Posts by Bart Janssen
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it's the mental health stats that'll be the added joy
Sure but that is true for alcohol as well. Basically anything that messes with your brain chemistry has the chance of screwing up your brain for good. But messing with brain chemistry is kind of the point of drugs.
Learning what works for you in a safe environment is what you'd hope society would aim for, but no we think that forcing the drug culture underground so kids try drugs in unsafe uncontrolled environments surrounded by people who don't care about them is a smart thing to do grrr argggh (the new word of the year?)
Is it too early for a cider?
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Grrr argh indeed, but they are politicians and rate on par with real estate agents for morality – what did you expect, if it doesn't win votes they don't care.
Prohibition of drugs does not work, but it’s easy. So let’s do easy and ignore that it doesn’t work.
But just one point for those of you smoking cannabis, please stop pretending it’s so wonderful – Sure as a drug it isn’t worse or better than alcohol but it does have the added joy of being as bad as smoking tobacco for you and for those around you. Legalise it, tax it and stick hideous pictures of lung cancer on the packets please.
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there are lots of silly ugly bits in national parks
Of course you're quite right.
Actually perhaps we could all help our government by taking photos of bits of National Parks that we don't care about. We could then assemble them into a nice big montage or one of those really cool pictures where all the pixels are really photos...
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So no right thread for this question -
Do folks think that mining our reserves will capture the imagination of the public enough to bring the government down?
I kind of think that it is so blatantly greedy that most kiwis will hate it. But most importantly it is the kind of issue that regardless of any realities* it can be presented as an act of evil.
*While not suggesting mining native forests is in any way justifiable it may turn out to be technically possible to extract minerals from public lands without doing harm. Note I believe that even if it was possible to mine without harm the companies doing it would fuck it up and do plenty of harm.
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This is why we need better numeracy standards!
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What bugs me about all the discussions of the details is nobody is asking the question
"Why should we want to pay less tax?"It is the underlying premise of all the debates that we should pay less tax. But the reality is that tax is what pays for the things we want and need from our government. Things that we can't supply ourselves as individuals and that we need to gather together to supply. You can't pay for a good teacher for your 2 kids but you can group up with your fellow citizens to pay for an education system.
The detail of who should pay more - rich folks or poor folks is kind of silly if we don't work through the logic of what amount of tax we actually want to pay for government services we want to receive.
When Key finally gives us the actual numbers my bet is the rich will pay a smaller proportion than they do now but not by much. Until we know the actual numbers it is all kind of pointless.
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I'd want my little Susie to read and write and do maths too. Can all that be taught in group projects?
I think what is being said is that they start by running a fashion show and then have to do the costings (maths) and write the script, presumably first in English (reading/writing) and then ...
Essentially it's learning the boring stuff by stealth. And it seems to work better than the way I learnt. Oh and they know it works better because education scientists have spent time developing tools and methods that can reliably and reproducibly assess how well the education system is working.
It is also pretty much how I learnt to write ... Finally when I came to write my first thesis it dawned on me that my written communication skills weren't up to the task and with the help of my MSc supervisor essentially learnt "English".
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Interestingly (with usual caveats) it's the same with hearing-impaired kids. Their problem is not literacy but numeracy.
Seriously Emma? It isn't just an n=1 problem? Cause if that's true it says something interestingly weird about either English or Sign in their ability to communicate numeracy.
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There's that, but what I object to more is that as soon as you start treating education as a science, then you automatically focus on the things that you can measure, however imperfectly, and stop paying attention to the things that are harder or in fact impossible to plot on a graph. How do you measure "values" or "inclusion"?
That really isn't fair Gio. What you are describing is bad science. I agree there are going to be less skilled education scientists that will do that but it isn't necessarily a function of the field itself.
You can measure values and you can measure inclusion and you can measure all sorts of interesting things like integration into communities etc etc. All things that are really important parts of what todays education system does. The stats become hard and the data collection isn't trivial and often involve extended interviews etc etc. But people are doing that kind of hard work.
Sure you could treat it as simplistic numbers and say ask for salary 5 years after leaving school, which would be complete bollocks. But I don't really believe education as a field is like that today.
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I was even worse. I dropped out a couple of weeks into my second semester because I felt so utterly lost,
At one time it used to be possible to get first year university drop out rates grouped by high school. It's not a number that you saw very often published. From my year I think the "winner" was Mt Albert closely followed by Auckland Boys.