Hard News: All your Trade are belong to us
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I still remember at that age reading in the British "Look and Learn" magazine that Maori had used kiwi skins for shields. That was news to me, since I'd never seen these shields in the museum or even in pictures. More surprising was the next bit, which said that nowdays (1970's) kiwi skins were used to make shoes and bags...
The smart bastard who wrote that - or a close relative - is probably still active. About a year ago the Wikipedia page on wetas claimed that the Maori made a form of container or carry-bag from the skin of the giant weta. There was even a special hot pool at Whakarewarewa where the skins were boiled and cured. It was up for at least a few weeks before the Wikiweta squad dealt to it.
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Craig, you should enjoy this. Today's Michael Laws outrage:
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Craig, you should enjoy this. Today's Michael Laws outrage
Oy... Memo to Hizzhonor: When Tariana Turia is bring the six pack of sanity to the party, it is time to go home, lie down in a dark room with a wet tea towel over your eyes and rest.
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Joe: here's a primary source! From a University of Auckland faculty member, no less.
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Craig, you should enjoy this. Today's Michael Laws outrage:
For a history graduate, Laws has a pretty short term perspective. Wanganui was a lot browner 150 years ago than it is now.
And he's a git.
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Joe: here's a primary source! From a University of Auckland faculty member, no less.
Oh far out! Pity I can't see the pictures though.
I did check out Peter Gutmann's CV (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/), but there's no mention of his ever having worked for Look and Learn,. -
hmmph. If that's what counts as a primary source these days, students should be instructed to use Wikipedia and nothing but.
(and to be fair, 'Look and Learn' also informed me that Maori had cannibalistic tendencies, which was clearly preposterous because my teachers and Weetbix cards had never mentioned such a juicy fact. Gotta love those PC-gone-mad '70s).
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The Worlds Strangest Bird
Nah. That's Bjork.
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That "Look & Learn" thing reminds me of the classic "do they have supermarkets in New Zealand?" question on Usenet. It seems to have sadly disappeared from the net but went something like:
Q: Do they have supermarkets like Coles and so on in New Zealand?
A: Sadly not. It is illegal to eat any food that you haven't hunted and killed yourself - followed by ritual cleansing in the juice of the Kiwifruit. -
the unfortunate result was that I found myself having to assume that a student unable to string three sentences together might in fact be making a coherent argument, whereas those who wrote well enough to let it transpire that they had in fact no idea what they were on about didn't get such benefit of the doubt.
Exactly! very well put. My viewpoint when marking essays was that I cannot read the candidate's intentions, only what is on the page. Once you start trying to figure out what they 'might' mean you are on a slippery slope trying to read people's minds. Either that or you may as well just go and read Derrida.
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As for making conventional coherent arguments; we are talking about communicating knowledge linearly. I suggest that explaining things in essays has significant limitations, constructing arguments as a series of points lined up one after the other could be seen as inefficient.
I'd agree is not the only way to exhange ideas, nor always the most compelling, but it's pretty darn useful, and I think it has a place in academia. Besides, Russell here - who if memory serves didn't finish his degree - is an absolutely brilliant essayist, the place is literally built on that particular skill of his. Can't be a bad thing to teach and to expect students to learn. But I agree that it shouldn't be an exclusive focus, even in the study of philosophy or English - there are other media out there that could be brought to bear.
In the first year of my dissertation I toyed with the idea of writing the thing as a hypertext consisting of three main chunks in a non linear squence, since the topic lent itself to it. My supervisors were definitely in favour, but we quickly figured out it just couldn't be done, the rules wouldn't allow it.
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While the thread seems to have wandered somewhat, I was interested in Russell's post, because it raised some issues I'd been mulling over ever since a box of discovery documents relating to the Nia Glassie homicide was found in an Auckland landfill. I think both cases highlight a hole in the law.
