New Zealand Conservative

Look in many school foyers and you will notice the school's academic goals are displayed. They will be framed and say something like this: "We will improve our literacy and numeracy rate" or "We will improve our NCEA1 pass rate" This serious document will be signed by the principal as it will be part of the performance goals the Board of Trustees is monitoring. Yet how meaningful are NCEA pass rates and such goals? There are three issues to consider. First, two schools may have the same pass rate but will not have used the same mix of achievement and somewhat easier unit standards to get the same result. Second, schools, in particular principals, are canny enough to change their school's mix of unit/achievement standards over time to meet professional performance goals. Third, schools that don't play the game of changing the standards mix are getting overtaken or devalued by schools that do. What appears to be missing from recent magazine features is how...

Some articles to scan if you find yourself on the internet rather than elsewhere. Like here, for example, in 1935 Bondi. The luckiest generation: pre-boomers born 1920-1940. Rather than spreading wealth between classes does welfare spread it between generations? Or another way, does the system only work if treasury-bills can attract buyers? Be very afraid but not of Santa. Vexatious litigation is funny in Boston Legal but not as a major influence on your culture. Fathers for Good. Lessons in Maniless from It's a Wonderful Life. Postmodern Conservatism in Australia. An oxymoron or confirmation of the suspicion that relativism is a subtle temptress even of John Howard and maybe John Key? How kangaroo burgers could save the planet. New Scientist Best Videos of 2008. NatGeo top ten Space photos of 2008. Another year and 74 year-old Gene Cernan is still the last man on the moon! Born in 1934 he would be another member of the putative"luckiest generation". Genetic Engineering ...

I read on Slashdot this morning that Apple is working on a "3D desktop" . Indeed Apple have made a patent application for : "A graphical user interface has a back surface disposed from viewing surface to define a depth, and one or more one or more side surfaces extend from the back surface to the viewing surface. An icon receptacle is disposed on one or more of the side surfaces, and one or more icons are disposed within the icon receptacle. The one or more icons correspond to one or more desktop items. " To me that sounds alot like a cube rendered in depth on a 2D screen. It doesn't sound like a haptic Minority Report or immersive Johnny Mnemonic style graphic user interface. So where exactly is the innovation here? Moreover, why would you pay the price of a second-hand car in three years time to have a "groovy" 3D-desktop effect which has been available for years as GNU Beryl and now Compiz-Fusion ? Let's not forget Apple...

In the ongoing quest to annotate the obvious and increase publication tallies, it has been confirmed that who you hang out with can affect your mindset. If your social contacts are happy then there's a good chance you too will be happy, which begs the question: why do people blog? WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Happiness is contagious, researchers reported on Thursday. The same team that demonstrated obesity and smoking spread in networks has shown that the more happy people you know, the more likely you are yourself to be happy. And getting connected to happy people improves a person's own happiness, they reported in the British Medical Journal. "If a social contact is happy, it increases the likelihood that you are happy by 15 percent," Fowler said. "A friend of a friend, or the friend of a spouse or a sibling, if they are happy, increases your chances by 10 percent," he added. A happy third-degree friend -- the friend or a friend of a f...

Again Mumbai is targeted . Since 2002 there have been six terrorist attacks in the city. Why attack Mumbai though? In addition to any idiosyncratic and perennially malleable claims made by the gunmen ("Deccan Mujahideen"), Mumbai is the economic centre of India, its New York, which is a strong lure; perhaps it is to stymie ongoing peace negotiations (Re: Kashmir) with neighbouring Islamic state Pakistan; and maybe also to destabilise India as a cohesive modern democratic state by inciting internal rifts. The persistently luminous Barrack Obama released these comments... , The United States must continue to strengthen our partnerships with India and nations around the world to root out and destroy terrorist networks. We stand with the people of India, whose democracy will prove far more resilient than the hateful ideology that led to these attacks.” Coincidentally, this Sunday morning National Radio's Chris Laidlaw hosts a feature on Pakistan and its fractured ominous si...

