Posts by Shaun Lott
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I basically have two cycle modes, and dress codes to match:
1) If I'm just cycling up the road to the dairy or whatever, possibly with one of the kids in the seat out back... then I pretty much wear whatever I was standing up in.
2) If I'm trekking off to work (Te Atatu to Symonds Street in 45-50 mins) then it's shorts and a t-shirt (maybe my one piece of lycra clothing if the washing lucky dip comes up trumps), sneakers and a backpack containing laptop and a change of clothes. For the sake of others, the first item of the working day is a shower.
I also have one of those backpack covers that says 'One less car'. I like it for being hi-vis, but I do wish it said 'One car fewer'...
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I grew up in the UK in the Thatcher years. She snatched my milk as a schoolchild, but her election as prime minister in 1979 probably saved my high school education, so I think that's a draw.
After that, though! My enduring memories of those years are:
Thatcher using the gift of the Falklands conflict to inspire jingoistic support. She then used this to enact a mass of extreme policies with no effective parliamentary opposition. A 'glorious' patriotic war enabled her to convince many working class people to be complicit in undermining their own futures.
Pre-Thatcher, my memory was that the homeless were largely middle-aged alcoholics. During her tenure, their numbers were swelled by very many teenagers who could no longer claim state benefits in often dire personal circumstances. It was a striking and visible change on the streets of British cities, and sat alongside the shameless wealth creation for the elite. It felt like the end of a compassionate state.
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A thing that had struck me as remarkable was the completeness of Bowie's silence. The man had made a record every two years, pretty much constantly from 1967 to 2003... then a decade of silence. Given his mulling of mortality on Reality, and his brush with it on tour, I had thought that was really that.
Quite remarkably excited
for sure!
Very curious to see whether he feels the need to get up on stage again...
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Hard News: What did you do yesterday?, in reply to Russell Brown,
Grey lines for me too :(
FF18.0.2, OSX 10.7.5 -
We walked the Waiheke sculpture trail. It seemed like half of Auckland were going to Waiheke, judging by the people density in the ferry terminal at either end, and the fact that Fullers seemed to give up on a timetable and ran the boats in a continuous shuttle. It was great! Personally, a day to reflect on what a fantastic city we live in.
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Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to andrew r,
But to me Paul Holmes was mostly about Paul Holmes.
As a relative new-comer to these shores, I have always felt that I was missing or had missed something when it came to Paul Holmes - some great feat he had performed back in the day that had allowed him to subsequently have a ubiquitous platform from which to broadcast whatever crossed his mind. But for a long time, I have felt that his primary concern was to maintain his own public profile. Unfair perhaps, but for me the man (or the persona?) had long since got in the way of any message he may have been trying to impart.
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Hard News: The Waterview Bore, in reply to thomas,
I look at the causeway raising, then to the temperatures in Australia and the lack of ice in the Arctic, and I wonder: Are they planning to raise it far enough?
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The Guardian survived the conversion to the Berliner, for sure. But the Independent certainly seemed to lose depth when it became tabloid. In the digital age, though, such things should surely count for less and less over time? I find the NYT almost unreadable in person, but great on the iPad. (If only they had a better subscription model.) In principle, ever more digital delivery should enhance substance over style, right?
p.s. "AUT" is fine. "AUT University" is not. Or indeed (as I once heard on RNZ, no less) "AUT University in Auckland".
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Well, I'll be convinced when I read it... shifting to tabloid was pretty much the end of the UK Independent as a serious contender.
But on another, unrelated point... Can we please not ALL go along with that dreadful phrase 'AUT University'... What exactly do we think the 'U' stands for?
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Some of the problem here is indeed, as pointed out by HORansome, that the shift to 'Gold OA' represents a shift in $ from the library's subscriptions budget to the researcher's operating costs. Another key part is the copyright restrictions that have made 'Green OA' hard to achieve.
In some places (e.g. in the US for NIH grants and in the UK for Wellcome Trust grants) these costs are being explicitly covered in grants at the same time as a 'Gold OA' publication policy is being mandated by the funding body. This is far from universal though, and the cost of publication has to come from somewhere, most traditionally from subscription charges to the journal.
The Economist has had a series of interesting articles on this subject (links below) the first of which summaries this business model of academic publishing quite nicely:
Academic journals generally get their articles for nothing and may pay little to editors and peer reviewers. They sell to the very universities that provide that cheap labour. As other media falter, academic publishers have soared. Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%.
However, not all subscribers pay the same amount. Harvard may be publicly complaining about the costs (Harvard crying poor?!), but I am led to believe that the University of Auckland (for example) has cut a much better deal with Elsevier by shifting to an all-online package.
The thing is complicated, and one model will not fit all.
But don't even start on the cost of time spent writing and reviewing grant applications!
http://www.economist.com/node/18744177
http://www.economist.com/node/21545974
http://www.economist.com/node/21552574