I'm so late to this discussion, I can't add much except to say that in the last National Government, the then Minister for Tertiary Education, Wyatt Creech, told them that's exactly what they should…

Basically, if we don't get high levels of investment…

Or should that be razor wires, concrete walls and Uzi-toting mooks?

Which brings us back to duh

And it makes sense to target our investment for maximum…

Don't be silly, ants don't have any money.
But wait, perhaps with more subsidies for farming we could send sheep to university.

Not particularly. Finland requires a Master's degree to become a teacher, and their education system really is the OECD's pinnacle of perfection. I would say that this is a worthy step on the way to being…

Given this is a hatchet job by the new Treasury big cheese, I suspect…

noice

;-)

antediloovial….
Adamant
Pretty sure I used to micturate on him….

more of a conviction than an opinion…
I thought that piece needed to be aired
because it shows…

Ain't that the truth

That was kinda me too, so you are down with this girl. Actually, Adamanty matter, with a wig and a hat Ben....... ;)

Selling this kind of policy to middle New Zealand, he has to omit the fact that At least 20% of international students gain permanent residence within 5 years of their first student permit welcomed…

Kind of. I was actually responding, as can be seen in the original comment that I quoted, to:

either you let scientists who have had the experience of working with brilliant people make the choice on who should get funding or…

garden anty-intellectual

Adamant!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7NyE8o5fxk&feature=related

Looks like Joyce is finally getting some use out of his (free?) Zoology degree

Joyce ups the anty? (the opposite of an anty depressant)
Does that make him an agony ant? Or perhaps an ant-agonist?

:)) I don't think he was meant to be arguing. Sometimes it just gets that way with a difference of opinion.

Yes, I realise that. I'm just trying to understand what he's arguing.

He said it 3 pages back.

I said here:

Another option is that many people can have input into the decision, including the shop floor scientists, the scientists who are somewhere up the chain towards management, the specialist managers, and the people who have to pay for it all decide. Also, the…

Quite. I'd ask everyone to relax a bit, please. Challenge ideas rather than attacking people.

Nope. University of Otago Site Act 1875 and Auckland University College Land Act 1908 (mentioning the AUC Land Exchange Act 1892) show that there were discrete universities by the start of last century.

There was apparently a shake-up…

Like that. Didn't it start that way until mid last century?

I have an Arts degree from Canty and a BDes from CPIT. When I started the BDes it had just become a degree programme and there was a strong feeling in the department that we had something…

It’s also through loans that National…

A "University of New Zealand" has been suggested several times. With campuses at various sites. The idea is that it would foster collaboration rather than competition.

The reverse…

Much the case in remote parts of NZ too. Many roads up north have no power. Unless one can afford solar, the cost to get power to the…

Not entirely, U-boats spent most of their time on the surface but because of their low profile, radar, particularly at the time, would have struggled.

There could be, yes, but as I know you're someone who supports the "compact city" vision for Auckland you'll be familiar with the "agglomeration benefits"…

Seems related to agency theory, a core tenet of neololiberalism that public servants can't be trusted. Infested this country during the 1990s funder-provider pseudo-corporatisation of our public agencies.

Still needs to be properly replaced by a…

Ha!

University of Auckland
Domestic student fees for one year of a BA: $5666.40.
Government subsidy for one year of a BA: $6014.00
For an arts degree, the ratio's not 25:75, but 49:51.

LLB…

In the late 1990s Lord Dearing posited that there was a quantum of population required to generate a world class university – I think it was about 4 million people. On that basis New Zealand could perhaps have reasonable aspirations to have one world…

But surely we most need the views of people who actually work in a field to give us the benefit of their skills and experience?? You seem to assume that these brilliant and dedicated folk are…

Sounds all too familiar.

And it’s not just teachers either – I wonder if they think water cannons would be a 'worthy investment'?

Please remember there are actual people in this discussion who fit that categorisation, and are understandably likely to take such statements as personal attacks. Not helpful.

I didn’t see the bit where he asked for more money. Could you point it out? Oh, he doesn’t…

So we should only countenance the arguments of people who have no direct experience in the field in question? That’s an odd argument.

Presumably, then, we should ignore anything teachers…

I may disagree with you about free markets, Keir, but on this, I agree with you. No matter what political system you're…

Maybe it does, but because it's Tim Hazeldine (who I rate highly as a lecturer) saying it I'm not prepared to just dismiss it as more of…

In UK they have an artificial 'points' system where universities are ranked by the grades of the students they attract, and the higher ranked ones are assumed to be 'better'. (Often,…

Now that, surprises me because it is all about measurement, no?
It reminds me why I found “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance” so annoying. It goes on about the qualities of the word quality without accepting that quality…

Look. the thing is, I don't give a…

And Tim Hazeldine of the UoA biz school makes the case for quality over quantity at NZ’s universities.…

The Handsome Family – Tesla's Hotel Room:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPyil7_V0_M

Made my day.

