Having a personal academic website is great for developing and coordinating information that you can publish about your work and others can find out about you.

There are a range of options from very simple approaches like the postcards package in R https://github.com/seankross/postcards or the more complicated approach using the https://github.com/alshedivat/al-folio.

My own blog and some other websites I created (e.g. My Online CV) are based on some markdown templates I borrowed from other authors on github, and they all use the Jekyll static site generator framework. I have found that using jekyll on my Ubuntu linux computers is fairly straightforward but I am keen to also be able to develop sites on windoze computers. Therefore I am going to embark on an experiment to set up a jekyll site generator using windows sub linux (WSL) as I think that running linux alongside windows applications gives a lot of access to powerful tools and a range of software from both windoze-land and linux-land. I will use this post to document the steps I take.

Steps:

1. Install WSL

Open powershell as Admin, ran

wsl --install

but this just showed the wsl help text, so I found instructions that let me know if wsl is already installed, but no linux system distribution has been enabled this happens, so in my case I had to run wsl --list --online and choose a distro. I chose Ubuntu which I assume will default to the latest version

2. install dependencies

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install make build-essential curl git tree -y

3. install ruby

sudo apt install ruby ruby-dev -y

4. need to tell Ruby’s gem package manager to place gems in our user’s home folder.

nano ~/.bashrc
export GEM_HOME=$HOME/gems
export PATH=$HOME/gems/bin:$PATH

Save and close the file, then activate the environment variable with the following command:

source ~/.bashrc

Install Jekyll

gem install jekyll bundler

5. Try it out

jekyll new jekyll.example.com
cd jekyll.example.com
bundle add webrick
jekyll serve

6. References:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

https://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-install-jekyll-on-ubuntu-22-04/

https://jekyllrb.com/docs/installation/windows/

additional stuff

1. Pandoc: for converting between document file types, especially markdown to html

sudo apt install pandoc

Some cool examples are here: https://zatta.link/en/web/top3-tools-for-convert-markdown-to-html.html

Just heard the great news the excellent PhD student Heather Stevens published another paper from her thesis which I co-supervised with primary supervisor Paul Beggs. Heather’s thesis was passed last year. Well done Heather!

“No retreat from the heat; Temperature-related risk of violent assault is increased by being inside”

Journal: International Journal of Urban Sciences (RJUS)

The DOI of our paper is not ready yet (as of 13th May) but once our article has published online, it will be available at the following permanent link: https://doi.org/10.1080/12265934.2023.2209544.

My colleagues and I have just published:

E. Jegasothy, I.C. Hanigan, J. Van Buskirk, G.G. Morgan, B. Jalaludin, F.H. Johnston, Y. Guo, R.A. Broome, Acute health effects of bushfire smoke on mortality in Sydney, Australia, Environment International (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2022.107684

My colleagues and I have just completed the work on the 2022 MJA-Lancet Countdown, so I wanted to send you an update:

The 2022 MJA-Lancet Countdown Article was published in The Medical Journal of Australia at 10:30 am Wednesday 26 October AEDT. The DOI link to the article is: https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.51742

The MJA-Lancet Countdown Australian Launch Event

Prof Hilary Bambrick and her team at NCEPH/ANU organising this year’s MJA-Lancet Countdown Australian Launch Event. It is at 5:30 pm Wednesday 2 November at the Margaret Whitlam Pavilion, National Arboretum, Forest Drive, Molonglo Valley ACT. It would be great if you can be there in person, but if this is not possible then please join the event online. Please also promote the event through your networks and encourage your colleagues to attend. The link to register is:

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/mja-lancet-countdown-tracking-progress-on-health-and-climate-change-tickets-428333957397

The MJA also published an Editorial about our report:

https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.51744

Our report has been the subject of an ABC Science online piece:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-10-26/climate-change-health-fossil-fuel-heat-inequality-bushfire-flood/101572852

Policy Brief for Australia

A Lancet Countdown Policy Brief for Australia has been prepared and will be published and launched at the same times as our MJA article on Nov 2.

