Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Mediocrity Watch | Feb 26, 2009 09:52

I'm concerned that a decision by Tony Ryall that should worry anyone with a stake in special-needs education has gone almost unreported. Ryall canned two pay equity investigations, including one that had revealed that the overwhelmingly female workforce that provides special needs support in schools is critically underpaid.

But I'm not surprised, either by the fact that these people are paid so poorly, or by the fact that Ryall's sudden decision was ignored. It's just not as sexy as having heads on plates, is it?

Hilary Stace posted to Humans her letter to Allan Peachey, the chair of the Education select committee, over the Education Act changes shoved through under urgency before Christmas. As she notes, she never got a chance to make a submission on the amendment bill, so writing a letter is about all she's got.

She notes all the concerns that parents of special-needs children -- and especially those on the autism spectrum -- might have about the amendments, from the clobbering stick on truancy to the demonstrated failure of the New Child Left Behind policy of frequent testing in the US. She also commends to Peachey's attention to the New Zealand Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline, which last year made recommendations National's amendments just roll right over.

This all seems news to Peachey. Ten days after Hilary sent her letter, she received a reply containing this anodyne passage:

Thank you for your recent letter relating to the Education National Standards Amendment Act 2008.

I have not yet had time to study your letter in detail but will do that in the next few days and bring to the attention of the Minister for Education concerns that I have in relation to how our autistic children are treated in schools.

I have raised with the Honorable [sic] Chris Carter Deputy Chairperson of the Education Select Committee the thought that the committee might do some work on the schooling for autistic children.

I cannot guarantee that this will happen but it is something I am quite keen to do.

Of course, the the "work" has been done, as Peachey would know if he'd found the time to "study" Hilary's letter, or even, say, read it. It's hard to say who is less impressive; Peachey or the minister, Anne Tolley, but nothing this government has done should encourage parents with special-needs kids.

On a more impressive note: Obama's speech to the join houses of Congress seems to have been highly impressive, if occasionally a little wayward (that bit about "find[ing] a cure for cancer" was like parody).

The Republican response, from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, is widely agreed to have been a disaster. It's going to take him a long time to live down the Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock meme. But it still might be better than that kooky exorcist thing.

Meanwhile, the Republicans seem intent on killing off any actual sane people representing the party. As Craig R will always point out, Olympia Snowe looks a lot more like the solution for the GOP than the problem. But what would I know?

And finally, Rebecca Priestley has a thing about cicadas. Or, rather, a nice blog post about how we know what we know about the sound of summer, on Pundit.

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Safari 4 beta: seriously quick | Feb 25, 2009 10:46

Javascript, declared Bruce Sterling at Webstock last week, is "the duct tape of the web". He then pooped on his own aphorism by declaring that Javascript was invented by Sun Microsystems (it came out of Netscape early in the browser wars) but the essential point holds true: Javascript is what makes modern websites work. It's also what slows down your browsing experience, when the ambitions of developers run ahead of the performance of your system.

Apple's just-released beta for version 4 of its web browser, Safari (available here for Mac OS and Windows) makes a lot of that go away. It is blisteringly fast at rendering Javascript: 42x faster than IE 7, 3.5x faster than Firefox 3. The experience is strikingly better than any other browser I have used.

That's not the only change. Safari has gone coverflow. You can browse both browsing history and bookmarks like you're in iTunes. More useful for history, I'm finding. And I do like the way it opens by default with big thumbnails of my 12 most-visited sites and a History search window.

This works very smoothly on a 2.4GHz iMac, but I wonder if it'll be so sweet on a Windows PC, or an older Mac, especially one with not much memory installed -- the beta is presently hogging a lot of the 2GB I'm packing. We'll see how it goes when I have 100 tabs open.

I'm not so keen on the new paradigm for tabs, but I'll give it a day or two before trying the Terminal hack to revert them back to the old style.

So far as I can see, Safari's hunger for memory is untempered, and it still scores a big FAIL on extensibility, and what add-ons you can use often seem fairly poisonous, especially when you come to try and upgrade. If it's add-ons you need, it's Firefox for you.

Of course, this is a beta. And Mac OS users should know that the only way to the new Safari is via the latest security updates and the potentially troublesome 10.5.6 system update. I'd been holding off the latter until this morning, and on restart the Finder hung trying to launch. I had to power off (while cursing my own stupidity in upgrading on a production day) but it ran fine after that.

In other news, my boy Leo has posted two more game reviews on his blog: Halo Wars (written in one blaze of blogging, a few hours after the game arrived) and Deadly Creatures on the Wii. Gamers, do feel free to drop by and leave him a comment.

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The strange story arc | Feb 24, 2009 12:21

This week's Media7 has two themes. One is media coverage -- or the lack of it -- of the trade union movement, for which we'll be joined by Ken Douglas, Laila Harre and Graeme Hunt, and the other is chequebook journalism in the wake of the Alfie baby farrago and the strange, oddly perfect, story arc of terminally ill reality TV star Jade Goody.

If you'd like to join us around 5pm for the recording at The Classic in Queen Street tomorrow, hit "reply" and let me know.

Alternatively, you might want to offer opinions or suggest areas of discussion in the forums here.

And if that's too much ... what about those Oscars, then? The most feelgood ceremony in years?

