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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) impacts the ability to maintain attention to tasks. Often, it also involves impulsive behaviour – saying or doing things without stopping to think first – as well as hyperactivity.

ADHD is the most common developmental disorder in childhood, affecting 5–8% of children worldwide.

Not all children and adolescents with ADHD need medication, particularly if they are functioning well at school and at home. Children with ADHD can also be supported with behavioural and educational strategies, as well as by working on the associated problems that commonly occur alongside ADHD, such as learning difficulties, emotional problems like anxiety, social challenges and autism spectrum disorder.

However, around four in five children with ADHD are prescribed medication.

One of the most common concerns parents have about ADHD medication is their child’s appetite and weight. So what can families expect? And how can parents optimise their child’s calories and nutrition?

Medication can reduce symptoms

Decades of research shows stimulant medication is the most effective way to reduce the main symptoms of ADHD. It can improve the ability to sustain attention and complete tasks, and reduce impulsive behaviours.

Two stimulants are approved to treat ADHD: methylphenidate (known by brand names such as Ritalin) and dexamphetamine (known by brand names such as Vyvanse). Both come in short- and long-acting forms.

These medicines work well in about 80% of patients and often improve the child’s school performance, relationships and self-image.

But they don’t suit all children. A minority become irritable, withdrawn or socially blunted. They may start finding it’s hard to have fun, for example.

If parents observe these or other negative effects, they can stop the medication. The child will return to their normal self by the next day, and their clinician and parents can consider alternatives.

The most common side effect of stimulant medication is reduced appetite. This happens in most children who take stimulants, for the hours the medication is active. This often means they are not hungry during the school day and have little or no lunch.

Reduced appetite is the most common side effect of stimulant medicines.
Russamee/Shutterstock

How can you boost your child’s food and nutrition intake?

When starting on stimulants, some children lose weight.

But they usually regain this over time as they get used to a different pattern of eating that includes a similar amount of daily calories. This might include:

eating a hearty breakfast before the medication kicks in. Stimulant medications typically take about 30 to 60 minutes to start working (long-acting medications have a slower onset than short acting)
eating enjoyable snacks throughout the day, such as muesli bars or chips
having a substantial after-school snack. Some kids have a mini meal when they get home from school, and then another main meal at around 7pm.

Nutrition and energy-dense breakfasts or after school snacks could include a full cream milk smoothie with banana, protein powder and peanut or almond butter.

High-calorie powdered food supplements – which are rich in protein and essential vitamins and minerals – in milk are another option. These are available from the chemist or supermarket.

If the child’s ADHD symptoms are only problematic at school, they will only need to take the medication on school days, and not on weekends or school holidays. They can catch up with eating on non-medication days.

Sometimes children can go medication-free on weekends and holidays.
tikcelo/Shutterstock

It’s also important to use the dose that achieves maximal benefit with tolerable side effects. The aim is often to reduce the child’s symptoms to close the levels of children without ADHD.

Using these strategies, most children can maintain a healthy weight while they take stimulant medication.

What if my child is still losing weight?

Occasionally, weight loss is more problematic, and alternate solutions need to be considered.

These might include:

using a short-acting medication (these usually last for 3–4 hours) to just cover the mornings. Or adding an afternoon dose, after the child’s appetite has returned and they have eaten lunch
trying one of the non-stimulant ADHD medications, such as atomoxetine (Strattera) or guanfacine (Intuniv). These are not usually as effective as the stimulants, but can be helpful to reduce ADHD symptoms. They have their own side effects, but do not suppress appetite
using a lower dose of the stimulant (aiming to provide some benefits with fewer side effects) in combination with a non-stimulant medication.

What about children’s height?

The other potential growth side effect of stimulant medication is on children’s height. There is some evidence that if a child takes stimulant medication consistently for many years, particularly in higher doses, they may lose 1–2 cm off their adult height.

However, it would be unusual for ADHD medication to stunt growth so much that a child has to stop taking it. Optimising nutrition is the best way to prevent this.

Children can lose 1–2 cm off their adult height.
interstid/Shutterstock

What else do doctors and parents look out for?

Children and adolescents with ADHD who are treated with medication need to be monitored regularly. They should have appointments with their prescribing doctor (usually a paediatrician) or GP at least every six months to monitor the treatment’s effectiveness and side effects.

Their medical review is likely to include a discussion of academic, social and emotional functioning – sometimes with the aid of questionnaires completed by teachers and parents – and a physical check-up including measurement of height, weight and blood pressure.

