Posts by Bart Janssen
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Which is interesting, because from my perspective the problem is an overload of good people for few post-doc positions.
From the perspective of trying to hire post-docs, nope. But bear in mind we pay crap. Really good post-docs go overseas where they can both do better research and get paid more for it.
If you are actually good, as in A grade good, most places in NZ will move Heaven and Earth to find a way to employ you, except of course paying you more money. Because frankly all we see are B grade and worse. And we make good use of B grade folks, the reality is most of the science in NZ is done by solid hard working B grade folks.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
Even for med students?
Medicine isn't science, at least not the way we mean it. Mostly talking about research level science, where you try and discover something new or figure out how to apply a discovery to a new situation.
In fact medicine is a perfect example of the problem we often see, good students who like research but choose medicine because the pay is better.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
It just means that I don’t think it will have much impact on the study decisions of the brightest students.
James and Lucy. Sorry I gave the impression I was theorizing.
It wasn't just me guessing what their behaviour might be but instead me passing on the upshot from several conversations with faculty. They have been seeing, during the student loan era, a shift in the quality of students taking the sciences. these are really bright kids who stand out in the stage I classes (yes lecturers do notice). aWhen they talk to those kids they simply say they'd love to do biology/chemistry/maths but they won't because they want to be able to pay off their loans.
This is real and it is happening right now. We can see it when we try and find students for PhDs, we can see it when we try and find technicians and try and fill post-doc positions. The quality is just not there. When we ask our colleagues in the university they say the bright ones just aren't taking the sciences any more.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Keith Ng,
and b) whether potential post-grads will be turned away because of the lack of an allowance.
There is a much more important and damaging effect.
The really bright kids and I'm talking here about that fraction of our population who really are exceptional ... think Jonah Lomu exceptional but instead of physical it's mental skills that they have ... those kids have choices.
The bright kids are generally interested in everything and they are good at many different subjects. So they can choose which career path they take. Law is just as easy and exciting to them as is theoretical physics or maths or engineering or NZ literature or ...
And these kids can do maths. They can work out that they will have a bigger debt the longer they stay at University. And they also can work out which professions pay the most and hence which professions will clear their debt fastest and easiest.
So what happens when you increase post graduate fees, which is effectively what is being done here, is the best and brightest kids choose the highest paying careers paths.
And that means they won't become ecologists or biologists or theoretical mathematicians or analytical chemists or god forbid any of the Arts. Instead they will all choose to be lawyers or economists and similar professions where salary ramps up fast and high. Note these are the brightest they won't be mere clerks.
Personally I want the best and brightest to feel free to choose more er useful professions (apologies to lawyers and economists but frankly we kinda have enough already).
In essence this is social engineering but without any intelligent reasoning behind the engineering.
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Went outside to look at the moon from the drive and it was ok. But then since I have a small telescope I've spent many hours looking at the moon in more detail anyway. The telescope was bought when we lived in Tucson, Arizona (dry air clear skies minimal light pollution) - sadly it doesn't get nearly as much use in Auckland (humid cloudy and more scattered light than we should have).
One thing that is interesting about using a telescope to look at the moon is that it is better when it's not full. The brightness of the full moon washes out all the detail but as the moon waxes and wanes you can look at the terminator and see the mountains and valleys that make the moon the subject of many hours of fascinating viewing.
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Hard News: The Base, in reply to Kiwi Nomad,
It’s not rocket science!
I'm sorry but because New Zealand has no space industry all funding for rocket science has been terminated.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to 3410,
thinly-veiled implication that the PM was… less than truthful
They didn't imply anything of the sort. They merely suggested a lot of people who have contact with Key knew. A lot of people whose job it is to keep Key informed. No suggestion at all that he would have actually been told. No. Of course not. Why would anyone think that he might have been told by any one of the dozen people close to him who knew. Stop being so ridiculous. Are you some kind of leftie?
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Hard News: The Base, in reply to Sacha,
average hamster
Sadly we didn't get the option to vote for hamsters.
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Hard News: The Base, in reply to Russell Brown,
is that he does indeed have a weakness in relationships with his colleagues
And that is all too likely. It's a different set of skills to learn, combined with a base aptitude. You can learn to be better at being a leader, you just have to realise that you need to.
But it's also worth noting that he actually doesn't need to be the leader to contribute. That of course may be a difficult lesson for someone who chose to enter politics.
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Hard News: The Base, in reply to Deborah,
and he doesn’t downplay it, or pretend that he’s not smart.
And why the hell should he?
We don't ask Beatrice to pretend she isn't an athlete of the highest quality. New Zealanders really need to get their head around the idea that just because someone was born with a brain that is capable of learning and storing data they are somehow elitist for using that ability.