The police, lawyers, and organisations such as TradeMe and banks (who are often required to provide information to police, usually under a search warrant) are all subject to the Privacy Act. The Act does allow information to be disclosed to the police for an investigation (as TradeMe rightly pointed out in its email). While TradeMe only has to disclose information it thinks is reasonably necessary to avoid prejudice to the maintenance of the law, I think they'd be covered if they disclosed information in accordance with a search warrant, even if that search warrant was framed pretty broadly.
I don't think the problem is so much at the front end of disclosure, given the procedural protections around the granting of search warrants. The main problem seems to be about what happens to the information once it is discovered.
Defence lawyers who receive discovery documents are subject to the Privacy Act, which means that they have an obligation to dispose of the documents securely once the documents are no longer required. There is a civil enforcement mechanism - investigation by the Privacy Commissioner - if the obligation is breached.
However, you and I are not subject to the Privacy Act, and nor is Jamie Lockett. We all have the right to represent ourselves in criminal trials. Even where we have a lawyer, I imagine it's pretty unusual for a lawyer not to show us the discovery documents if we want to see them. But because we are not subject to the Privacy Act, there's nothing to require us to dispose of discovery documents securely (as opposed to dumping them at the landfill), and there's nothing to stop us using the information for purposes unrelated to the trial (eg posting people's TradeMe details on the internet).
It seems pretty ironic that the ultimate fate of discovery documents rests with whether or not there's a defence lawyer in the picture.
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if anything I think that academic writing style isn't pushed enough.
And thank [deity] for that. Academic writing is bollocks. Other than having to crash-relearn elementary algebra (lost in a fog of traumatic amnesia a decade prior to starting my degree) in order to complete my mandatory stage one economics papers, the biggest challenge I've faced at uni has been academic writing. Not because I can't construct a coherent sentence to explain an idea, because I can, but because it is so far divorced from reality as to be a totally different language. In one job interview, when asked what the biggest challenge at university had been, I actually said "academic english".
If you're fresh out of high school and thoroughly unschooled in writing for "the real world"[tm], then I'm sure it's a piece of cake. But you're in for a hell of a shock once you get out of the rarefied atmosphere of tertiary education and enter the real world. Or if, like me, you've spent some time working, and writing real-world documents, before you go to university, you're in for a hell of a shock as you try and unlearn everything you thought you knew about writing. Forget thinking for yourself. Forget calling on your past experiences. Such things are strengst verboten.
If one has no intention of leaving academia, then I'm sure that academic writing is a wonderful thing to learn and exercise. For the rest of us it's a load of shit. I can say with utter certainty that academic writing will not help me one jot after I graduate. It barely helps me now, and I'm still a student. The only thing it's good for is ensuring that students don't dare exercise their minds. It certainly doesn't help them with their spelling and grammar, as witnessed by other comments on what markers see/do. That shouldn't be a tertiary institution's job, to be sure, but students who lack even rudimentary literacy tools shouldn't be allowed to pass. Until that changes, there's no incentive for the lower levels of education to pick up their game.
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Matthew the reason why academic writing is different from what you define as 'real world' writing is that in academia being completely open about the subject and your sources is the whole bleeding point. Whereas in commercial life often the point is the exact opposite, you want to emphasise the positive and downplay the negative or vice versa.
In writing an academic paper you are required to spend time picking apart your own arguments and pointing out their weaknesses. Failure to do so will cause the referees to send it back until you do.
This is also why people in the 'real world' often complain that academic's minds are so open, their brains have fallen out. It is a failure of cultures to appreciate the other's needs.
To put it bluntly acadmics care about the truth whereas wider human society is all about controlling what information you show to others while trying to find out all you can about them.
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Matthew, I'm assuming you're doing a Bachelor's degree, in which case you're right - independent thought is generally not allowed, since at that level, you're supposed to be showing that you can research a subject and understand what you've learned. At Master's level and further on you get to start making your own points(although everything you say has to be carefully backed up, of course).
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