Posts by Bart Janssen
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
but it's a bloody tough sell to Treasury. And, if anything goes wrong, to a news media only too happy to make an issue of it.
and
Well, it should be a bloody tough sell to everyone. I'm sorry if this makes me the in-house philistine, but no matter how you cut it, film and television production is enormously speculative and I'm not inclined to sneer at anyone who finds that a much harder sell that putting money into a new surgical suite at their local hospital.
Nope that doesn't make you a philistine. But the real question is not if it should be a hard sell, the real question is which funding model produces better results.
My experience of treasury (limited and removed) is that despite banging on incessantly about accountability they are extremely reluctant to answer the question "does their funding model work".
All too often treasury have enforced changes with the mantra of accountability but eschewed any responsibility for long term results. Not surprising since most of them think 5 years is a long time in a job.
I wouldn't care if all the accountability actually produced better results but very often all it does is produce endless freaking reports and milestone summaries. The actual aim of the funding seems to be irrelevant to treasury so long as they get their reports and can fill in their spreadsheets.
What Jackson is saying (I think) is that educated and experienced people with hunches work better than open transparent accountable scorable funding systems for the creative art of the film industry. That's something I can believe.
That may not sit well with MBA graduates in treasury but if it is real then logic dictates that any money we spend on our culture (or science or medicine) be spent in the way that produces the best results, long term.
-
Basketball is also a non-contact sport just like netball. Theoretically the players commit a foul every time they touch. Theoretically the pushing and shoving to get position around the key is all cheating. Yet nobody who plays or knows basketball would remotely call it cheating. Sometimes it gets called as a foul and usually then the discussion is about how the ref ruined the game's flow.
I remember being amazed to discover that most of top level yachting was about forcing the opposition to commit a penalty offense. I thought it was about sailing your boat really well and knowing what the wind will do, but no, apparently for those familiar with the sport it really isn't.
For those familiar with rugby what McCaw does around the rucks is normal, but for those watching with an unfamiliar eye he is a cheat (and also for those who hate Canterbury).
Same here I think. For those really familiar with football a defender committing a foul to stop a goal is normal and expected. It is against the rules and that's why it is a foul and a red card one at that.
-
Seems to me that like most govt funding bodies the NZFC suffers from failure of imagination, hence the bias towards safe commercial rather than new novel and innovative. And combines that with fear of failure, which again pushes funding towards safe and commercial. And worse when failure occurs, as it will, then then funding body over-reacts.
I'm not sure whether those two things (failure of imagination and fear of failure) are a result of being government bureaucrats with government restrictions or whether that a general kiwi trait, part of our culture.
I doubt it's really the fault of the individual people in the NZFC who almost certainly are doing that job because they love the industry. But it's more likely a result of performance indicators and a kind of business mentality that is common to anything that the accountants in treasury fund.
-
Good grief guys in a sport where diving is an art form and a totally accepted and normal party of the game - you are outraged or even surprised at a handball that saved a goal?
An instant red card in the last minute of the game to save a certain goal. You see defenders make that decision all the time in football and nobody thinks about it for a second. That's what defenders are for, to stop the striker at whatever cost is appropriate at the time. The best defenders are those that can make the appropriate cost benefit judgements for the situation.
My guess is if he hadn't stopped the ball his coach would have given him a bollocking.
-
Do those machines use permanent magnets or do they just leave them powered up for some reason?
I thought they were all electromagnets, probably superconducting and supercooled. I think the reason they are left running is they need to be tuned or something like that in order to get good quality scans. Since that tuning takes a lot of time it's more efficient to simply leave them running.
-
because that would create a problem that ,well I can't actually define the problem at the moment
You guys (and Emma of course) a making fun of this and it's damn serious. If websites are used the way they were intended the end result would be the wanton (thinking of you when I say this Emma) dissemination of knowledge.
Good grief, it's a slippery slope to having people building entire websites dedicated to spreading knowledge. If that sort of thing spread to local government or even worse national government people might discover what their representatives are doing!
-
Just thought I'd mention that I've had surgery on both knees, both ankles, and a hernia surgery. All of which went brilliantly and made my life much more pleasant than before. They do get it right sometimes :).
-
medical technology will advance to the point where they can be done with a hand-held salt-shaker thingy
I always remember the bit in Star Trek IV where McCoy is wandering through the hospital
McCoy: My God, man. Drilling holes in his head isn't the answer.
Makes me very aware of the things we think are advanced now and how they might be viewed in a few decades.
Glad to hear your brain is normal.
-
And I do think we risk ...strange catastrophes...by playing with things we dont know enough about.
Of course we don't know everything. Of course we will be continually surprised and amazed by the world. At least we will until we are dead.
Do we risk strange catastrophes - hell yeah. Every day I do things that may create some unheard of unthought of combination of genes and environment that may end civilisation. No really I do.
But like all discussions of risk there are two parts, first is how likely is the risk. The risk of a strange catastrophe from what I do day to day is miniscule. With 40 years of "playing" we haven't seen anything remotely like a strange catastrophe with my day to day work or the day to day work of thousands of scientists doing the same stuff as me. So we accept that the risk is so small as to be irrelevant.
So how big is the risk from GM crops? That's a little harder. We only have 15 years of crops in the field and only 25 years of modified plants in the lab. And fewer people working with them so less data. But based on what we've observed so far and based on everything we can realistically think of ... the risk of strange catastrophe is also miniscule.
Some argue that the nature of the imagined catastrophe is so unrecoverable that even miniscule is too great. That's a much harder thing to discuss because it's easy to imagine truly catastrophic scenarios. People have come up with world ending scenarios and even the more reasonable environmental disasters proposed are scary. It doesn't take much knowledge to go around scaring the pants off people. But are those scenarios realistic or just scary stories? My opinion of them is pretty obvious.
But there is a second part of the risk discussion that gets much less air time. And that is the benefit. We all make risk/benefit decisions every day. Did the person going through the door ahead of me have flu and leave viruses behind balanced versus the benefit of staying inside outside in the cold? Is your child going to become an evil genius? Is your 4-wheel driving going to spin out of control and kill everyone at the bus stop?
The people presenting disaster scenarios are smart enough to also present utopia scenarios. But they don't.
The reality of the last 15 years is that the very best predictions for the GM crops have been wildly exceeded. At the same time all the disaster scenarios failed to eventuate, no mass poisonings, no bee deaths , no monarch butterfly deaths, no allergic reactions. Those putative disasters were worth watching out for but were not real. The same uncertainty that Dyan is emphasising exists on the good side of the equation. The same unknowns that make it possible for GM salmon to wipe out some other important creature could just as easily result in the restoration of the north atlantic cod.
Saying "but we don't know enough to be certain" is not a reason to stop and do nothing. It's a reason to sit down and balance risk versus benefit. And most importantly it's a reason to keep monitoring.
That last bit deserves a paragraph of it's own.
I absolutely believe we must continue to monitor these new crops over periods of decades. Disasters occur when we look away and stop monitoring. That is part of reasonable oversight.
But I also absolutely believe that the benefits demonstrated by and the benefits predicted for GM crops are so great that we must embrace the risks and take the opportunity to make progress. We have a very real chance to change the world for the better and I think it's wrong and indeed that it does harm to stand still and do nothing.
-
Um, does Helen Anderson (until recently) being head of MoRST - the lead agency - count?
Of course. But look at the CEOs of the CRIs and then look at their SETs and then look at the next tier of decision makers. All heavily male dominated and some exclusively male.
I'm sure there are very good reasons why each of them were chosen. I'm sure there is no conscious bias at all.
I'm sure I'll win lotto.