Posts by Peter Ashby
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@Craig
Torchwood: Children of Earth was just warmed over Quatermass with some chaste gay attraction thrown in. I thought it weak.
@Russ
Home 3D may be closer than you think, just to confirm my slight geekiness I reveal I read The Register:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/07/23/fujifilm_3d_w1/Note it takes 3D video and you can buy a 3D screen to view the pictures/video on and no silly glasses required. So bums on seats required at the moment, but give it 3 to 5 years and it's Pirates a gogo.
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One thing though, I keep being logged out of PAS after a few minutes of not posting. Doesn't happen in other sites. Is that a feature or a bug?
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I subscribe to the email notifications then go to my RSS reader (Vienna on the Mac, its free) and look it up there where PAS is bookmarked. I like that it lists all posts as I will occasionally look up one of the others or one of the Guest posts.
I got into the RSS reader after noticing that if you leave a page open in Safari for longer than about a day it slows everything down a lot, which made following blog posts difficult. Vienna doesn't have that problem so I can follow discussions for days if necessary.
I am not on any social networking sites and as others have said, I don't do smalltalk so see no point to Twitter. People still email me, so why change?
I will also buck the trend and vote for threading please. Maybe its because for a long time after blogging went live I stuck resolutely to usenet, which is fully threaded and has been for ages so I find the lack of threading irritating. New Scientist use threading on their boards and I think it works well there.
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@Angus Robertson
Denmark was far from unique in restricting citizens of the latest tranche of new entrant countries to the EU. Here in the UK we were one of the few that did not and prior to the crunch much of the economic boost was young Poles and Czechs coming here and working hard. Our crops would not be picked if it were not for migrant Eastern Europeans because the locals don't want to do the work. The eldest works in a Highland Hotel and apart from the manager there are no Scots on the staff, just a Kiwi, one Aussie and the rest are Poles. Apparently the head housekeeper doesn't even speak English.
I guarantee there is unemployment in the village, but again the locals won't work in hospitality if they can help it.
Some of the Poles and Czechs have gone back post Crunch, but not all. The caravans are still there around the farms because someone has to pick the strawberries and raspberries, the blackcurrants, the whitecurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries. The raspberries are very good, the straws not far behind. I'm not complaining.
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@IS
The benefit cut in the early '90s was 7%. This is engraved on my mind. When I was a married with children PhD student and my stipend ended before I was quite finished we took a pay rise when we went on the dole (very helpful staff in the benefit office, they got a sort of mention in my thesis). This was true even after they cut it.
Despite coming from a lower income than the dole they still made us stand down for 2 weeks. We ate a lot of lentils and basically bought milk, cheese and potatoes only.
As for productivity in Health and Science, you do this with 'capital deepening too'. If I am a phlebotomist and I must take 8 separate tubes of blood from a patient (had that done) then I can do fewer patients than if I only have to take 1 or 2. You achieve this by investing in better/smarter blood analysis tech. Or you invest in equipment such as scanners so people get diagnosed faster and more accurately so are on the lists for a shorter time.
In science you can automate too, my last lab bought a desktop robot that would grid out samples in tubes into 96 or 384 well plates with or without reaction mixture and seal them. It read barcodes too so you had a record of what was where. Around the same time we bought a water bath pcr robot and took great stacks of those 384 well plates and ran them through and analysed the result real time for you. That was on the people side supporting a large population based clinical study. I used it for my mouse samples both because it was faster and because it was more accurate. Real time pcr has been a boon too, no more running gels and then trying to manually quantitate bands (always a dodgy method) and no radioactivity (forces you to go slower for safety and you have waste to dispose of).
Biology has seen an exponential increase in productivity to the point where we hit a computing problem, in terms of storing, cross linking and mining all that data.
In the NZ situation it means that rather than doing a study on the small area around one hospital you can do it nationally because you can now handle the samples and the data with just a couple of people. Back in the day you would have needed a small army.
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@Craig
The only chocolate-related problems I've got at the moment are a waistline spreading faster than coughing pig death,
according to an article in today's New Scientist out of those who have died from Swine 'flu in the US there are twice as many obese people who have died than their prevalence in the population would suggest. IOW it makes you susceptible and there are good biological reasons why.
