Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Dunce Dunce Revolution | Oct 23, 2009 11:09

Here's an irony: in the same month that it becomes clear that educational funding will be diverted from arts and sciences into the narrow curriculum embodied in the government's national standards policy, we can read a major report that doesn't merely criticise the British government's adventure down that path as damn it to hell.

National, and its minister, Anne Tolley, really had no grasp on the implications of its policy at the time it was promised – and, to judge by the way it was whisked through under urgency late last year, had no intention of being troubled by evidence. I made it clear here at the time that I was troubled by the fact that such a major change to New Zealand's educational system could be introduced without debate. And now it's here.

Tolley's whining that schools would have complained just as loudly had she not diverted funding into support for the standards policy is as irksome as it is ridiculous. Lady, it's your policy, not some act of god.

Grant Robertson and Gordon Campbell have more on this.

The British system is not the same as ours, and the Cambridge review covers only primary education – but it finds against nearly everything our impending standards system embodies or implies: school "league tables", a narrow 3Rs curriculum and the bypassing of researchers and educators themselves for political reasons.

In a week when significant changes to the ACC scheme have also been set in motion more on the basis of ideology than evidence, we would to well to contemplate where that kind of behaviour tends to get us.

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Phew. After that, I'm happy to say that my boys and I will this weekend embark on an educational activity of quite a different stripe. Yes, it's Armageddon Expo time, and I for one am very glad that the expo has moved to the Auckland Showgrounds. It outgrew the Aotea Centre years ago, and if the suburban streets of Greenlane won't be the friendliest place for cosplayers, the event itself will be easier to stay at for longer.

But how long do you reckon we'll have to stand in line to get Seth Green's autograph?

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Last night's Media7 is available on demand from TVNZ. It kicked off with a discussion of the coverage of the Crafar Farms story (where it was particularly useful to hear from Waikato Times editor Bryce Johns) and moved on to an enjoyable look at this year's top conspiracy theories.

I feel a bit remiss in putting Mikey on the spot with respect to one of his friends -- Jonathan Eisen -- without putting similar questions to Vicki Hyde with respect to one of her friends, Skeptics co-founder Denis Dutton. No, I am not saying Dutton is the same as Eisen. But hear me out.

Dutton is essentially a conspiracy theorist on climate change. He imagines that the ideas he finds most politically congenial are marginalised because they are suppressed by the IPCC, governments, etc – and not simply because, in the view of the majority of expert opinion, they lack merit. And, like an intelligent design enthusiast, he has created a website for the "debate" which centres on the depiction of a false equivalence between the ideas he favours and the view of all major expert bodies. It's classic behaviour. And, I think warrants calling when we're bagging the crazy people.

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I went along to the launch of the second series of The Jacqui Brown Diaries on Monday, and it looks like it's going to be fun. There's fighting and stuff blowing up all over the place. And there's Media7! Yes, in episode 7, I interview Jacqui's character and ask what happened to the role model she used to be. It was a lot of fun to do.

Anyway, the show kicks off on TV3 tonight at 9.30pm, before 7 Days.

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This has turned up in comments, but I think it deserves highlighting again. Communities do not get any safer together than this:

And Paul Henry interviewed Sergeant Guy Baldwin himself on Breakfast this morning.

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The inaugural Auckland Laneway Festival lineup looks pretty good, with more to come in December: Echo and the Bunnymen and a reformed 3Ds for John Campbell; and N.A.S.A., The Xx and Florence and the Machine for the indie kids.

If you haven't heard the Xx's remix of Florence and the Machine's cover of Candi Staton's 'You Got The Love', you really should. It's gorgeous. The song itself has a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Got_the_Love" target="_blank">an intriguing history.

Meanwhile, you can probably write down The Pogues for the next Big Day Out reveal …

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And finally, some giving away:

The next LATE at the Museum, on 5 November, looks like a cracker: David Kilgour and Sam Hunt performing together, with SJD and various other artists playing in the galleries. The panel discussion is looking at the human migration to NZ. I have 10 double passes to give away for the evening. Click "Reply" and email me with "LATE" in the subject line.

And I have two copies of the Fly My Pretties CD/DVD A Story to give away too. Click Reply and email me with "Fly My Pretties" in the subject line.

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Windows 7: Actually Not Bad | Oct 22, 2009 11:53

We installed Windows 7 yesterday, having reached the end of the line with Vista. Leo's attempt to install Vista Service Pack 2 on the kids' gaming PC wound up, as so many attempts to upgrade Vista have for us, in a big mess of fail.

"Your copy of Windows is not genuine," said the message on the Vista screen. This did not mean that the operating system was insincere, but that we had fallen victim to a known bug with Windows Genuine Advantage (the lover of language in me loathes that name) and until it was fixed we were stuck in limited functionality mode. I need hardly tell you that the fix didn't work either. We didn't even get as far as begging to have our product re-enabled over the phone.

What bugs me is that this should not have been my problem, yet Microsoft had made it so. Its interest in making its software difficult to use illicitly clearly trumped any value my own time might have to me.

So Leo declared he'd like to clean-install the copy of Windows 7 that arrived in the mail the day before, but he needed a USB drive to back up to. So we ducked out to Extreme PC and got a 1TB Seagate drive which would be my new Time Machine volume, so he could use the old one. (After going years without proper back-up, I found the couple of hours it took to write a Time Machine back-up to the newdrive oddly nerve-wracking.)

He tried to get Vista to back itself up, but it bluescreened. Disloyal to the bitter end. He was pretty sure he could manually copy over all the files he needed and reinstall applications as required (as a Mac user, that all seems like a complete mess to me – I'm used to a home directory and an application layer that's quite separate from the operating system).