Whether or not a child with ADHD takes medication, it’s important in all cases to pay attention to lifestyle factors that can influence their health, including their sleep, nutrition, exercise and use of electronic devices. Läs mer…

Door handles, taps, playground slides, furry pets… Getting zapped by static electricity is a common experience. But the physics that causes the spark is surprisingly intricate.

If you’re getting zapped often, understanding the causes of static may help you avoid at least some of the shocks.

What is static electricity?

To understand static electricity, we have to peer inside the building blocks of matter: atoms.

Every atom has a heavy nucleus in the centre and several electrons that orbit this nucleus. The nucleus itself contains subatomic particles called protons and neutrons.

All subatomic particles have intrinsic physical properties, such as mass, spin and charge. Charge is what comes into play when we talk about static shocks. It is either positive or negative. Each electron has a negative charge (-1), while each proton has a positive charge (+1).

Opposite charges attract, while like charges repel each other.
Underducker/Shutterstock

In normal conditions, the number of electrons and protons in an atom is equal. This makes the total electric charge of the atom neutral.

But charged particles exert a force on each other, known as electrostatic force. Opposite charges (positive and negative) attract each other, while charges of the same kind repel each other.

Within an atom, electrostatic force is what keeps electrons orbiting the nucleus. The ones farthest away from the nucleus can sometimes escape, leaving the atom positively charged (more protons than electrons). By contrast, other atoms can attract an electron and become negatively charged (more electrons than protons).

This imbalance is what we know as static electricity.

Rubbing your hair with a balloon is a great way to demonstrate static electricity.
Yavdat/Shutterstock

From charge to discharge

Now, let’s take two surfaces with a difference in static charge. Say your hand has built up a negative charge by gathering additional electrons. As you reach for a metal object, the electrons hop across, forming a tiny, short-lived electric current.

That current is what’s known as an electrostatic discharge: electrons from a negatively charged object jump to a positively charged one if they’re close enough. The discharge is what you feel as the zap of a static shock.

So why do electrons build up on certain objects, like our own hands or the fur of a cat?

The answer lies with another physical force: friction.

At a microscopic level, even the smoothest surface isn’t perfectly smooth, but rather rough and irregular. When two surfaces slide across each other, all these irregularities cause friction as they “catch” on each other.

In certain materials (for example, copper), a small amount of energy is what makes those electrons jump ship from their atoms. This energy can be supplied by forces such as friction.

So why did the door handle zap me?

The last concept you need to keep in mind is to do with whether materials are good at letting electricity travel through them (conductors), or are good at blocking it (insulators).

The human body is a great conductor of electricity. All you need is some build-up of electrons on your skin from friction, and the next suitable thing you touch will cause a static discharge.

A typical example is if you wear rubber shoes and walk on carpet. The friction between the two materials will cause some of the electrons on the carpet’s surface to transfer to the rubber. Because rubber is an insulator, the additional static charge will be distributed over your body. The next time you touch another conductor – say, something metal – you get a static shock.

You can experience the same effect when taking off a jumper, or brushing your hair. Some dogs and cats may build up static in their fur, and you and your pet can both get a zap when you reach for a pat.

Static electricity also causes static cling – cat fur builds up an electrostatic charge, and light, positively charged objects like foam peanuts can easily stick to it.
Sean McGrath/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

What can I do to prevent static shocks?

Several factors contribute to the frequency and intensity of static shock, including sensitivity, body size, clothing material, temperature and air humidity.

Some people are more sensitive to static shock than others – they just feel it more. Also, a bigger body requires more charge, so smaller people may get zapped more often depending on their clothes, environment and what they touch or the surfaces they walk on.

Dry, cold air also increases the probability of static shock. This is because dry, cold air is a better conductor compared to humid, warm air.

While static shocks aren’t pleasant, they’re usually not harmful. However, they can create nuisance and even damage sensitive electronic devices. A static electricity spark can also ignite flammable gases, so it’s a risk factor for things such as oil and gas transportation.

People who need to avoid static electricity on the job – in computer repairs, for example – may even wear anti-static wrist or waist straps. This is a strip of conductive material connected to a wire on one end, while the other end of the wire is connected to a table leg or something else that transfers the extra electrons to the ground.

There are a few practical tips if you want to reduce static shocks:

use a humidifier to increase air humidity in your home
keep your skin moisturised to reduce friction between your body and clothes
be mindful of what type of sole your shoes have – these have a significant role in building up a static charge. Soles made out of insulating materials like rubber are worse for this than leather, for example.

You can also carry a small metal object in your pocket, like a coin or a key, and touch it to metal surfaces to discharge the electrons on purpose before the static has a chance to zap you. Läs mer…

Orange and tortoiseshell house cats (torties) have long been an enigma for hair coloration in mammals: now, the genetic basis of their distinctive coat colour has been unveiled.

