Posts by Kyle Matthews
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while also upholding the marriages that happened in the interim
Which will be known in the future as 'the gay window'? How bizarre.
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Because the people making the decisions, usually suit wearing middle managers, are too lazy to use their brains. Or simply don't actually have functioning brains. Or are keen to stamp their mark on an organisation by changing previous decisions.
That's a terrible generalisation. My workplace is one of the largest purchasers of IT and software in the country, and our software purchasing decisions come from departments and their IT support staff. I wouldn't switch all my academics over to an open source alternative because it would be my biggest nightmare from hell. It's difficult enough to train a Professor to use Word let alone do it, and then teach them to do it all again in a different software package.
We get incredibly cheap pricing on microsoft products, the financial benefits of us switching to OSS would be negative.
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This stupid law makes it a lot more difficult to get someone like Mason to modify their behaviour to a behaviour that is acceptable to 80% of parents.
Christ. Good parenting isn't a democracy. Just because some proportion of the population think that something is good parenting, doesn't make it so.
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Or the day when someone gives her a F1 car and she gets to kick Jenson Button in the nuts
A pair of steel-toed boots would be cheaper, surely.
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I'm not sure if people in Wellington would be too impressed. Y'know, if you care ;)
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One of my main concerns is due process of law. I believe a judge or a judge and jury should decide if someone breaks a law that carries a penalty of two years imprisonment. This should not be left to the whim or ideological beliefs of an individual police officer.
No doubt you'll be rushing around the country's rugby fields on Saturdays and taking copious notes of the occasional punch that players throw, and then taking them directly to the authorities.
When, no doubt, the police will tell you to stop wasting their time.
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Um, I think you'll find that the Herald article was quoting the Otago Uni psychologist as saying that not one of the thousands of international studies was inconsistent with this study's findings
Probably not this research which Russell raised in 2007, by the Children's Issues Centre at the University of Otago:
A research team from the Children’s Issues Centre recently reviewed research on the guidance and discipline of children (Smith et al. 2005). This paper summarises and updates a section of that report. The research suggests that physical punishment is both ineffective and harmful as a method of disciplining children. This paper provides both an overview and specific examples of recent research on physical punishment relating to the following topics: social, cognitive and mental health; moral internalisation and family relationship outcomes; and the interactions with culture and ethnicity.
Not-with-standing this 'your research isn't as good as my research', find me someone who's doing research on whether a light smack is harmful to women by their partner. Like Emma is sick of justifying why same sex partners should be able to get married, I'm sick of having to justify why children shouldn't have the same rights not to be hit as adults.
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<quote>Borrowing one of David Bain's jumpers wasn't the best idea either.</quote.
Hehe! That was the first thing my girlfriend said as well.
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Close Up is going to have a story on the disruption. Not that I hold out much hope for some penetrating analysis.
That really was a complete waste of ten minutes of my life. Paul Henry was predictably awful. But the get across spokesman didn't seem very well prepared - the first question 'what gives you the right to break the law and disrupt people's days' wasn't dealt with well at all.
This was a very middle class walk over the bridge. VERY middle class. The chance of madness such as you describe was limited.
Given that apparently the protest organisers couldn't stop the people from going onto the bridge, their ability to stop them doing something stupid while on it = about nil.
Relying on 100% good behaviour 100% of the time from a bunch of people that you've got riled up as part of your protest will only work 99% of the time at best.
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Despite my years in student politics etc I've never been arrested or even cautioned.
Clearly you weren't doing it right. Twice. Twice I tell you!
There's also the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study.
People wave that around a lot. There's some things to be aware of in relation to this study:
1. It's self-reporting. The subjects are interviewed regularly and asked questions, about which they answer honestly (we hope). Are you using drugs, do you do this, have this ever happened to you etc. It's not the same as 'smacking led to the same outcomes', it's 'their/their parents memories of whether or not they were smacked as children led to these answers about their later life'. Cue all sorts of research about memory and the way people answer questions about their past and their current life.
2. The researchers aren't experts in this field. It's an incredibly broad study and no doubt will provide lots of useful early pointers for further research but they're not experts in child development, behaviour, health etc.
3. The same university has a children's issues center. Their research contradicts this finding. As far as I know they're not involved in this research by the multidisciplinary unit at all.
4. As the Herald story says, this research 'refutes' thousands of international studies. Which is interesting, but doesn't make it correct. It's quite likely that its methodology means that its not correct, and the thousands of other studies are correct. Or something in between the two.