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Get yer avatars out | Feb 23, 2009 12:23

Right, you can turn your avatars back on again. Although the dispute at its heart is far from over, the Internet Blackout protest concluded when this morning's wide-ranging blackout of blogs and other websites did, at noon.

I think that's about right. The protest virtually came out of nowhere last week -- it was conceived in a schoolroom in Warkworth on the Saturday, and enacted on the Monday. The mobilisation involved was really remarkable. But you lose a lot of nuance in protest mode.

I do understand that the copyright owners have felt under siege on this one. The troll who sent aggressive emails to record companies and posted their responses in the forums of the Creative Freedom Foundation website forums certainly didn't help (the whole thread was deleted by Matthew Holloway).

On the other hand, Bronwyn Holloway-Smith and various others on the protest side were understandably creeped out by the phone calls they received from a man with a weird accent, who was apparently trying to trap them into endorsing copyright infringement. That was just as wrong.

Even if they feel hard done by, I hope the rights holders can accept that the people protesting have been motivated by principle, rather than personality. I suspect the feeling behind the protest has been building in increments, and this was the final straw.

Section 92A is a measure government officials advised should be deleted from the copyright amendment bill. It was explicitly opposed by a wide range of submitters and interested parties, including the Consumers Institute. The select committee that heard submissions removed it from the bill. It was reinserted without debate at the last moment.

The overseas jurisdictions whose plans helped underwrite a rationale for the measure -- the UK, Germany, the EU -- have reversed those plans since November, in some cases describing the measure as a breach of human rights. To say it is controversial ain't the half of it.

Was the protest a success? Yes. On February 13, the rights owners stance on the draft code of conduct for ISPs was that they should be in the sole position to adjudicate their own claims, and that they should be make to pursue those claims without incurring any of the cost of the process, which should fall entirely on ISPs. Now, they can't understand why no one grasped that they were never opposed to an independent dispute resolution process.

That's a big shift. But the code is months away from agreement. A vague law that relies overwhelmingly on an unfinished code should, at the least, be delayed.

The protest was also a success because it has fostered a new voice on copyright and creative issues; one that isn't an industry or technical body. The Creative Freedom Foundation's petition has 12,000 names -- and 8000 of the signatories identify themselves as artists. That's remarkable. It has attracted worldwide attention.

I'm tapped out on this for now, but I'm not going away. My main intention is to try and encourage both sides of this argument to demonstrate and assume good faith in the other. That will mean the protest side not demonising the rights holders (whilst continuing to critique their present stance) and the rights holders not opening every conversation by dismissing those who disagree with them as mere mongers of piracy. None of that helps.

PS: Happy days! The interviews with various interesting people (Tom Coates, Joel Pitt, Vik Olliver, Daniel Spector and Damian Conway) at Foo Camp have been uploaded to the Media7 blog. Unfortunately, the professional Avid suite we hire turns out to be completely shit at exporting for web use, and would only do so a very low resolution. TV really ain't the web. Thanks a lot to Sacha Childers for wrestling with the machine to get what we did.

PPS: You might still be seeing Blackout banner ads. I'm trying to get them to stop.

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Play Time | Feb 20, 2009 11:19

Greetings from the floor of Webstock where I have given my keynote speech. It went okay, but being the first person on the stage after Ze Frank is, well, intimidating. His closing keynote yesterday was an inspiring romp through the possibilities of community creativity.

Of all the things he said, I liked this best:

We've become so obsessed with building baseball fields that we kind of forget we're supposed to play in them.

In other words, we focus so much on the platforms and not so much on the human things we can do with them. With Ze, the play's the thing.

Spend some time today with The Scribbler, or the flower garden. Muse on The Atheist Game. And check out his TED talk for the flavour of what people here saw yesterday.

I'm not going to talk about Section 92A today, except to say that I stood up this morning, praised people on the other side of the argument (Ant Healey for one) and implored the people there not to write them off. I can't emphasise strongly enough that this dispute over principle shouldn't be personalised or allowed to turn into a shitfight, even if that sometimes seems to be what a few people want.

On a happier musical note, one of the country's leading moderately-paced rock bands, Cassette, would like you to know that their new album, The Jingle King is out on March 16, and that they'll be touring in support of it next month. (Details on their MySpace).

In fact they're such wags that they're offering you, Public Address readers, the chance to download a very sexy track off the album. For free. Crazy, no? It's called 'Our Dream' and it's here for you.

The other Great New Zealand Song of the Week is, of course, Flight of the Conchords' insta-classic, 'Too Many Dicks on the Dancefloor':

That's Michel Gondry directing there. Yowza.

Finally, all of you who have RSVPd for tomorrow's Orcon Great Blend (with Bruce Sterling, Jasmina Tesanovic and Andrew Dubber) don't forget to be at the Pioneer Women's Hall in Freyberg place at 6.30pm. Anyone who desperately wants to come along and didn't make the cut, email me via the 'Reply' button and I'll see what I can do. If I don't get back to you, that means I'm slumped in a corner somewhere. But I'll be alright …

PS: I forgot! There's a tidy Media7 on the economic crisis, science reporting, Top Gear Live, Foo Camp and New Zealand's last hanging, on the wires now.

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