Orange is an ancient colour variety. Ginger cats are evident in Egyptian tomb artworks and some mummified cats may have been gingers. From Garfield and Puss in Boots to Hermione Granger’s Crookshanks and Goose the Flerken in the Marvel universe, ginger (or orange) cats are everywhere in popular culture today.

Orange isn’t the most typical coat colour in cats. Most cats are non-orange, usually brown or grey tabbies with some pattern of black stripes, swirls or spots, or black or blue solid-coloured cats.

Tortoiseshell cats have a brindling pattern (mixture) of orange and non-orange hairs throughout the coat, with some areas mostly orange or non-orange. Calico cats have distinct patches of orange and non-orange, in addition to extensive regions of white. Gingers are mostly male, while tortoiseshells are typically female.

Now, after more than 110 years, two new studies finally reveal the gene and the variant for orange coat colour.

Tortoiseshell cats have a brindling pattern in their coats.
David Boutin/Shutterstock

A visionary theory

In 1912, before the XX/XY sex-determining system was discovered in cats, American geneticist Clarence Cook Little proposed a visionary theory to explain how cats inherit orange and non-orange coat colours.

He built on the idea of a “sex-producing factor”, symbolised as X, that was gaining acceptance at that time (mainly from work on sex-determination in insects). He proposed:

let’s suppose female cats have two copies (XX) of the sex-producing factor X, while male cats have just one copy (X—)
let’s also suppose there is something associated with the sex-producing factor X that affects coat colour and exists in two forms: normal (the non-orange form) and variant (the orange form).

This theory predicts that tortoiseshell cats have one of each form of the X factor, in which case they must be XX, and therefore must be female. Because males have only one X factor, they will be either orange or non-orange, but never tortoiseshell.

Little’s theory also explains the common observation that ginger cats are mostly male. If matings are not arranged on the basis of coat colour, and if we assume, for example, that 20% of male cats are ginger (having just one X factor of the orange form), the proportion of female ginger cats is expected to be much lower, as they need to receive two copies of the orange X factor.

Mathematically this can be calculated as 20% x 20% = 4%, meaning that we would expect only 4% of female cats to be orange.

Eventually, the X factor was revealed as the X chromosome, and the “—” as the Y chromosome.

Tortoiseshell and calico males do sometimes occur, but it’s usually due to an abnormality of the number of sex chromosomes, such as one too many X chromosomes (XXY), which also causes sterility.

Calico cats have white in their coats in addition to patches of orange and non-orange.
Oporty786/Shutterstock

Modern science confirms Little’s visionary theory

Little’s set of assumptions gave rise to predictions that have actually worked in practice for more than 110 years. This is a great example of the power and utility of what might have initially appeared to be an extraordinary theory.

The newly posted, not yet peer-reviewed reports of independent discoveries by a Japanese team and an American team have now found the something that Little proposed to be associated with the sex-producing factor X.

It’s a gene that’s part of the X chromosome. It produces a protein whose name is a bit of a mouthful: RHO GTPase-Activating Protein 36. The official gene symbol ARHGAP36 is not very descriptive, so we will simply call it the Orange gene.

The Orange gene has a known role in hair follicle development, but scientists didn’t previously know it is also involved in pigment production. This means that a new pathway for pigment production has been discovered, opening the way for exciting and important research into a basic biological process.

Ginger cats are mostly male.
Ivan Lopatin/Unsplash

A curious bit of deleted DNA

The other important discovery by these research teams is that the orange form proposed by Little is a large DNA deletion (loss of genetic material) of part of the Orange gene, and the non-orange form is the unchanged or “wild-type” version of that same gene.

While the deletion does not appear to change the protein that is produced by the gene, it does seem to impact when and where the protein is produced. Both discovery teams showed the Orange gene is persistently switched on in orange areas but is mostly switched off in non-orange areas of a cat’s coat.

Even though much remains to be discovered, ginger cats and their owners around the world can rejoice – the genetic basis of their distinctive coat colour has finally been worked out, more than 110 years after it was first proposed. Läs mer…

According to New Zealand’s Trademarks Register, the name Red Bull has been registered for everything from “varnishes” to “sausage machines”. And, of course, energy drinks.

All have been registered by the maker of the eponymous energy drink, but this doesn’t necessarily mean Red Bull will be branching out into new products.

One of the purposes of trademark law is to protect names, words and logos so that when consumers see a product they know where it has come from.

Yet in most trademark registration systems around the world – including in New Zealand and Australia – you can acquire property rights in relation to a trademark simply by filing an application for the nominated goods or services (known as the “specification”).

