Posts by Steve Reeves
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When Kate Wilkinson said
“Ultimately, the employer must make arrangements to pay for the doctor’s visit. "
I took that to mean the employer paid for a doctor to visit you at home and examine you and issue a certificate (if appropriate). I.e. I took "the doctor's visit" to mean "visit of the doctor".
Did she not mean that?
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I wonder if companies choosing not to use this law, i.e. not taking-up a 90 right to fire at will, will become a point of difference once the employment rate picks-up?
I think, if I had the opportunity, I'd shop around employers to see who did and did not have this on offer. And I might, if I were an employer in a tight market, parade my non-use as a reason to work for me.
Though a large pool of unemployed people does seem to go hand-in-hand with the current government's (and those like them) philosophy on how to run a country, so this might be a moot point.
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Bart, I agree.
My point is that if you fail at the first round you have no idea if your proposal was viewed as brilliant, good, rubbish, science fiction or what. In such an environment, how is improvement possible?
If you fail this year, how do you know what to do next: put in the same thing (assuming it was viewed as brilliant, but the money ran out)?; change it---then how?---you might make it worse rather than better, but in the absence of feedback, how would you know which direction to move in?
So, you may as well flip a coin---hence, the caricature of a lottery.
The way things were done in the UK when I got grants there was the opposite---perhaps things that did not "deserve" it got funded, but one of the big names in UK science was able to proudly tell me that we fund all the good science and don't miss anything, at the expense of perhaps funding some things that aren't worth it.
Here we seem to fund a few of the good things but are so afraid of funding bad ideas that we are content to miss good ones too. And apart from all those missed opportunities, it is hugely demoralising and makes science in NZ a very, very precarious thing to go into---none of which can be good for the country, surely?
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James, I agree.
In fact, everyone I meet and talk about Marsden with agrees that it is, in fact, just a lottery.
The trouble is, it sells itself as a sensible, defendable, reputable way to dole out public money for science.
So I guess the problem is the mismatch between what it tells us it is (mainly, I suppose, for the politicians' benefit, so they don't look too closely) and what we actually see---a lottery pretending to be a science system.
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Thanks for the summary, Bart.
I agree we just need to fund all the good science we can---and some of it---10% seems to be a figure that emerges from international experience over decades---will go on to make loads of money.
The rest, of course, will merely increase knowledge, educate more people better (by being a part of great teams, for example) and give NZ some standing in the science world (rather than being the cargo-cult we sometimes seem to be currently). All of this, I realise, is a waste of money :-)
I also agree with the point about putting more into Marsden. That is where we REALLY need the people (and therefore the money). But, some of the increased (in my dream-world) Marsden funding should be used to run it in a transparent and morally defendable way. Currently, it runs in two "rounds".
In the first round you write a page or two describing your idea, the team and why it needs funding. This gets looked at by a panel of our peers, selected by the fund. In the panels I've submitted to, there has only ever been one person remotely in my area, and NEVER anyone who is actually expert or an enthusiast for my area.
Each panel member (reports-back tell us) spends a few seconds or minutes on each application (the workload is so high). Then, a meeting of the panel is held, and applications get either selected or not. All this gets manipulated and scaled in ways I don't understand, to come up with final invitations to apply with a full application, or not. Full applications are long documents and get reviewed by experts.
Now, here's the worst bit---if you do not get through this round you get NO feedback (just a one liner saying sorry). So, from year to year there is no way of knowing if your idea is mad, bad or simply misunderstood. How a science system can work without the most primitive of feedback mechanisms, I fail to see.
So, tens of millions a year get distributed by a system which, at its first stage, is totally opaque. No accountability, no opportunity to learn from mistakes, no "improvement mechanisms".
If one enquires or complains, the only response, essentially, is: "we can't afford the cost of doing it better"!
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@Sacha You mean...Bryan Dawe and John Clarke...?????
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Perhaps there was a subtle (??) republican message being sent. Diplomats talk a different language, y'know.
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Vegan pizza---a real Neapolitan classic called Marinara--simple and really tasty. The best pizza I've ever had (though it was in Rome :-) ).
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"Brutus is an honourable man."
Using only complimentary words to get someone condemned---not quite what was asked for above, but nice all the same. A good example of causing offence using only compliments?
Certainly good telly!
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That clip does make NZ look very...monocultural...was it like that then?
And that end message did seem to say: if you're white, it's all yours...and so if you're not already there, go and claim your piece of it (before.....)