Posts by Stephen Judd
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He's a poor human being, but still a human being, and speculating over whether he really mean to kill himself, or sneering because he failed to do a good job of it is not classy .
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Lower decile schools are better funded because they NEED it to be on a par educationally. Hence any consideration of "better" is on other grounds such as exam passes or social connections.
(But then again, when my daughter went to a dec 10 primary school in Auckland, just the primary school fair could raise $90k, never mind donations and other fundraising. I don't know what the funding gap between them and a decile 5 or 1 school would have been but I suspect it was well covered)
But the desirability of a "good" school is partly about the kind of kids you believe your kids will mix with, and the hope or fear that the other kids' qualities will rub off on yours.
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Thanks Rich - that's pretty much exactly how I feel too.
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I collected some data on religion for a study I ran recently (as yet unpublished).
I would love to hear more about this study.
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Just to be contrary about science education, aren't there two parts to it?
In maths, we mostly want kids to learn arithmetic and useful techniques - we don't in fact teach them much if anything about induction and proof. And in science, don't we really also want to impart a lot of handy basic facts? I'd say that evolution just squeaks in on that count, if only to make sure they understand why they have to finish all their antibiotics, but I reckon a curriculum that was really focussed on applying empirical techniques to establish a body of provisionally provable "knowledge" wouldn't bear much resemblance to school science as we know it at all. Plus all those skeptical experimenting kids would drive every adult in the vicinity insane.
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The denial that religion plays a part in violent conflict has a flavour of No True Scotsman about it.
I find it hard to see how one could see, say, the partition of India apart from its religious component, or the English civil war, or the Shia vs Sunni struggle in Iraq. If we always excuse these conflicts by saying "ah, that's not really religious", then I begin to suspect that we have a definition of "religious" that includes "can't ever be a contributor to violence."
Now, I'd accept that the claim that religion is responsible for more violence than other causes is unprovable, let alone true. But equally, it sure does help.
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Apropos the attitudes towards homosexuality, I see this in the summary:
"... young people are more tolerant of sex before marriage than older people; they are also more accepting than older people of homosexuality."
We also learn that the "gay sex is wrong" figure has dropped from 50% to 40% since the last survey 10 years ago.
I suspect this is a belief which few people change their mind on. But enough people have died in the last 10 years to make a difference. If 40% strikes you as implausibly high, perhaps your and your peers are in the younger half of the respondents.
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The clbuttic issue is a variation on the Scunthorpe Problem.
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do think having some key historical narratives in your head is useful in doing many kinds of journalism
Absolutely agree.
And the point of the pomo theory brigade is surely that those narratives themselves need examination from time to time. How were they shaped? Whom do they serve? Do the entities they present really have an objective reality? (By that last, I mean for example whether looking at things like whether people called "leaders" really represent the groups they ostensibly lead, whether those groups deserve to be lumped together as one, that kind of thing).
Grasping the big picture is vital and important, so is deconstructing the picture and seeing whether you can do something else with the material.
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you might find the Newsmash at the end of the show amusing.
I sure did.
(It's doing the rounds on Facebook already...)