You don’t have to have actually used the trademark on your product or service to apply – you just have to be the first to register it. As a result, some businesses may register their trademarks for a wide range of products or services to claim broad property rights. This prevents other companies from taking advantage of their brand.

Such “registration-based” systems can be contrasted with “use-based” systems. The prime example of the latter is the United States, where a mark will only be registered once an applicant proves they have used it for the goods or services in the specification.

The main benefit of a “registration-based” system is you are provided with some assurance that your trademark will be protected before you go to the trouble and expense of marketing your product or service.

Once you have marketed it, the hope is consumers will indeed come to recognise your product or service because of its trademark.

The downside of such a system, though, is that brand owners can potentially register trademarks for goods or services they will never use their marks for, and in which they have no real commercial interest.

A recent court ruling in the United Kingdom puts the spotlight on such filing practices in registration-based trademark systems, and how a better understanding of “bad faith” might curb such practices.

Sky Ltd vs SkyKick

A prohibition on filing trademarks in bad faith is one mechanism used to prevent abuse of “registration-based” trademark systems – present both in New Zealand’s and Australia’s trademark legislation.

The UK Supreme Court recently considered how “bad faith” ought to be interpreted. As well as being a “wakeup call” for some UK trademark owners with wide and commercially unrealistic specifications (the description of what a company may trade in), this decision is likely to influence the shape of the law in New Zealand and Australia.

In 2016, UK-based media companies Sky Ltd and Sky International AG (Sky) began trademark infringement proceedings against IT company SkyKick for use of the mark “SkyKick” in relation to the provision of various cloud-based products.

SkyKick responded by claiming Sky had filed its trademarks in bad faith and they should be cancelled. SkyKick’s arguments centred on the breadth of Sky’s specifications, its use of overly broad categories such as “computer software”, and its enforcement strategy.

One of Sky’s marks, for example, had a specification that ran to more than 8,000 words, and covered goods such as “bleaching preparations” and “whips”.

The High Court concluded Sky’s intention was to acquire trademarks as a legal weapon to use against third parties. This meant the trademark applications had been partially filed in bad faith.

The High Court finding was eventually overturned by the UK’s Court of Appeal. But the Supreme Court upheld the High Court decision.

In November, the Supreme Court confirmed it can be an abuse of the trademark system – and therefore bad faith – to file an application to register a trademark for goods or services for a purpose other than that contemplated by trademark law, and where the person had no intention to use the trademark as a badge of origin.

In this case, Sky had obtained registrations for a very wide range of goods and services without providing a plausible commercial rationale, and was prepared to enforce these marks against other traders.

Protecting against bad faith

Admittedly, New Zealand’s Trade Marks Act 2002 has additional mechanisms to prevent abuse of the registration system compared with the law in the UK.

The act allows the intellectual property office to question the justification of a specification, and third parties to challenge whether an applicant has a genuine intention to use a trademark, for example.

That said, the SkyKick judgement has the potential to trigger more scrutiny of trademark filing practices in all registration-based systems. New Zealand courts already seem open to interpreting bad faith in line with the purposes of trademark law.

In a case in the New Zealand High Court, Planet Fitness Ltd v PFIP International, it was alleged a business had filed for the trademark “Planet Fitness” to prevent the expansion of a global gym chain into New Zealand, rather than to use the mark itself.

The High Court found the application was made in bad faith because the applicant was pursuing aims unrelated to protecting a mark intended to be used to communicate origin in the marketplace.

This approach to finding whether a registration was made in bad faith may mean the days of registering trademarks for every good or service under the sun, for purposes unrelated to use in the marketplace, are numbered. Läs mer…

The scene at the end of the 19th century in what was known as Indian Territory — at one point encompassing most of the present-day United States west of the Mississippi River —
would seem familiar to anyone following the news about the crisis on the United States-Mexico border.

Illegal immigrants streamed in, and some leaders had seen enough.

Nationalists among the Chickasaw Nation called for a mass deportation of white U.S. citizens. One Chickasaw leader, Judge Overton Love, wrote that undocumented whites should be “placed under arrest immediately and hustled out of the country with strict orders not to return.”

Muskogee leaders reported intruders to the federal government. U.S. marshals escorted white migrants to Arkansas and hit them with a US$1,000 fine. But they returned, again and again.

Delegates from 34 Indigenous tribes at the Creek Council House in Indian Territory, now called Oklahoma, in 1880.
(National Archives)

Illegal invasion

Among those intruders was my great-great-grandfather, Bill Hogan. Bill was an illiterate white sharecropper in Yell County, Ark. He migrated with his family to the Muskogee Nation sometime around 1900, probably following a new railroad line.

