Week 51/2024: Long exposures

Week of 16 December 2024

My last full week of work for 2024. I was desperately trying to get a piece of work finished by Friday. It didn’t happen.

Long exposures

Morning walks

I met up with the photographer Andy Hatton to pick up my Dorney House print from the moonrise boat trip I didn’t go on last week.

All this night photography inspired me to get out my ND filter and head to the beach early in the morning to try out some long exposures.

(If you don’t know what an ND filter is, it’s a very dark filter that blocks a lot of light, which means you can make longer exposures, letting the light in for a much longer time. Having the shutter open for longer creates the soft blur because the water is moving, while keeping the elements that don’t move, like rocks, sharp.)

I think I should have gone out a bit earlier. I didn’t actually want the sun in the photos.

But there it was.

Happy solstice!

Long exposures on the beach are definitely something I want to keep practising.

Agapanthus season

I also carried on with my agapanthus project. These photos require the opposite of long exposures!

I need a home for this work.

Week 51 summary

Habit tracker

• 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 5/7
• Hip exercises (5 days): 6/5
• Go outside before 8 am (7 days): 7/7
• 2 walks or bike rides or a combination (6 days): 6/6
• Long walk (1 day): 0/1
• Walk 8,000 steps (7 days): 7/7
• Evening exercise sequence (7 days): 7/7
• 9.00 shutdown (7 days): 5/7

What was the best thing about this week?

Apart from Kramstable’s year 12 final results (which were excellent and really exciting), I loved my beach photo walk on Sunday morning.

What did I notice this week?

The green rosella (Platycercus caledonicus) is a parrot native to Tasmania. There are some living in my suburb. I often see them when I’m out walking, and they sometimes visit my yard.

I almost always see them in pairs, but this week one has been visiting by itself, and I can’t help wondering what’s happened to its partner.

What did I learn this week?

97% of Australians don’t have the media literacy to be able to verify if content they find online is factual.

This is the conclusion of a study by researchers at Western Sydney University, University of Canberra, QUT and RMIT.

On reading the article that made this claim, the very first thing I asked myself was whether it was true, or whether it was part of a test to find out if I could verify online content.

So I went to the actual report (you can find it here) Online Misinformation in Australia: Adults’ Experiences, Abilities and Responses (DOI: 10.60836/jpmm-dw04).

If it’s a fake, it’s a good one. It has all the uni logos on it, the authors are real university researchers and the UWS* website talks about the project (because they were the lead uni).

The project, Addressing Misinformation using Media Literacy with Public Cultural Institutions, was funded by the Australian Research Council in 2023.

I think it’s real.

The report is very comprehensive. The researchers surveyed 3,853 adults, and tested 2,115 of those surveyed in assessing the credibility of four examples of online information. They also did more detailed studies with smaller numbers of participants. Among their conclusions were that 45% of Australian adults have ‘no ability at all’ to verify online information and 52% have only an ‘emerging ability’ (that is, they have very basic skills).

The researchers also found that many adults overestimated their ability to identify misinformation (in the same way, I assume, that everyone except me thinks they are a better than average driver).

The report observes that when people make decisions about whether to trust information online, they usually rely on their existing knowledge or beliefs or the look and feel of the content, or they accept the content at face value rather than investigating whether the information is accurate.

Very few people in the study took adequate measures to verify information—these measures include things like assessing the credibility of the information’s source, using fact-checking websites, or conducting a reverse image search. For example, one participant, when presented with a mislabeled Instagram post, assumed it was legitimate because they’d “heard of this happening to other people”.

An example was a photo from a bushfire, which the post claimed was from 2020 but was actually from 2013. 75% of participants assumed the attribution was correct, and said things like “looks like real flames and smoke”, “[the post is] probably [factual] as a photo is included” and “the bushfires happened and that is what happened, I saw the news live”.

That is . . . concerning.

It’s also interesting that adults aged 30-39 had the highest ability to verify online information—higher than younger adults, and a lot greater than people aged 60+. The demographic that really separated people’s ability was education levels, with 60% of people in the low educational attainment group having no ability to verify online information, compared to 38% in the group with high educational attainment.

The report identifies a number of themes arising from the unhelpful strategies people took to reaching uniformed conclusion about the information presented to them. These included

• rejecting particular sources (e.g. Wikipedia) without applying any critical thinking or assessment
• making decisions on content based on based on their existing beliefs or things they had heard of happening to others
• making judgements based on their previous experiences with the creator (e.g. this person is trustworthy
• basing their judgement on the appearance of the content (e.g. it is easy to read and understand or looks official).

(This report also looks official, just saying!)

It’s an interesting report, which concludes “there is a need to educate the public to ask critical questions and take steps to verify potentially dubious information”.

Indeed.

I’m watching this space.

What am I reading?

I haven’t been reading anything this week.

* I always knew this university as UWS and had no idea until right now that it had changed its name to Western Sydney University. This happened in 2015. It’s been a long time since I worked in the university sector . . .