It strikes me that he's precisely the kind of brilliant individual who achieves what a building full of common-or-garden smart people could not.

Anyway, it's a great read:

The Oatmeal on Tesla.

Oddly enough, it leaves out the breakthrough I…

Applause

Both I and Lucy have answered that to the best of our ability. You dismiss our examples as pointless anecdotes and then are offended when I object to you dismissing the examples. What I have described is my personal experience…

(i) people who are able to “think differently” enough to identify previously unrecognised false assumptions are able to act as catalysts, speeding up (unfortunately, to an unpredictable,…

The labour market doesn't seem to work that…

But yes, the fees paid are roughly half of what the government contributes per student. But that’s a…

Trying to define value only by what you can measure is the usual flaw…

You think wrong. I'm arguing against something far more specific – your point about attracting…

Oh and BTW Darwin’s contribution wasn’t a Theory of evolution it was the Theory of natural selection.

Thank you Bart.

teeworthy

This is the bit that is causing difficulty. I, and I believe Lucy as well, am saying that there is more than just a quantitative difference at the top end, it's a qualitative difference in ability. In my experience those people can never be replaced by any…

Read your response to Lucy on page 4 Ben.

LET US TURN NOW to the celebration of scientific rigor. Individual sciences develop rules and standards for appraising evidence—as they learn about aspects of nature, they learn more about how to learn. At any particular stage of inquiry, communities of scientists agree on the canons of good inference, so that…

No, I didn't and I've answered this criticism, whereas you're just reiterating your last post and now inventing positions for me. You're not engaging. Good day, sir.

Well, what else do we have? And if someone found something better, that would just become the new thing we called science. It must be able to evolve, or it could go into a long…

Yes you did. Lucy and I have presented examples which you have simply dismissed as either luck or sexism. We presented the examples as instances where a person of exceptional ability made a change in the field that few were able to understand. And you ignore…

I still rate the guy extremely highly. For starters, his writing is highly accessible, and that's a sign of brilliance to me, when someone can explain a very sophisticated idea without very much jargon. Falsificationism…

I'm not sure whether you're speaking of one or two argument lines in this thread, or just making a general comment. I didn't "dismiss" anything, I responded to an argument…

Disclosure /…

Lucy, I have a postgraduate diploma in science myself,…

Also: countries with large financial…

And for the ultimate in irony, remember the much-touted Wall Street of the South Pacific? Treasury and MED have called bullshit because…

Are you sure about that. If scientists in the DSIR had listened to market signals there would have been no kiwifruit industry in NZ.

Markets forces can only tell you…

Ah so that's the problem. OK…

more like angrily deny :)

The other thing that the Chinese system (for all its many faults) is beginning to get really right is devoting resources to ameliorating the threat of climate change. Indeed, climate change is…

And when we present you with examples you dismiss them as luck or sexism. Sorry Ben but that isn't productive.

Here's an example you should read Barabr McClintock discovered transposable elements. Bits of DNA that could move within the genome and change…

hmmm two days late. I wouldn't normally bother arguing this with you Ben but to me it's one of the serious flaws in kiwi culture. You say we overate talent, I say we overate the mediocre and call it egalitarianism. You're right…

And they sent huge numbers of them to be trained *in* those Western systems – notably, US…

Citing the internet is hardly cherry-picking. It's so important that it counterbalances any number of losing bets.

Interestingly, TCP/IP caught on it part because Cerf, Postel, etc were able to force adoption via their control of public research funding. If…

I don't know if the presence of phylogeneticists in 1912 would disprove evolution, but I imagine it might cause physicists some concerns.

And you dismissed it as “cherry-picking” when Ben cited the internet!

And that is solely in New Zealand, a traditionally free market economy.

Anything but. New Zealand in the…

Just a couple of points.
(1) If you're going to go down a Popperian / falsificationism route, then famously, evolution could be disproved by fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
(2) You…

I never at any point said that there should be no markets. By the "refuted economic theory"…

That's the kind of flawed thinking behind the myth of the man-hour -…

One interesting aspect of the Motunui synthetic fuels plant, part of Think Big, is that when they turned it on in 1985 or so, it immediately halved NZ's balance of payments deficit due…

Think Big, of course, was a major cause of…

Yup all those people at NASA are crackpots...

Of course, it is very easy to point to examples of misguided government investment. Think Big, for instance.