The author’s grandfather, William Bethel Hogan, with his horse in Indian Territory around 1900.
(Russell Cobb), Author provided (no reuse)

Predatory landowners in the South made life difficult for poor white people like Bill, and nearly impossible for Black people. But freed slaves founded prosperous all-Black towns like Boley, just down the road from Bill’s homestead near Eufaula.

The illegal invasion of sovereign nations by white American citizens occurred all over the West, from Texas to South Dakota. Mexican authorities even worried about a flood of U.S. citizens re-introducing slavery into the republic, and banned U.S. immigration in 1830.

This did nothing to stop the flood of Americans from claiming land. A treaty prohibiting U.S. citizens from settling in the Great Sioux Reservation was blatantly violated by hundreds of gold prospectors in the 1870s.

When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, the U.S. effectively closed a chapter on 100 years of invasions and illegal land seizures in the western United States. A century later, conservative leaders have been claiming the U.S. is now the nation under threat of invasion, conveniently ignoring this long and complicated history.

White supremacy doctrine

It is common to hear that the U.S. immigration system is broken, but it was never fixed. Migration to and from sovereign Indigenous nations, Mexico and even Canada has always been subject to waves of xenophobia and fear. A political wind of change can turn intruders into pioneers, as happened on a massive scale among the Five Tribes in Indian Territory.

Bill Hogan may have been in the Muskogee Nation illegally, but he was accepted by his Muskogee neighbours by 1901. The Indigenous-published Indian Journal reported on his travels around Indian Territory in local news, and his son, Jordan, started to achieve some prosperity. The Hogans intermarried and my grandmother lived with a Choctaw man. She is buried next to a Muskogee family in the Checotah cemetery.

Editors and politicians back in the States noticed this unique mixture of native governance, poor white subsistence farming and Black town-building. They were not impressed. It was anathema to white “civilization.” The tri-racial experiment of Indian Territory was crushed by a doctrine of white supremacy established in new state laws.

Unlike today’s unauthorized immigrants, white intruders had political power and influence to change the law. The Indian Appropriations Act of 1902 made it illegal “to remove or deport any person from the Indian Territory who is in lawful possession of any lots or parcels of land in any town or city…which has been designated as a townsite.”

Just like that, ownership of land now protected white intruders like my ancestor if they owned land. Imagine the shoe on the other foot today: U.S. Congress passes a law protecting unauthorized immigrants from deportation because they own some real estate in an Oklahoma suburb.

A lineup of wagons and mules in the 1930s hitched to posts in Eufaula, Okla., close to where Bill Hogan had his homestead.
(Library of Congress/Russell Lee)

There is a crucial difference between Bill Hogan crossing into Indian Territory and the current wave of migrants arriving in the United States. These new “intruders” do not want land.

The few stories of Latin American migrants seeking to claim land through squatters’ rights have little legal credibility. Unlike the settlers that pushed the Cherokees, Chickasaws and others off their allotted lands in Oklahoma, the new migrants are not really settlers at all. They are labourers.

The story of Leo Bennett

The U.S. Marshall tasked with enforcing migration laws in Indian Territory, Leo Bennett, found himself in the crosshairs of some who wanted mass deportation and others who wanted the termination of Indigenous governance.

An undated photograph of Dan ‘Dynamite Dick’ Clifton, an American West outlaw of the late 1800s.

Bennett was married to a Cherokee woman and empathized with Indigenous leaders who resented the intruders. Bennett promised to deport known law-breakers, but he resisted the calls to ban all migrants.

Chickasaw leaders were rightly afraid of people like the notorious outlaw Dan “Dynamite Dick” Clifton. But Dynamite Dick did not represent the majority, and so Bennett would not enforce mass deportation. Most Indigenous leaders agreed with him.

Some of the whites milked cows, ran hotels and serviced the trains. If all whites were deported, they would only return again, hungrier and more determined. Bennett wrote in a local paper that “equity as well as law must be so administered that justice shall be tempered with mercy.” He wanted “fairness toward all concerned,” but fairness, then as now, was easily reframed as weakness.

Those ideals — equity, mercy and fairness — require a historical reckoning over how the United States acquired its contemporary boundaries in the first place. Those ideals also require compassion for newcomers, whether they’re white men from Arkansas in 1901 or a Haitian family in Springfield, Ohio in 2024. Läs mer…

Influencer marketing has become one of the most important tools in brand strategy. Companies across various industries are increasingly turning to social media personalities to promote their products and services.

