Sydney Film Festival 2013 - Film Review - Stoker

Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska

Master Korean Film Director, Park Chan-wook's first English language film is best described as more atmospheric than tangible and more horror than suspenceful. Stoker has three of Australia's current best known actresses in its cast - Nicole Kidman, Jackie Weaver and Mia Wasikowska as well as a competent male lead role with Matthew Goode - however there is only so much a good cast can do to manage a muddle of a script which depends much on scenery and lighting and little on conveyance through dialogue. Described as a haunting Neo-Gothic thriller with a nod to Hitchcock, the film story is structured around the world of India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), a strange introverted young woman who likes to hunt animals, having been trained and shared this interest with her father. Her life and that of her unstable mother (Nicole Kidman) is disrupted by the sudden unexpected death of her father and the arrival of his long-lost brother Charlie (Matthew Goode). Charlie allegedly has been travelling the world but the discovery of old letters by India, reveals he has been in a mental institution and has a predilection for murder. India's aunt (jackie Weaver) also arrives but before she can give a warning about Charlie, he disposes of her.

With gratuitous violence and latent sexual awakening between Charlie and India, this is a voyeuristic film with a superficial plot, shallow one-dimensional psychopathic characters and elements of sado-masochism.  

Sydney Film Festival 2013 - Film Review - Wadjda

Waad Mohammed in a scene from 'Wadjda'

As the first feature film to be shot in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (where there are no cinemas), Wadjda immediately should attract attention and this simple yet reflective film is deserving of such interest. Written and directed by Saudi-born but University of Sydney educated Haifaa Al Mansour, the story is centred on 10-year-old Wadjda (Waad Mohammed), a rebellious, fun-loving yet determined girl growing up in a deeply conservative Islamic society. Wadjda longs to own a bicycle and one day sees a new green one delivered to a local shop so she sets about raising the money to purchase her bike through all manner of activities. Her mother has been reluctant to buy it for her fearing the opinion of wider Saudi society which considers a bicycle as dangerous to a girl's virtue. The film captures effectively the divisions and contradictions between men and women in Saudi society and manages to be gently subversive. Wadjda's fund-raising efforts to buy the bicycle include winning a Koran recitation competition at her school and appearing to be the model of conversion and piety despite being considered by her teachers to be an endless source of frustration. 

Shot with a German production team in Saudi Arabia, the director, Haifaa Al Mansour often had to operate out of a production truck using screen monitors to direct as she was not permitted on the street. Her script is partly autobiographical as it draws upon the experiences of some members of her family. An insightful film, sometimes slow moving and in Arabic with English subtitles, Wadjda  provides a window into a society which is at the cross-roads of change.

Norovirus - the global hitchhiker

Norovirus image

Vomiting, often in projectile form, diarrhoea, muscle and head aches and a churning stomach which lasts a day or two - the symptoms of Norovirus, arguably one of the most common human pathogens on the planet and for which there is no known treatment or vaccine. Norovirus is particularly prevalent during Winter months and highly infectious as exposure to as few as 17 virus particles can lead to infection in comparison to almost 1,000 which are needed for influenza to take hold.

For an RNA virus, Norovirus is very resilient being able to withstand most chemical detergents, freezing and heating up to 600C. It can also survive for up to 2 weeks on hard surfaces such as doorknobs and  tablecloths. There are around 40 identified strains. One study in 2009 the Netherlands which examined a jamboree which had been over-run by Norovirus found that for every person who fell sick, fourteen others were infected. These are startling rates of transmission and account for the speed at which Norovirus epidemics can quickly move to pandemics. Norovirus has two main groups (termed genogroups) which afflict humans - GI and GII - within each of these are viral variants with GII.4 currently having the greatest mutation capacity.  The mutation capability of Norovirus is what makes it hard for the immune system to identify the pathogen  and attack it.

With the Winter season now in full swing in the Southern Hemisphere, the global hitchhiker is bound to make its appearance. In 2012, Novovirus GII.4 Sydney progressed to world -wide infection with a substanial impact on the United Kingdom.

Eyes in Space - Canada's sentinel in the sky

Canada's NEOSSat

The surprise explosion of a meteor over Russia on 15th February this year, again served as a reminder of the vulnerability of the planet and its' inhabitants to contact with near-earth objects. The meteor was undetected and estimated to be approx 17 metres wide delivering a 470-kiloton blast with a shock wave that damaged 3,000 buildings and injured over 1,500 people in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia.

Canada has added to the relatively small number of assets available for space monitoring with the launch on 25 February 2013 of the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat). The suitcase-sized NEOSSat orbits approximately 800 kilometres above the Earth, searching for near-Earth asteroids that are difficult to see using ground-based optical telescopes. NEOSSat is not limited by the day-night cycle but operates round the clock. It circles the globe every 100 minutes, scanning space near the Sun to pinpoint asteroids that have proximity to the Earth. Despite the additional surveillance there remains a significant number of unseen objects as shown below. 