Which gave us…

You'll use the fact that it was not selected for as evidence that it was not clearly advantageous, so that's not going to work. No matter what advantage I could think of that has occurred occasionally…

How to disprove evolution: find a situation where a trait is clearly advantageous but is not selected for (c.f. the Galapagos finches, if beak distribution did not change during droughts even though…

Of course,…

I don't see why. Bart wants what he does to have the best chances it can get and that's admirable. My question about the true necessity of extreme talent is genuine, but I do not question that…

Ben, whether you intended it or not, that is *so* fucking patronising mate- a humble…

Considering the magnitude of the examples, they're part of the argument. Especially since you made the blanket claim that they couldn't pick winners. That's tosh, admit it. The information revolution is based on massive government investment. One possible future of…

The way you are using this public interest thing seems amorphous and ill-defined. I would like a lot more definition before I relied on it for any policy decisions.

If economics can't take public interest into account when talking about state-subsidised education, then it doesn't seem all that useful.

A functioning economy and society needs both lawyers and software engineers, sure.

Only if you believe that market is functioning properly. Where's the return on our broader public interest from having truckloads of BCom and LLB grads?

I referred to deifying the A-grade scientists, as if they brought something that couldn't be…

In particular, war-driven advances in technology are one of the worst advertisements for government investment in technology ever.

Of course, space is not a particularly non-commercial environment, and (hardly surprisingly) there are a crazy number of crazy US space fanatic…

To steal a phrase from our host, Duh! The student allowance's existence is entirely predicated on paying your living costs. It's…

No, it's not. That would just mean that the human species is older than we think. Maybe it came from another planet. That does not refute evolution. Nor is that…

Anyway you want to make things scientific by popperian falsification-ism, and that's a rubbish game, so let's not play it.

Certainly, and speaking the lingua franca also helps, if Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had only been British....

Cool. What experiment could potentially disprove evolution?

Let me be clear. I'm not disputing evolution is true. I'm disputing whether it is a scientific theory. To many appearances, it is a tautology. Which means it is certainly true, but immune to disproof…

I always love the quote:…

The problem with the government picking winners is that the government just doesn't have that much knowledge about the skills required in the economy. So it is all very well to say we need more tradespeople, but (a) the market should correct that…

1) Yes. 2) Yes. That's....really not in dispute. There is a lot of very fine work qualitatively testing evolution. Lemski's E. coli stuff is one of the more beautiful examples, or the…

We don't all have it, but suggesting it can't be more widely learned is, IMHO, false. There are a lot…

But it's not usually "a little more time", it's "a…

The theory of evolution was synthesised from a growing body of evidence and ideas, and someone was going to come up with it sooner or later – modern biology is impossible without it. This is evidenced by the fact that, in fact, two…

Could you give me an example? Some breakthrough that you have personally actually witnessed happening at the hands of a real live genius that you couldn't imagine having been stumbled across by…

That's still rather high given his pedigree:

"Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too…

Doesn't work like that. If you're getting the student allowance you're not allowed to draw down living costs on your student loan.

It is consistent with the current govt's ideology to make sure most resource of any kind goes to those who already have more of it. The theory is that it's more effective for society to invest in the already-successful. These folk…

The current student allowance system has merely played catch-up from its first incarnation in 1992 – for years it wasn't inflation adjusted, and the Clark Govt did address that somewhat. Also, students are far less likely to resist means-testing than pensioners.

And I can…

Not saying that the B graders aren't valuable. I'm one myself so I bloody well hope I'm valuable.

But I am saying that genuine A graders are special. I've worked next to a couple of A graders. And they make connections and leaps that no…

It really worries me sometimes when I get comments from people who are impressed because I can do well in a (microbiology) genetics class while…

Also you are factually wrong, lawyers and engineers get roughly comparable pay, and training engineers gets a far larger government subsidy than training lawyers.…

I have no doubt of that. Charles Darwin rated himself as…

This is something that is always tricky to talk about because it treads on people's sensitivities. But nobody has a problem with the idea that Dan Carter is special, genuinely gifted. It doesn't matter how many hours a club rugby player practices they will never be able…

Yes and no. There are a few…

As I understand it, foreign courts will enforce debts and contracts, but they won't enable a country to impose arbitrary taxes on its former residents. (So if the UK decided it wanted to make me…

I do wonder if half of the problem is because one's chances of making a significant breakthrough in science these days are pretty small.…

Unless, like one of the younger members of my whanau, they have a parent who is a GP!
That person has an excellent intellect,…

I know James. Some of my best friends are ... really I have a friend who has a PhD in international conflict law. To be fair it is…

From the perspective of trying to hire post-docs, nope. But bear in mind we pay crap. Really good post-docs go overseas where they can both do better research and get paid…

Medicine isn't science, at least not the way we mean it. Mostly talking about research level science, where you try and discover something new or figure out how to apply a discovery to a new situation.

In fact medicine is a perfect example of the problem…