However, despite its widespread use and significant impact, influencer marketing is surrounded by uncertainties, ambiguities and controversies, both for practitioners and the general public.

Questions often arise: How do brands determine the effectiveness of an influencer campaign? How do influencers ensure that the brand partnership does not affect their relationship with their audience? Who controls the creative process during an influencer campaign?

In our recent research article in the Journal of Marketing, we discussed these ambiguities, focusing on two core areas relevant to both influencers and brands: How to determine the value of sponsored content and how to co-produce it.

Our study drew insights from a wide range of sources, including interviews with both influencers and influencer intermediaries, podcasts, media articles and third-party platform reviews. We conducted 21 primary interviews and transcribed 37 secondary interviews from podcasts. This sample included influencers specialized in the fields of fashion, food, cosmetics, travel, lifestyle, health and sexuality.

CNBC International segment about how influencers have changed the ad industry.

Insights from research

One major challenge we observed is that brands often struggle with determining the value of sponsored content. Brands also struggle with how to measure the return on investment from influencer campaigns.

Similarly, many influencers we interviewed said they often faced difficulties determining their fees and charging for their work.

Another common issue involved payment terms. For brands, upfront payments can be risky if an influencer doesn’t follow the terms of the partnership.

On the other hand, payment models based on conversions can be disadvantageous to influencers. Sales outcomes depend on multiple factors beyond an influencer’s endorsement, making such arrangements an unfair measure of an influencer’s contributions.

Brands and influencers also need to agree on the terms of a partnership and decide who is responsible for each element of a campaign. For instance:

Should influencers be responsible for generating awareness, such as showcasing new product launches?
Should influencers become more involved in campaigns by closely working with the brand to co-create content?
Or should influencers act as affiliates by offering a discount code for their audiences?

These questions highlight the need for clear expectations and mutual understanding in forming effective influencer partnerships.

Creativity vs. control

To navigate the uncertainties of influencer marketing, both brands and influencers engage in what scholars call knowledge work — the process of creating and applying knowledge.

This dynamic also includes third-party companies that act as mediators, build metrics, match brands with influencers and quantify results through expert judgment or algorithms.

Our research found that all this knowledge work causes significant changes in the marketplace and shifts the relationship between both brands and influencers.

Influencers feel that excessive control from brands makes their work less meaningful.
(Shutterstock)

For example, when brands impose restrictions on influencers — such as asking them to overtly promote a product instead of naturally embedding it into their content — it can restrict influencers’ creativity.

This can not only affect the authenticity of an influencer’s message, but also alienate them from their audiences. Influencers often cultivate parasocial relationships with their followers through engaging and relatable content; when authenticity is compromised, these relationships can erode.

The influencers we interviewed felt that excessive control of their work limited their ability to apply their expertise and ultimately made their work less meaningful.

Because influencer compensation relies on metrics, a consensus in the industry was that this incentivized influencers to purchase fake followers or manipulate engagement metrics to appear more successful.

In response, some brands have turned to third-party services to surveil influencers. This practice risks undermining the trust that is necessary for effective partnerships and the benefits that emerge from developing long-term relationships, such as a greater synergy between brands and influencers.

Recommendations for influencers and brands

Efforts to reduce ambiguities surrounding sponsored content have been transforming the influencer industry. These efforts have introduced new ways of measuring value like proprietary metrics, new entities like influencer agencies, new job categories like directors of influencer marketing, and new platforms — 62 of which were reviewed in our study — to address these challenges.

However, our findings suggest these changes don’t always benefit industry participants. Instead, they can amplify imbalances between brands and creators, resulting in an environment marked by distrust, surveillance, over-reliance on incomplete metrics and even manipulation of those metrics.

To mitigate these challenges, we propose the following recommendations for influencers:

Influencers should consider outsourcing business tasks or learning managerial skills to have better control over their brand partnerships.
Influencers should consider engaging in collective action to advocate for and protect their interests, address power imbalances and create fairer industry practices.

For brands, we propose the following recommendations:

Brands should recognize that influencers fulfil multiple roles and juggle multiple partnerships and audiences. Pressuring influencers to change their voice can harm their authenticity and erode their connections with followers and other collaborators.
Putting too much emphasis on short-term metrics or exerting excessive control over sponsored content can hurt the quality of content produced and the quality and long-term sustainability of relationships with influencers.

These recommendations can help establish fairer, more sustainable practices in the influencer industry and extend into other emerging industries, such as the metaverse, NFTs and generative artificial intelligence.

These sectors face similar challenges because their products and services are not yet fully understood by their creators or consumers. Like influencer marketing, they require ongoing knowledge creation and application to function effectively. Läs mer…

First released in New York on December 4 1924, Erich von Stroheim’s intense, monumental Greed remains more famous for what didn’t end up on screen than what did.