Size in metres	Unknown %
1,000 upwards	7%
150-999	67%
40-149	99%

Online medical diagnosis - harnessing a 'world-wide' audience

The expansion of interactive websites on the internet has led to a wide range of online tools in the health sector which assist with self diagnosis or to facilitate patient and clinician understanding. With the increasing recent use of crowd sourcing for fund-raising, suspect identification and IT tasking, it was only a matter of time until health also started to make use of the wider community for diagnosis, whether only a specific segment or a wider general call. With over 7,000 known rare diseases there is a large market of people who either suffer from an undiagnosed condition or one which has been misdiagnosed. Two such new emerging health websites are CrowdMed and FindZebra.

CrowdMed promotes its' function by stating:  

“Instead of relying on individual physicians, CrowdMed harnesses the collective intelligence of hundreds of Medical Detectives (MD’s) to produce astonishingly accurate diagnostic suggestions in just hours. As a CrowdMed Medical Detective (MD), you can use your personal experience, intuition, and online research skills to help solve the world's most difficult medical cases. You can not only win cash, prizes, and status, but also help save lives"

CrowdMed does not require a medical degree or any health qualifications at all. Participants on the website bet on a patient's diagnosis from lists of suggestions and the top three are given to a patient to discuss with their physician.

In contrast, FindZebra provides an index of articles from rare disease databases. The website contains a condition of use stating:

"FindZebra should only be used by medical professionals. Although the articles indexed by the system have been written by medical professionals or reviewed by medical associations, it is strongly recommended that, as a patient, you consult your local health care provider. FindZebra does not replace professional health care, and cannot be held responsible for erroneous use of the information provided through the system".

As with all website data, it is a case of buyer beware. Both these websites can be found by clicking the links below:

CrowdMed

FindZebra

Theatre Review - One Man, Two Guvnors - Sydney Theatre Company 2013 Season

Owain Arthur and Edward Bennett on stage

As part of the Sydney Theatre Company's 2013 season, the National Theatre of Great Britain staged  'One Man, Two Guvnors' with the original British cast from London's West End. The play written by Richard Bean is partly based on the 18th Century Italian comedy The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Gondoli. The play's story is cented on a knockabout servant and dogsbody character Francis who, always looking for an opportunity finds himself with two masters, one of whom is really a woman pretending to be her murdered brother, with the other master being her lover, who happens to be the murderer.  The Goldoni plot has been readapted to be 1960s Brighton in England and features a mix of British humour and slapstick recognisable from the antics in Fawlty Towers, Monty Python and Benny Hill.  Owain Arthur's command of the stage and ad libbing as the character of Francis provides the almost seamless continuity whilst Rosie Wyatt and Edward Bennett as the two Guvnors provide contrasts as well as foils for their servant. The performance in two parts is punctuated with musical mood accompaniment and a well selected period repertoire by the young band, The Craze. 

Hitching a ride - compromising the earth's waterways and ocean ecosystems

Container ship in port

The movement of ocean and water organisms around the globe as a result of hitching a ride on the ships traversing the seas is not a new problem nor is it one which the general public have not heard about. However the scale, extent and failure to act when solutions actually exist, is almost certainly a fact which is not so well known. Cargo ships and tankers require ballast water to avoid capsizing mainly when offloading cargo but also when carrying lighter loads - the water is up taken in one port and often discharged in another port, thousands of kilometres away. A large ship can carry up to 60,000 tonnes of ballast and more than 7 billion tonnes of ballast water is transported around the world each year in which an estimated 7,000 different species of seeds spores, plankton, bacteria, eggs and larvae hitch a ride into new surroundings. The impacts can be dramatic with examples being the European zebra mussel arriving in the Great lakes of North America, Chinese mitten crabs in Europe, Asian Kelp in Southern Australia, Mediterranean mussels in Southern Africa and dinoflagellates spreading across the world (the sources of 'red tides'). The Mediterranean has 900 alien species which originated from ballast water.

Efforts have been made to reach an international agreement through the UN Convention on Ballast Water in 2004 which requires ships to install kits to eliminate biological hitchers in their ballast water. The International Maritime Organisation has certified 20 commercial treatment systems which will do the task utilising various combinations of biocides, electrolysis, heat, ozone, irradiation or filtration systems. However for the treaty to come into effect, requires at least 30 nations representing 35% of the world's merchant shipping tonnage.  To date ratification nations only account for 29%  with the well known 'flags of convenience' countries - Panama, Bahamas, Malta and Cyprus - avoiding the issue. Nor have the US, UK, Germany, Italy and Japan ratified the treaty. The cost of taking no action is both economic as well as environmental for the invading species can cause significant negative impact - the Black Sea was devastated and its commercial fishing destroyed by the comb jellyfish  whilst the European zebra mussel blocked irrigation channels and water pipes in North America costing billions of dollars of restoration work. Inaction therefore is not really an option.