Media

As in past years, there is likely to be significant media interest in this year’s MJA-Lancet Countdown report. Engagement with the media is an important part of the Lancet Countdown’s broader communication strategy.

Social Media

Similarly, social media is an important part of the Lancet Countdown’s broader communication and engagement strategy. Please share the MJA-Lancet Countdown report through your social media networks as soon as you can.

Promote and Cite the MJA-Lancet Countdown Articles

Please promote the MJA-Lancet Countdown reports whenever and wherever possible, and remember to cite our reports where appropriate. DOIs for our past reports are as follows:

The 2021 report: https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.51302

The 2020 report: https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50869

The 2019 report: https://doi.org/10.5694/mja2.50405

The 2018 report: https://doi.org/10.5694/mja18.00789

My colleagues and I published this paper a little while ago and I wanted to point out an interesting and important topic about the use of environmental health indicators (EHI) for policy and planning.

• Edokpolo, B. Allaz-Barnett, N., Irwin, C., Issa, J., Curtis, P., Green, B., Hanigan, IC. and Dennekamp, M. (2019) Developing a Conceptual Framework for Environmental Health Tracking in Victoria, Australia. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16101748

We based a lot of our thinking on the DPSEEA framework (Corvalán, C., Briggs, D. and Kjellström, T. Chapter 2: Development of Environmental Health Indicators, in World Health Organization., Briggs, D., Corvalán, C., & Nurminen, M. (1996). Linkage methods for environment and health analysis - General guidelines - A report of the Health and Environment Analysis for Decision - making (HEADLAMP) project. World Health Organization (WHO). Geneva.)

Our modified framework for use in Victoria, Australia

While several conceptual frameworks have been used to organize data to
support the development of an environmental health tracking system,
Driving Force–Pressure–State–Exposure–Effect–Action (DPSEEA) was
identified as the most broadly applied conceptual framework. Exposure
and effects are two important components of DPSEEA, and currently,
exposure data are not available for the EHTS. Therefore, DPSEEA was
modified to the Driving Force–Pressure–Environmental Condition–Health
Impact–Action (DPEHA) conceptual framework for the proposed Victorian
EHTS as there is relevant data available for tracking. The potential
application of DPEHA for environmental health tracking was
demonstrated through case studies. DPEHA will be a useful tool to
support the implementation of Victoria’s environmental health tracking
system for providing timely and scientific evidence for EPA and other
decision makers in developing and evaluating policies for protecting
public health and the environment in Victoria.

We presented a hypothetical example of how the DPEHA conceptual framework could be applied in estimating the burden of respiratory illnesses associated with anthropogenic PM2.5 (as shown in Figure 3). Common anthropogenic PM2.5 sources included emissions from road vehicles, planned burns, and wood heaters for heating. This scenario made use of the data in Table 3.

Table 3

| DPEHA  Conceptual Aspect | Data Inputs                                                                                            |
|--------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Driving force            | Population increase in Victoria                                                                        |
|                          | Increased demand for road networks                                                                     |
|                          | Increased total number of private and commercial vehicles (cars, vans, trucks, and buses)              |
|                          | Increase in ownership of petrol and diesel vehicles                                                    |
| Pressure                 | Average age of vehicles (older vehicles may release more PM2.5 and PM10 than newer vehicles)           |
|                          | Busy roads                                                                                             |
|                          | Emissions from petrol and diesel vehicles                                                              |
|                          | Cars not maintained well could produce more emissions                                                  |
| Environmental Conditions | Monitoring and modeled concentrations of ambient PM2.5 and PM10 from car emissions collected over time |
| Health Impact            | Premature deaths and hospital admissions for respiratory and respiratory conditions                    |
|                          | Estimated disability-adjusted life years lost attributable to PM2.5 exposure                           |
| Action                   | Policies to improve air quality                                                                        |
|                          | Use of available technologies and controls to reduce emissions from road vehicles                      |
|                          | Public awareness campaign                                                                              |
|                          | Community engagement through educational programs                                                      |
|--------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|