Posts by Bart Janssen
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we are hoping to do a house-swap with someone in the south of France or Italy for the period of the Cup (offers anyone?)
So is there web site set up so all us Aucklanders can go to Italy/Spain/France?
Purely noble reasons of course I wouldn't want to disrupt the World Cup 2011 by driving or shopping in my own town :).
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the thought of having to deal to 14 yr old boys, who would inevitably be taller than me? No. Really, it was nothing more complex than that at the time.
Nobody needs a reason to want to avoid 14 year old boys
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I wagged once.
(Auckland GBHS 1970s for those mapping the geographical and temporal loacalisation of the terms).And it was only a half day. It was totally hormonally driven. She had long blonde and I was pathetically grateful that she noticed me enough to invite me over to the party at her place. Needless to say she totally ignored me.
Why didn't I break the rules more? Um... school was fun. And a combination of my parents and Mrs Gribble (whom I loved but I was shocked to learn that others hated) taught me that school was about being given the opportunity to learn. Why would I skip it?
I didn't remember the PATs until someone described their colours. And I loved them.
Does writing journal papers count as tech writing?
And respect/mana is earned. That said, certain roles in society are shitty enough that those in those roles deserve some respect. Yes they can lose that respect pretty fast, but as a baseline they deserve respect. For example, anyone that has to turn up to traffic accidents automatically gets my respect as a baseline.
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showing me where the scars for a breast reduction operation went. These things are so easily misinterpreted.
I so want to see that on a Tui Billboard
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Thanks Hadyn :)
I was worried I might have to find four horses for the quartering.
Drake was also a voice I found remarkably sensible from the Rugby commentary box. He actually made me understand scrums sometimes.
As for the cricket, kind of a pity they've had awful weather. The two sides are reasonably evenly matched which would have made for an interesting game.
Hey can somebody explain the chucking thing?
When you allow the elbow to straighten during the bowling action you can make the ball do things that are not possible otherwise.
The original problem was with fast bowlers who could use the throwing action (which is what you get when you start with a bent elbow and straighten it) to get more speed. About an extra 5-10 kph.
The more recent problem is with spin bowlers who get more spin by involving elbow movement in the delivery. A very famous Sri Lankan bowler has been identified on several occasions as straightening his arm too much during delivery, but each time he has gone to a "clinic" where he doesn't straighten his arm.
The ICC recently changed the rules to allow some movement of the elbow. Coincidentally about as much as the above Sri Lankan was moving his elbow.
In short there are rules that make the game what it is, eg bowling from 22 yards away as opposed to 20 yards or 15 yards. Some folks try to bend those rules to gain advantage. Some people call rule benders cheats. It all makes for good column inches.
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Just to address the straw man. The question is
"how do we best go about improving literacy and numeracy?"It's worth comparing teaching from when I grew up, which although at a different school was within the same system as that described by David Haywood
and the kind of teaching that is exemplified by Tim Kong at the bottom of the page.Back in the good old days we had lots of tests and kids failed them. We can also see in the US an experiment with large scale nationwide testing of the kind implied by the new bill.
It seems fairly clear that testing of that nature does not improve literacy and numeracy.
To improve those things we need to train dedicated and talented teachers and give them the information and skills to teach. I firmly believe our education system has dramatically improved over the last 20 years, particularly in it's ability to deal with minority groups of all kinds. Having the Minister mess with the system seems unnecessary.
We want to teach our next generation, not train them to take tests.
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Wow so much in this thread already.
I wish I could be as nice as Emma, really.
Sorry crazily long post, the comment on Pharmac is the one that hurts the most to write.
Re Democracy:
New Zealand still hasn't got the hang of MMP and governments still try and obtain a majority that will allow them to pass legislation without compromise. IMO the point of MMP is to allow minority views to have an impact on society. Just under 50% of kiwis want National to represent their views in parliament That does not make representation of the views of the others wrong or irrelevant.Compromise frequently results in better more carefully thought out law. Urgency would seem to limit any compromise.
