Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Sure, if your essay is on the history of Southern Brazil, you wouldn't want to be using the encyclopedia as your source but, if as part of an essay on the rise of the populist left in that region, you wanted to refer briefly to the war with Paraguay* then why not?
I honestly can't recall a single situation where I have ever contemplated referencing an encyclopedia in four years of uni. If the fact is important, someone somewhere will generally have written a paper/discussed it in a book; if the knowledge is that basic, i.e., "the war happened", then there's no point referencing it. That's not to say that you can't use an encyclopedia as a starting point, but by the time you're writing the essay, you should have better sources.
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anyone who quotes wikipedia as their primary source deserves to be mocked roundly and marked out of academia.
Pretty much, yeah, I just think the automatic fail is going a tad far.
But no-one should even be thinking about footnoting with Wikipedia, and especially not for history, seeing as 90% of the history articles are taken from the last out-of-copyright edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (approx. 1911) and are thus wrong, wrong, wrong.If you want something really shocking, I've had third-year papers with lab sessions on How To Use Databases. People are reaching the last year of their degree without working out how to use journal databases. It makes me cry.
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Getting students to realise that the internet is a public space (and also how to research without copypaste and wikipedia) is something we were told to work on all the time.
One of my uni lecturers has announced that using Wikipedia as a reference means you will automatically fail the assigment. On the one hand: kind of harsh. On the other: I can see where he's coming from.
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Then again, Finlay shouldn't throw stones when he strokes his column weekly in the Sunday Star Times -- aren't we about due for another 'The Dingo-Bank Ate My Lifestyle (And Forget That I Was A Total F**k-Wit To Get So Grossly Over-Extended In The First Place)' sob story? Or are we due another Bebo suicide cult non-story?
I wouldn't know, I stay as far away from the SST as humanly possible.
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Also, Russell, your last link (to the Herald) seems to be broken.
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"How You Too Can Stay in Shape and Keep Your Job in the Current Property Downturn (And what It Means for NCEA)"?
Or Finlay McDonald's classic "Does My Mortgage Look Fat In This?"
To be fair, North and South are the real whiners when it comes to education. If I see another "X Part Of Our Educational System Is Teh Suxxorz (And It's All Labour's Fault)" cover, I may be enticed into magazine-burning.
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It is weird talking about female health issues because it's not something thats been discussed much (by the hairy gender at least). Actually is this a health issue or just accepting there is biology that women have that men don't , a difference that almost certainly makes them the superior gender.
I knew the other half was a keeper when I asked him to pick up some pads for me at the supermarket and he said "sure, but you'll have to tell me what size."
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And why do you think thousands of women just have to eat this ridiculously overpriced expense merely because we have ladybits?
But the government supplies you with nearly-free hormonal contraception! It's not _their_ fault you choose to keep being icky once a month when you could be period-free (and ritually pure in several cultures, to boot!) year-round.
More seriously, this is actually a very sensible argument. I'd vote for it.
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But I do think, however, there's at least an argument about (say) bonding student teachers, doctors etc. to work in New Zealand for a period with the quid pro quo of (say) an additional lump sum in the form of additional student loan repayments.
They're already doing that to some extent with scholarships: teaching scholarships that require you to work as a teacher in NZ for three years, Bonded Merit scholarships which are targeted at getting the top 500 uni students to stay in NZ for as many years as they recieve the scholarship, that sort of thing. They could definitely extend the programme, though.
I can't actually understand why FHP as you call 'em aren't free. How is it a choice to consume such items?
Well, it is possible to get reusable cloth pads. They're just difficult to come by in NZ and involve a very, very large degree of ick-factor and extra effort - not more than cloth nappies vs. disposable nappies, realistically, but to the extent that most people are happier to spend $6-12 dollars a month (on average) on things they can chuck out.
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Just to play devil's advocate: so many of our most educated disappear overseas for want of opportunity or adequate remuneration. If we invest heavily in education, won't we just be funding a brains trust for the taxpayers of other countries (in the same way that we seem to be hoovering up medical graduates from 3rd world countries)?
Bingo. I'm going overseas for my PhD, and it's not because I can't get it here; it's because we only have two universities with decent programmes in my field of study, and neither has specialists in what I'm really interested in doing my thesis in. We're an agricultural country. That's awesome if your field of study relates to those areas, but we simply do not have the industry to support as many fields as people are interested in. Add that to better pay overseas, and people are always going to go away. The important thing is that, like Key, most of them come back - bringing their experience with them.
It worked in places like Korea and Vietnam, though, right?
Which are significantly closer to major markets. NZ's problem isn't just its size; it's the isolation. Ireland is in the EU, Korea and Vietnam border China. It takes a bit of working around.