Posts by Hilary Stace
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Hilary, rest assured I won't get you to stand up and make yourself known in the show, and issue a retrospective apology on behalf of your ancestors.
Thanks because I am very shy. Besides there are thousands of descendants so there is collective responsibility.
But are you still collecting examples? How about the INCIS police computer?
There is also a wealth of material in our medical history eg Institutionalisation, lobotomies, unanaesthetised ECT (all well described in Janet Frame's works), Templeton, Kimberley and Lake Alice - all monuments to wierd ideas about how humans were supposed to be or not. Eugenics, which was popular in NZ in the early decades of the 20th century, and the linking of mental illness or disability with moral depravity. The idea that the 'race' was in danger if certain people were allowed to breed. The trepanning which was tried on prisoners in the 1950s etc etc
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Tony Parker - Tony Attwood and several of his colleagues are speaking at the Autism NZ conference at Te Papa, 8-10 September, if you would like to hear more.
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Thanks Russell, that was a nice surprise. (By the way Darwin's report on NZ, Christmas 1835, is a great read.)
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I agree with Giovanni. I try to listen to One in Five on Radio NZ at that time but would really like more info about PA Radio and what's coming up that week - and how to find it on radios usually allergic to commercial stations. BTW Happy Birthday Craig.
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My ancestor, Richard Davis, a missionary farmer in the Bay of Islands, brought gorse to NZ in the 1820s.
A grumpy and tired Darwin visited him at Waimate North in 1835 on his way home after four years away, and wrote 'After having passed over so many miles of an uninhabited useless country, the sudden appearance of an English farm-house and its welldressed fields, placed there as if by an enchanter's wand, was exceedingly pleasant'. Gorse fences were among the advances he noted. He also noted that the Norwegian rat had already devastated the local birdlife. But he was not impressed by New Zealand: 'I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place'.Source: Letters from the Bay of Islands: the story of Marianne Williams ed C Fitzgerald, Penguin, 2004.
(These letters also reveal the missionaries persuaded the locals to physically punish their children, a previously unknown practice)
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Russell - good programme tonight but too short as usual. As Peter Gluckman said, you need to be on every night for an hour to discuss these ideas.
Guardian man interesting too. It would be good to hear from Brian Deer, the Sunday Times journalist whose long campaign, determined investigative journalism, and scientific literacy finally brought Dr Andrew Wakefield's false autism theories and bad science to account.
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Is anybody else concerned that Paula Bennett seems to have a poor grasp of what constitutes qualitative and mixed methods research?
The role of the Families Commission has been to research areas related to NZ families, for which we have very little research at all. So using mixed methods, including quantitative data, they have looked at many topics such as the varied experiences of grandparenting, or how families cope when members also work extremely long hours in paid work. The reports clearly show how government policy can help, for example, by reducing family financial stress They have also funded small blue skies research projects on family related topics.
She seems to think that there is very little to be gained from actually talking to real people in interviews or focus groups. Instead she wants .... I'm not sure.
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Steven Joyce made the weird claim the other day that the new bigger longer heavier trucks that he had approved would mean fewer trucks on the road.
Does he mean that the big companies will bring in big new trucks and squeeze out all the current independent operators?
It is more likely that there will instead be a lot more trucks on the road while the railway lines alongside the roads remain underused and neglected. Until peak oil hits of course.
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Apparently the Icelandic eruption is a Plinian one - a plume is going 8 or so kilometres up in the air - quite small compared with Pompeii.
Autistic savant Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in a week. He's written about how easy it was in his book Embracing the wide sky. He found it a logical language full of patterns.
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One day we will realise that that those with the real expertise and wisdom are the consumers and those who live with the consequences of poor policy every day.
Who knows more about how the welfare system doesn't work, and therefore could be improved, than those who daily face the humiliation, the patronising attitudes, the conflicting information, the poverty, and lack of awareness of their disability or child care needs?In the meantime we continue to believe there is a problem located in the individual which could be fixed by punishment, incentives or some kind of rehabilitation.