Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Sacha,
cropping?
Only if you cropped out anything of significance, one would assume. Maybe, as an example, if you were an architecture lecturer and you wanted to show students a design feature that you saw in the background of a photo you could try and argue fair dealing, but to retain the original message the photographer was trying to convey you wouldn't be able to crop anywhere near enough to protect you.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Sacha,
Didn’t [University of New Zealand] start that way until mid last century?
Nope. University of Otago Site Act 1875 and Auckland University College Land Act 1908 (mentioning the AUC Land Exchange Act 1892) show that there were discrete universities by the start of last century.
There was apparently a shake-up in the early 1960s as the “modern” establishment Acts for Auckland, Canterbury, Lincoln and Otago were passed in 1961, and for Massey, Victoria and Waikato in 1963.
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don't get the blanket exclusion of photos either.
Well, fair dealing is the use of part of a work for the various purposes permitted: review/criticism, current affairs reporting, and education. How do you use part of a photograph in any meaningful way in any of those situations? Given that there are vague thresholds defining how much "part of" is too much "part of" for print and video, one can roughly know how much is allowable. Those mediums are multi-part and snippets can be used without having to use the whole thing. The same is really not possible with a photograph.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Bart Janssen,
It's somewhat ironic that a country with such a strong culture of anti-elitism has a strong culture of intellectual snobbery.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Deborah,
My assumption is that he intends that students would be able to borrow the increased fees via the student loans system. That’s a cost to government, because even though student loans are loans (duh), it still costs to provide them in the first place.
It’s also through loans that National comes to the conclusion that we spend amongst the most in the OECD, per capita, on tertiary education. So if we increase the amounts being loaned, our per-capita spending increases (according to National economics). If that’s what it takes, so be it.
He does talk of the need for much better scholarships to be available, too, addressing your other apparent objection to the suggestion that we even dare to consider trying to create one elite university in a country with 4.5 million occupants and no fewer than eight full universities. If we rationalised some of them down a bit we could probably free up a fair bit more funding, too. (ETA: Bart, snap)
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Sacha,
There’s perhaps room for further discussion about other answers like creating a virtual high-class network across the best globally-ranked parts of our current universities instead.
There could be, yes, but as I know you're someone who supports the "compact city" vision for Auckland you'll be familiar with the "agglomeration benefits" argument in support of that vision and be able to see how virtualising an entire tertiary institution across the country will be destructive the benefits that come from inter-faculty discussion and collaboration - especially in physical disciplines, where virtual collaboration is, at best, difficult.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Deborah,
I’m not prepared to give any particular weight to what a professor at Auckland University says in favour of giving much more funding to his university by f#*^king the rest over
I didn’t see the bit where he asked for more money. Could you point it out? Oh, he doesn’t ask for more government money? Yeah, that’s right.
Fuck’s sake, people, read the article carefully before jumping in to attack things he doesn’t say.ETA:
Perhaps I might give it more credence if it was accompanied by proposals to disestablish all current Auckland University staff, and make them compete for positions there.
Given that he also wants to significantly increase ratios of academics to students, I don’t think he sees much place for a significant shrinking of the number of academics. Which you’d have known if you’d read the article carefully instead of leaping in to attack its suggestions.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Keir Leslie,
Tim Hazeldine talks a lot of self-serving bullshit about national champion status, which plays precisely onto his hands as a lecturer at UoA
Maybe it does, but because it's Tim Hazeldine (who I rate highly as a lecturer) saying it I'm not prepared to just dismiss it as more of the same. He's consistently left-wing in his outlook (read other of his contributions in the Herald, or his quoted comments in articles), and if he thinks this is actually what's needed to improve the quality of tertiary education in this country then it's a pretty stark, if veiled, statement that the "the market will provide" philosophy currently in action is not delivering what's required for us to make the transition away from being a bunch of cockies exporting milk and trees.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Keir Leslie,
New Zealand, a traditionally free market economy.
A market economy, maybe, but very definitely not free. Until the 1980s our market was incredibly tightly regulated. Currency controls, im/ex regulations, subsidies and tariffs up the yin-yang, state involvement in provision of many goods and services including housing, banking and insurance... Muldoon was the capstone on a very lengthy period of the state governing most aspects of life, for good or ill - and given the sorry state of our economic and social performance during and subsequent the term of the Third Labour Government I'm far from convinced that the ill entirely outweighed the good.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to BenWilson,
But it’s not usually “a little more time”, it’s “a lot of time”, or “a lot of wasted effort and resources looking at the problem the wrong way”.
Care to quantify? Is an A student twice as fast as a B? Ten times faster? Whatever number you pick, that’s the number of resources their talents take to replicate. They are therefore not essential at all.
Humans are not computers dealing with linearly-scalable problems. With a computer, if you know it will take 200 years at 1Gflop you can extrapolate that it'll take roughly 1 year with 200 1Gflop computers working on equal-sized portions of the problem.
You cannot say "An A-grade scientist will derive a solution 10-times faster than a B-grade scientist, therefore 10 B-grade scientists equal one A-grade scientist" because the output of those 10 scientists will contain overlaps, it'll contain deviations from the problem, it'll contain errors, and, most importantly, it's the work of 10 unique processing units who all have their own quirks and idiosyncrasies and consequently their output is not the cohesive whole of a single A-grade scientist. And you can't just scale it out to add more B-grade scientists, either, because that's just scaling up all of the other problems that come from trying to get multiple people working on the same problem.That's not deifying scientists, or whatever you want to call it, it's a recognition that you cannot look at how we use computers and attempt to apply the same overlay to how we use scientists. It doesn't work. A large number of B-grade scientists collaborating on the same problem may well achieve the same breakthrough as a single A-grade scientist, but it won't be based on any linearly-related application of additional resources to the problem and it quite possibly won't be as elegant in the first pass because it's a collage not a portrait. Their final output could well be better, because beyond the breakthrough there are many more brains working on finishing the product and filling the gaps, but how much more money and other resources went into achieving that breakthrough than could've been achieved with a single A-grade scientist?