Step away from the chocolate bar.
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Russ speaking of chocolate and single malt, if you encounter a bottle of Bowmore Darkest buy it, the stuff tastes of chocolate. It's chocolate from the direction that malt on the tongue can become sort of burnt and caramelly, os on the dark high % scale, but choc nevertheless. My wife loves is and only knows it as 'the chocolate malt'.
It is also sad that Cadbury's is doing this, their product here in the UK is waxy not particularly pleasant because it has more hydrogenated vegetable protein than milk solids in it. The NZ version was always much better and comparing the ingredients list was always sobering.
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@Sacha
Whanau-oriented wrap-around social services that harness existing community strengths.
The kind of stuff we can do as a young Pacific nation with global connections and talented, pragmatic people.
Something ambitious.Nice though I would like measures to ensure it isn't driven by dogmas but we have in place studies to ensure it is bringing good value added. That need not invalidate cultural inputs but those should not be allowed to be means of failure or degradation. We should be ambitious for those programs to be the very best too.
And of course the elephant in the room of why there was a power grab for science funding is that as a proportion of GDP NZ spends little on Science and R&D. National scrapping the R&D tax relief was a seriously retrograde move. What would they prefer to get companies doing what is good for them? Legislating that they must spend a set proportion of income on govt approved research?
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@Islander
Now you've gone and pressed one of my buttons!Research: back in the early '90s research in NZ got butchered. It was billed as hitching science to the 'Knwoledge Economy' but it was a power grab. Largely by the Medics who were pissed that they couldn't get MRC (now HRC) funding for piddling little 'studies' of no evidential basis and less statistical power because the biomedical researchers in the Universities were winning it all on the spurious basis that their proposals were good science, asking important questions and trying to swim with the big boys in international science (parochial science is often bad science). The biomedical researchers were forced to compete for a smaller pool with the chemists and physicists and ag researchers.
It got worse, there was no funding for a program of basic research, asking those important questions. Instead you got funding for one study for 3 years then you took ALL the thing you didn't discover firmly in those 3years and went to another pool for money to develop it to the point where you could flog it to the Venture Capitalists or BigPharma.
Consequently we know a lot about little pockets of health needs but have no national pictures. The research is written up in the New Zealand Medical Journal and disappears. Meanwhile research becomes extremely short termist and researchers become dilletants flitting from project to project without any structured program of investigation.
Applied science is all very well but the science on which it feeds has to come from somewhere. If you have nobody discovering or inventing the basic building blocks then you are reduced to building on other people's IP which reduces the value if it is ever sold.
The only way this is being done is through Royal Society of NZ funding for a few groups which is an old boys network par excellence. The world is filled with New Zealand scientists who can find no fit back home for their skills and experience gained overseas in top research labs.
The idea of yoking science to the economy is a nice one in principal but it assumes you know the necessary answers already. The world is not like that and our level and depth of knowledge about it is nowhere near good enough. So by all means use funding to direct some funding but you need to realise that allowing people to follow their curiosity gets the best out of them and your research dollar. People who go into science to make money are either deluded fools or rogues whose results bear close scrutiny.
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WRT Switzerland being well governed they have good trains too and they don't use their unsympathetic geography as an excuse on that, it's just an engineering problem. What happened to the New Zealand that built the Raurimu Spiral? I remember the stushie over electrifying the North Island Main Trunk line too and with Peak Oil looming what a good investment that was! Along with the serendipitous decision to lay fibre optic all along it for signalling that ended up being the internet backbone.
I like this discussion, here in the UK there is no sense of it being 'our' democracy in the way that is being expressed here, except that it is developing here in Scotland. I think that is not uncoincidental with the Edinburgh parliament being elected by MMP (currently we have a minority govt, sound familiar?). I just find it sad that in NZ the discussion is how to stop the politicians from selling off what remains of our assets when there should be a discussion over which useful assets for the future we should be building. I like the idea of a national cycle route though I am not persuaded it is the best use of available resources.
What alternatives would people like the govt to invest in? with or without the private sector or simply because the private sector is not interested but we want it anyway (surely what a govt is for?).