Based on Frank Norris’ 1899 novel McTeague, Greed is a psychologically intense story of the corrupting influence of capital.

Miner John McTeague (Gibson Gowland) journeys from northwestern California to become an (unregistered) dentist in San Francisco. There he courts and marries a local woman, Trina (ZaSu Pitts).

Drawing on a notorious murder of the 1890s, Greed dramatises his downward spiral, ending in “escape” to the forbidding vastness and isolation of Death Valley.

Greed was a financial failure on its initial release and received a mixed critical reception. But it quickly went on to be regarded as one of the great silent films and a key influence on many subsequent filmmakers and film archivists.

Self-made legend

Stroheim was always a larger-than-life figure who actively embellished his own legend.

Erich von Stroheim photographed around 1920.
Wikimedia Commons

Arriving in the United States in his early 20s as a poor immigrant from a Jewish background, he claimed an aristocratic heritage – hence the “von” – and became a star in Hollywood. During World War I, he played an array of sadistic Prussian officers on screen and was touted as the “Man You Love to Hate”.

After working with director D. W. Griffith on films like The Birth of a Nation (1915), Stroheim began his directorial career in 1918. He quickly became notorious for his attention to detail, budgetary extravagance and fondness for excess and perversity.

Although stories about him insisting that soldiers in his 18th or 19th century set dramas must wear period appropriate underwear are almost definitely apocryphal, they pinpoint the extraordinary combination of the realistic and the baroque that marks his work.

After making a series of increasingly ambitious and often financially successful films in the late 1910s and early 1920s, in which he also often starred, Stroheim was contracted by Goldwyn Pictures to make a series of films.

The first of these was Greed.

A novel cinema

Stroheim was given considerable creative freedom on this project as well as some latitude in terms of its escalating budget.

The film’s often gritty and close to contemporary setting, as well as its American subject matter, were something of a departure for Stroheim. But the director plainly found a theme to match his escalating ambition in Norris’ downbeat novel and set about translating it to the screen on an epic and intimate scale.

Although many accounts suggest Stroheim aimed to adapt every full stop and comma of the novel to the screen, the reality is much more nuanced, with many additions also made to the material.

This mammoth production was shot over 198 days in 1923 with approximately 85 hours of footage captured. This was subsequently whittled down to around nine hours, a version shown to a select audience including other filmmakers and studio executives.

This version’s emphasis on expanding out particular incidents, psychologies and interrelationships was supposedly remarkable – even revolutionary. But this was never a version that was going to be commercially released.

Over the next few months various other cuts of the film were made, initially under Stroheim’s supervision, before a significantly shortened and bowdlerised version at just over two hours was released.

Many of the subplots and various characters were removed, diminishing its scope and downplaying German-American film director and producer Ernst Lubitsch’s claim Stroheim was “the only true novelist in films”.

This may seem like a backhanded compliment, but Lubitsch’s claim highlighted the thick detail and thematic ambition of Stroheim’s cinema as well as its profound connection to the work of realist novelists like Norris and Émile Zola.

Lasting legacy

After 100 years, why is Greed still an important film and influence?

Filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan, Jean Renoir, Josef von Sternberg and Sergei Eisenstein have cited it as inspiration.

It’s hard to imagine it wasn’t an important model for Paul Thomas Anderson’s similarly themed There Will Be Blood (2007) and a playful reference for Christoph Waltz’s dentist-turned-bounty-hunter in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012).

It has also long been a catchword for a certain kind of realism or naturalism in cinema.

Stroheim shot most of the film on location including a hellish two months at the height of summer in Death Valley for the film’s brilliant but brutal final stanza.

Greed spent two months filming in Death Valley at the height of summer.
Wikimedia Commons

Although many of the novel’s San Francisco settings were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, Stroheim still insisted on locating the places where the novel was set and using many of them.

The film remains remarkable for its sense of detail, its psychological intensity and its placement of its characters within actual environments.

But the true lasting legacy of Greed is more closely related to the extreme models of filmmaking it promoted. The “full” version of the film is one of the great “holy grails” for film archivists, even though the excised footage was allegedly destroyed not long after production. It is one of the films first mentioned whenever a filmmaker’s vision or excesses are brought into question.

It is the chief example, along with Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), of the great lost, once complete film but also of the indignities suffered by uncompromising artists in Hollywood.

Stroheim would go on to make a series of other films in the 1920s, some equally vexed, and then forge a varied career as a striking character actor. As an actor, he is best remembered for his dignified appearance in Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937) and the very close-to-the-bone Max von Mayerling in Sunset Blvd. (1950).

