Posts by dc_red
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Hard News: The Music for Occasions, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think you’ll need to have a full three-day tangi and make up playlists for each step of the way.
Genius
Plenty of time for one of those 17-min versions of "Stairway to Heaven"?
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"I've smoked too much" is awesome, but might lead to some unwanted speculation as to cause of death? Or, heck, wanted speculation!
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Caleb D'Anvers,
… this isn’t a “philosophy of education.” It’s a regime of quantification masquerading as a system of value. It’s part of the same long, slow cultural tragedy that sees managerialism eventually destroying the ethos and, well, point of every institution it invades
Well said!
And like any system of quantification it can be "gamed" - e.g., teaching to the test and exclusion of pupils unlikely to pass (in the case of national standards) or dividing work into the smallest possible units to increase the count of achievements (in the case of PBRF).
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Russell Brown,
A few years ago when Western Springs College was losing students to certain other schools – causing it to consider the known success strategy of imposing a school uniform
Ah yes, the conservative educational version of pandering to the lowest common denominator. Sprinkle illiberally with same-sex classrooms and you have the recipe for success.
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Russell Brown,
Does anyone recall much teaching-to-the-test in NZ high schools during the everything-depends-on-your-end-of-year exam era for School-C and Bursary?
I was 'lucky' enough to go through towards the end of that era when up to 30% of the final grade could be internally assessed ... although some subjects like English remained 100% final exam.
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Somewhat relevant personal anecdote:
Undertaking a Sunday tour of my new Dept., the day before the first day of my PhD program, a stressed-looking prof emerged from her office. After I briefly introduced myself, I received the following 'advice':
"Do you have any children? No? Good! Don't have any until you've finished your PhD and got tenure!"
Whereupon she retreated into her office.
Quite a lot for a young fella to take on board.
By-the-by, a colleague working as a Postdoc in a particularly technical and demanding area of experimental science in the US just informed me that a minimum of 5 years, and easily up to 10 years, of Postdoc experience are required in his field to be competitive for the few tenure-track positions that are still advertised.
That means you can easily be 40 by the time you land a potentially-permanent job and a real foothold in your chosen career. It's almost a bad joke.
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Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to Craig Young,
And they need to tackle one issue at a time- first medicinal cannabis, then possibly recreational cannabis, then a harm minimisation/risk reduction approach to E, and then perhaps a rigorous evidence-based full deconstruction of the Misuse of Drugs Act. However, Class A drugs should remain illegal due to their demonstrable harm.
I agree with the sentiment, but the assertion around the "demonstrable harm" of Class A drugs is a generalization at best, and misleading at worst.
The following have Class A status in NZ: Methamphetamine, Magic Mushrooms, Cocaine, Heroin, LSD
Comparing these with the harm rankings for 20 common drugs by Nutt et al. (2007) in the Lancet ("Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse") we find:
Heroin: 1st
Cocaine: 2ndMethamphetamine: 8th (ranking for amphetamines in general - behind alcohol in 5th)
LSD: 14th (behind both alcohol and tobacco)Shrooms: Not ranked
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cannabis offenders
A term that always struck me as inherently contradictory. For the life of me, I can't see the offence (other than in the most narrow legalistic terms).
As for the vile "wrong message to children" argument - although it's more on an excuse than an argument per se - well, we let adults do all sorts of things that we don't let children do: Drink. Drive. Marry. Enlist. Smoke Tobacco. Fornicate. Vote.
Hopefully not all at once mind you.
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Hard News: Strange days for journalism, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Reading further into the Monthly article, there seem to be uncanny anti-Federalist political parallels between Western Australia and the Canadian province of Alberta.
I'm not sure what if anything you base that on. Apart from a handful of cranks who still whine about the long-defunct National Energy Program (b. 1980 d. 1987) and curse the name Trudeau, there's no anti-Federalism here that I can detect.
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invest our resources smarter to get the best results
That's up there with children are important because they represent the future in meaningless waffle. Not acceptable from a novice undergraduate, let alone a government department.
Also, there's the implication that after more than 3 and half years of a National government, resources continue to be invested in ways that are not smart (i.e., dumb) and which yield sub-optimal (i.e., bad) results.