Atlantic Records , a subsidiary of Warner, has distinguished itself by becoming the first record publisher to receive more than half its revenue from digital sales. Certainly the future is digital but overall music sales are still predicted to shrink by $300million a year for the next three years. See: ArsTechnica

On top of today's $200 London departure tax , I ran across this "food-miles" article at Reason.com. As long as the affable Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearney-Whittingstall direct the popular imagination of British eaters, our produce shipped across oceans will be threatened by politically popular, but punitive and illogical taxes. In the article below I think it's significant that "New Zealand Apples" are deployed as a metaphor for gross wastage and perverse levels of greenhouse emissions. In reality, a sparsely populated area, most emissions in the food supply-chain are derived from moving produce from ports to supermarkets and moving the consumers from their couches to the markets. Specifically, in the case of the UK, 82% of food miles are generated within the UK, and in both the UK and USA transportation of food to the national market accounted for only 1-2% of emissions. 4 November, 2008. Reason.com . The Food Miles Mistake Saving the planet by eating New Ze...

Who would want to be President? Markets in free-fall and your armed forces embroiled in foreign wars, but then when was it ever different? The specifics of crises change but the Gordian tangle remains. Consider Jimmy Carter . A highly capable person, chewed over by hard times and spat out. Democrat Jimmy Carter beat incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976, 297 votes to 240. Factors contributing to the win included the Watergate scandal, Ford's pardon of Nixon, and the ongoing conflict in Vietnam. Carter went on to cut defence spending, negotiate the SALT II treaty with the USSR, mediate the Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt, and establish the idea that no other foreign power should dominate the Persian Gulf. Everything would have been fine for Carter if not for 1979. In 1979 he was faced with the terminal results of chronic 1970s problems - the Energy Crisis, Stagflation, and the Iran hostage crisis. During the 1979 Energy Crisis oil went from $15/barrel to $35 in 12 months . Stag...

Okay, I have been reading some H.P. Lovecraft recently as well as Jorges Borges and so I was amused to stumble across this parody of Lovecraft's Cthulhu at the excellent Arstechnica . The Call of Cthubuntu. An artifact that prophesies their grim return has come into my possession: the dread Cthubuntu Linux distribution —an arcane relic of ineffable power that originated in a dark time beyond reckoning. The incomprehensible apparatus is an otherworldly chimaera forged by alchemical arts unknown to modern science. It came into my possession after the sudden death of my mentor, an elderly UNIX system administrator who was wise in the ways of ancient lore... Ubuntu , in case you don't already know, is a popular and completely free operating system. Download here .

The Wilson Quarterly surveys polls. Despite unanimous poll results predicting an Obama victory in the New Hampshire democratic Primary, pollsters still determined Hillary Clinton was going to emerge the ­winner. The New Hampshire debacle joined a list of major embarrassments that includes the disastrous Florida exit polling in the 2000 presidential election, which prompted several networks to project an Al Gore victory, and the national polls in the 1948 race, which led to perhaps the most famous headline in U.S. political history: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” After intense criticism for previous failures and equally intense efforts by pollsters to improve their techniques, this was not supposed to ­happen. New Hampshire gave new life to many nagging doubts about polling and criticisms of its role in American politics. Are polls really accurate? Can surveys of small groups of people give a true reading of what a m...

Well, probably not the noble librarian per se , rather it's their puppeteer City Council. Have you ever suspected the local metropolitan library doesn't have your best interests at heart when they send overdue notice emails only after the item has accrued 7 days of fines? Naturally, a warning email 3 days in advance so you can return the item would be impossible! Okay, this is obviously a petty peeve but I find it galling as an out-of-town user that otherwise tech-savvy institutions ingenuously play dumb in this area. To fight back against the buttoned down tyranny of passive-aggressive revenue gathering I direct you to the website LibraryElf . Register and load your cards onto the site and it will give you due-date warnings, hold notifications and other simple features that apparently are beyond our local libraries. This is particularly useful if you subscribe to several libraries, for example city and university, and have children in the household. Check out LibraryElf .

Miranda Devine revisits the gastric unease caused by Sarah Palin. Her SMH column is worth a quick scan. Devine identifies two sources of particular rancour towards Palin; firstly, adolescent green-eyed jealousy and secondly, an offence against the sacrament of abortion. In attempting to understand the hatred pitched at Palin from many Australians, Devine notes that 75% of Labour party women in Australian parliaments are members of Emily's List . The US website of the group states, "EMILY's List members are dedicated to building a progressive America by electing pro-choice Democratic women to office" and goes on to say, "When women are involved in the political process, our democracy is truly representative. " But only the right kind of woman, only if they are pro-choice and Democrats, or in the case of Australian members pro-choice and Labor. The common cause is pro-choice. Sarah Palin is neither Democrat nor pro-choice so even though she is a woman electe...