Re ETS:
As far as I can tell the actual legislation for the ETS under Labour was crap, full of stupidity and lacking in the kind of compromise and input from others that could/should have created a good law.That said, politicians arguing over weather climate change is real is not what anyone voted for. I really really want an ETS (or something) in place soon, so that NZ can be seen to be trying to do something sensible. BUT and it's a huge BUT. Nothing NZ does has any impact on climate change, we are simply too small. Oddly enough on this issue our international relationships are more important than the actually changes we make to our law or to our carbon emissions. Hopefully we get something good to replace the ETS and soon.
Re Education:
I grew up with exams and standards. I also grew up during a time of abject failure of the education system to engage Maori, which were ~20% of the students depending on how you counted. As far as I can see the current system is doing a whole lot better at including more minorities and improving their educations than the system used to. So why mess with something that is demonstrably improving? And it is improving, the comparisons with the other OECDs countries prove it.Cynical nasty answer is, the business round table wants standard exam grades so they can exclude people from the workforce based on those grades.
Re Fire at will:
Um guys this is actually one of the few pieces of legislation in this batch that actually has been through "the system". It's stupid because any competent business could hire on probation anyway and providing they wrote a letter at month one and month two they could fire any new employee at month three. So the new law does nothing really that wasn't already available. So this isn't the worst law, just unnecessary given what we already had.Re Biofuels:
Nasty answer is someone took a nice fat bribe from the oil companies to get this condition removed. No local suppliers of biofuels the problem???? If that's true then removing any local market is NOT going to help. This gets my vote for surest sign of corruption in the new government.Finally Pharmac:
Sitting on a committee whose job it is to decide who will die and who will live is NOT a fun job.
Let me be really clear, Pharmac came to the conclusion that more people will die if they spent the money on 12 month Herceptin treatment than if they spent the money elsewhere.
Even IF it is true that longer treatment with Herceptin would save some lives, then the job of those poor people on that committee is to decide whether more people would live if they spent the money elsewhere.Do you really think they made that decision easily?
So by reversing Pharmac's informed considered decision this government is choosing to (maybe) save the lives of a few breast cancer sufferers and sacrifice the lives of... who??? We'll never know, statistics will hide us from the gory personal details.
I'm happy for those lives that will be saved from this treatment. I'm deeply saddened that more lives will be lost because of this treatment. And I'm not sure if I know what it must feel like for the folks on Pharmac, who using all their knowledge and experience tried to do the best for everyone involved and ended up being shafted by politics. One wonders why they would continue to do such a job.
cheers
Bart -
And just another question regarding the ETS.
Does someone know whether this is a well thought out scheme? I believe we need to do something but some things I've heard about it second hand suggest that while the idea is good the implementation of the ETS is not so good.
The example I heard was that if you had an hectare of forest (planted before 1990) you could never convert it to anything else eg high value dairy, without paying a huge cost. Even if you planted two hectares of forest elsewhere to replace the one you converted.
I could try and read the act myself but I was hoping for a TLDR version :).
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Re climate change
Can anyone point me to some data to refute this idea I heard from a friend that...
"predicted changes [in climate] for new Zealand would all be good for our agricultural and horticultural industries"I guess the thinking is if it gets warmer in NZ our crops will grow better. The question I have is "will it in fact get warmer or just get wilder?"
As for warm weather helping crops I can pretty much refute that on my own since yes you get better crop growth for some crops but you get lousy fruit set and likely also get more pest problems.
cheers
Bart -
BTW, where is Akl cricket going when they shut down the Outer Oval?
From the Annual report of Auckland Cricket
under the agreed design for the redevelopment of Eden Park, the Outer Oval will be retained as the home of our domestic cricket into the long term future, unless Auckland Cricket agrees otherwise
and
...for the 09/10 and 10/11 seasons...The interim venue we have chosen for our temporary relocation is University Oval at Merton Road