But Greed, and all it represents, remains his greatest legacy. Läs mer…

Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has recently approved a self-test kit for chlamydia and gonorrhoea for women and other people with a vagina.

Reports indicate these at-home tests will be available in pharmacies from December 13.

So what do we know about this test?

The basics

The test is developed by a Sydney-based company called Touch Biotechnology.

We don’t yet know how much retailers will charge for it, but people will need to pay for the test out-of-pocket (Medicare only subsidises pathology tests done in a lab).

The test is for two of the most common sexually transmitted infections (STIs), chlamydia and gonorrhoea. Both are bacterial infections.

It’s a vaginal test. While it’s possible to contract chlamydia and gonorrhoea in other parts of the body including the throat and rectum, at present there are no self-test kits available in Australia for other sites (or for men and other people without a vagina).

To collect a sample, you insert a swab into the vagina. The next steps are similar to an at-home COVID test, although the sample needs to be mixed with two different solutions, rather than one.

You next place a few drops of the mixed solution into two separate wells on a cassette (one for chlamydia and one for gonorrhoea). Similar to a COVID test, two lines mean you most likely have an infection, and one line means you probably don’t. You can read the result after about 15 minutes.

Detailed instructions will be included with the test kit.

Who should take this test?

Most people who contract chlamydia won’t have any symptoms. But the infection can sometimes cause burning when you pass urine, vaginal discharge, unusual vaginal bleeding and pelvic pain.

Gonorrhoea usually doesn’t cause any symptoms when it’s in the vagina, but it can similarly cause vaginal discharge, bleeding and pain.

All this means you don’t need to have any symptoms to take a test.

If you don’t have symptoms, it’s important not to test too early after exposure. Chlamydia can take 7–14 days from exposure and gonorrhoea can take about 7 days to show up in a test, including lab-based tests. If you had sex without a condom and are worried, taking a test at about one week would be best (if you do have symptoms it’s reasonable to take one sooner).

Most STIs are easy to treat, but when they’re not diagnosed and treated over a long period, they can cause complications. For example, chlamydia can travel up into the uterus and fallopian tubes and cause problems with fertility.

Of course, detecting and treating STIs is also important to reduce their spread. Chlamydia and gonorrhoea infections have been increasing in Australia over the past couple of years.

How accurate is the test?

The TGA has strict criteria about how accurate at-home STI tests need to be. They must have a sensitivity of at least 95%, meaning they correctly identify at least 95% of positive cases.

Touch Biotechnology states the at-home chlamydia and gonorrhoea test has more than 99% sensitivity. However the research underpinning this figure has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

In any case, a positive result still needs to be confirmed with a lab-based test. So if you return a positive test, you need to consult a doctor for further testing and advice on treatment.

If you get a positive result on the home test, you’ll need to see a doctor.
Pressmaster/Shutterstock

At-home STI tests are not entirely new

While this represents an exciting innovation in sexual health, at-home testing for STIs is not a completely new thing in Australia. HIV self-tests have been available for purchase in Australian pharmacies since 2021. These tests involve extracting a small amount of blood from your fingertip.

Looking at how HIV home tests have worked can give us clues as to what we might expect from these newer at-home tests for chlamydia and gonorrhoea.

Although most HIV testing is still done in clinics, the availability of self-tests has been shown to increase how often people test for HIV and encourage people who have never tested before to do so.

At-home HIV testing provides an extra level of anonymity compared to attending a clinic. This may be especially important for some populations including younger people, people from culturally and linguistically diverse or migrant communities, and men who have sex with men who identify as straight.

Research suggests most people who get a positive test result on HIV self-tests successfully become linked to the care and treatment they need.

In Australia, it’s also now possible for women and people with a cervix aged 25 and older to collect their own vaginal swab to screen for HPV, which causes cervical cancer. You can take the swab in a clinic or arrange for at-home testing via telehealth.

Some things to consider

When you see a clinician such as a doctor or nurse for a sexual health check-up, they can discuss a range of issues with you including contraception, STIs, vaccinations and other methods of prevention.

At-home tests should not replace discussing your sexual health and wellbeing with a clinician, such as at a GP clinic, sexual health clinic, youth health clinic or other health service.

And remember the at-home test is limited to chlamydia and gonorrhoea only. If you have symptoms that are worrying you, such as pelvic pain, pain during sex or pain with urination, it’s possible you may have another STI, or a different medical issue.

So, if you have symptoms and your at-home test is negative for chlamydia and gonorrhoea, it would be a good idea to get examined to see what else might be going on. Läs mer…