The Times has released its global university rankings for 2008. The Australian reports here . So, in the week many people at Ag Research discover they will lose their jobs, R&D tax credits seem unlikely, when we discover that "prefu" is an acronym meaning "hospital pass to the next government", the Dow falls another 7% (on Thursday alone) and the BlackCaps lose to Bangladesh would it be too much to ask for an uptick at the end of the week? Perhaps all that aggressive spending and expansion of government services over the last nine year will be recognised by our Universities steadily rising in the global standing? That'd be nice wouldn't it? Our top university, Auckland, is ranked 65 by the Times , down from 50th in 2007. Next is Otago at 124, down from 114, and Canterbury has remained steady rising from 188th to 186th place. The citation and student components of the total score really drag NZ down, for example ANU's citation score is 74 to Aucklan...

Source: The Australian. An unusual case is developing in Australia where a small Catholic parish is being scrutinised and possibly disciplined by its Archbishop. In a strongly worded letter Archbishop Bathersby describes St Mary's parish of South Brisbane as "out of communion" with the Roman Catholic Church and goes on to say, "in reality, St Mary's South Brisbane has taken a Roman Catholic parish and established its own brand of religion. Ultimately it does good ... but its own style of worship and sacramental practices can hardly be described as Roman Catholic." The blog of the parish is linked here . Defenders of the parish describe themselves as unique and in the spirit of Vatican II. The criticism, which is thought to have originated with a letter to the Vatican, was dismissed by a spokeswoman as, "fundamentalist Catholics wanting to control the rest of the church". She expanded that, "our liturgy clearly reflects the modern world. We l...

[Update Tuesday 930am, Bail-out rejected Wall Street Crashes 750 points ] Pat yourself on the back. You've just become a historical footnote. Are you feeling "financially distressed"? Well, if not you should be. You should be either "distressed" or "panicked". Distress is what you feel after a speculative bubble implodes but panic is what you experience when what you though was the bottom turns out to be a ledge over a chasm. I'm reluctant to look down. Neville Bennett of the National Business Review has done us the kind service of comparing financial "panics". Yes, it's a "panic". Of all panics from 1847 to 1929, Bennett asserts that 2008 is most similar to 1929 because of the relentless train of morbid news and annihilation of landmark institutions such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. In other words, recollect yourself and prepare dusty anecdotes for future grandchildren, you've just passed through the most vola...

Source AFP. Anti-Semitism is alive and well and just like last time we refuse to see it when it's right in front of us. TVNZ's verbal ping-pong machine "Simon and Wendy" missed yesterday's annual celebration of Al-Quds day in Tehran . An industrious militia group used the occasion to launch a book called Holocaust , an event which attracted the Education Minister. The book is a compilation of cartoons and sarcastic comments mocking the WW2 holocaust. No word yet on a reaction from the Danes . Many snaps of the festive crowd here . Earlier in the week Iran's Ahmadinejad used the UN platform to report, "the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse and there is no way for it to get out of the cesspool created by itself and its supporters." How can this nonsense from Iran be construed as "peaceful" and be ignored? Does anyone think the election of Obama will suddenly convince Iran that Israel should not be driven into the sea?

During the last week I've watched both Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting . Overnight Paul Newman has died from cancer, age 83. R.I.P.

Three incidents occurred today that shook rust free. I saw a hard-core crusty old dude at the gym, Neil Armstrong made a rare public appearance , and China launched a mission that is to include a space walk. As someone born after the Apollo Moon landings I find it lame that no significant exploration has happened since then. Even though we now congratulate ourselves on global awareness it is a mediocre fact that only 30 people have ever seen the Earth from a distance sufficient to view it as a blue globe. Of those 30 astronauts (Apollo 8 to 17) only 12 walked on the Moon and of them only eight now survive. They are all aged over 75 years! Grand-dad's generation flew to the Moon and I stumble around thinking a sleek music player, the latest add-on, and espresso coffee is “progress”! One of the eight Moon veterans is Neil Armstrong, aged 78, a certifiable hard-core old dude. Armstrong appeared for the 50th anniversary of NASA and there he said, “Our highest and most important hope is...