Then I had to go and make a TV show By the time I got back, the PC was running Windows 7. I walked into the kids' room, looked over Leo's shoulder and could immediately tell things were better. Yes, Windows 7 seemed to work better just from looking at it.

"It does," Leo agreed. "It's like it's got this aura around it. Of just working."

Maybe it's just that it's not Vista, but Windows 7 does seem to have arrived in good shape. Its long public beta period has presumably helped there.

Indeed, I'd go so far as to say the Windows 7 has arrived in better shape than Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, which I think is another point release or two away from doing justice to the changes Apple has made under the hood.

Ironically, the performance of Microsoft Office 2009 under Snow Leopard is one of my problems. But that has eased since I fixed the big one: Flash. The scourge of the web is particularly scourgey under Snow Leopard – WebKitPlugInHost, the process that brokers communication between 64-bit Safari and 32-bit plugins, would suddenly be using 99% of my CPU. I routinely browse with dozens of tabs open, occasionally more than 100, and some of those pages have multiple Flash movies on them -- it was a serious issue. All praise be, then, to the Webkit plug-in ClickToFlash, which has given me back my computer.

So that's all good.

The remaining question is what we should do with that old copy of Windows Vista. Leo says we should lock it in a box where it will stay for 700 years before being used to disable SkyNet with its unmatched ability for FAIL. That sounds like a cunning plan.

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Of swine and cows | Oct 20, 2009 14:21

In this week's Media7 we're looking at conspiracy theories – for which it has been a vintage media year. All the action right now is around swine flu and the vaccine against it. In the US, it's not just Glenn Beck stoking fear about the vaccine – it's the pot-smoking liberal atheist Bill Maher.

And here in New Zealand, Uncensored magazine is suggesting that the flu may well have been created in drug company labs, to drum up vaccine business. It's also a hot topic with crowd that gathers at former Act MP Muriel Newman's New Zealand Centre for Political Research: see Weaponised Swine Flu Debacle and Are Flu & Pandemic Vaccines To Be Trusted? And for that matter, New World Order Infowars Dispatch.

But bigger than anyone this year has been former Act vice president Trevor Loudon, whose tireless work uncovering the Communist conspiracy that has nurtured Barack Obama from childhood has made him the toast of the conservative Republican web.

To discuss those and many other theories – up to and including the New World Order – I'll be joined by Vicki Hyde of the Skeptics, Auckland University's Matthew Dentith, and self-professed conspiracy theorist Mikey Havoc of 95bFM.

We'll kick off the show with a look at coverage of the Crafar Farms failure. A business story? And environmental one? Animal welfare? In light of Close Up's sympathetic visit with Alan Crafar, are we still waving farmers on their merry way?

For that discussion, we'll be joined by Bernard Hickey, who did so much to break the story, and farmer and journalist Alan Emerson.

If you'd like to join us for the recording tomorrow, we'd need you at TVNZ from 5pm (and most certainly before 5.30). Click Reply and email me asap if you'd like to come along.

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Rather than having a piss-up a with a blogger to prematurely celebrate a "political victory", the Maori Party might be well advised to look to the Act Party for lessons in how to exercise leverage as a minority support party. Because they got dicked, again. I certainly have sympathy for Maori Television: not much at all for those involved from the Maori Party.

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Look! There's a discussion on the 2011 referendum on MMP! I'm guessing the thread should stay live till nearly then …

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And finally, some video:

Glenn Beck being fair and balanced about the swine flu vaccine:

Bill Maher debates former Senate majority leader Bill Frist (a heart surgeon) on the vaccine:

A public health commercial from the 1976 swine flu scare:

That vaccine didn't work out so well.

And the trailer for this year's documentary New World Order, which looks at conspiracy theories and those who subscribe to them:

I've downloaded that movie (having posted encouraging comments on The Pirate Bay, the makers seem happy enough about that happening) and I'm rather looking forward to watching it.

You may know of other relevant videos. If so, just paste the whole URL (not the embed code) in the comment window.

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Getting Across | Oct 18, 2009 15:37

I'm delighted to learn that the visionary proposal for a grand span seems to be being taken seriously as an option for a new harbour crossing for Auckland. Its latest incarnation – as an ANZAC centenary project, due for delivery 2015 – offers a ready identity the project lacked for some time.

Richard Simpson's idea is now officially backed by the ANZAC Centenary Bridge Group, whose membership includes New Zealand Steel, Mainzeal, Aspec Properties, Davis Langdon, and Jasmax, and yesterday's press release listed endorsements from the Returned Services'Association, the Heavy Engineering Research Association and Heart of the City. The presence of Matthew Hooton on dark-arts duty won't hurt its chances either.

The ANZAC bridge is an alternative to a new harbour tunnel, spanning from Wynyard Point to the Onewa Road interchange. Unlike a tunnel, it's multi-use – road, rail, cycle and pedestrian. It frees up valuable harbourside land at both ends of the present bridge. It offers a striking design signature for the city. And, according to its supporters, it would be significantly cheaper both to build and maintain than a tunnel "or any other alternative". (Transit New Zealand's preferred option is presently a tunnel.)

I've been looking at this since Richard first aired the idea in 2005 and I'm actually keen to hear what's not good about it.

There was a story in yesterday's Sunday Star Times which suggested that the accelerated construction of the crossing might leave other transport projects in the cold – but it might also provide an opportunity for the government to reconsider one of its spur-of-the-moment decisions. Auckland needs this crossing a lot more than it needs a $2.3 billion stretch of motorway from Puhoi to Wellsford Josh has the numbers on that.

Anyway, there will be a website here at the end of the month, and the group is undertaking to publish costings and technical information on December 3. Its representatives say they've had "encouraging informal discussions …with Prime Minister John Key, Transport Minister Steven Joyce, Auckland MPs, and other Government officials."

I hope their optimism is well-founded.

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