Kiwiblog

The Press reports:

Former ACT candidate John Peters travels New Zealand selling $20 pens, of which $5 from each goes to charity.

Since first appearing in The Press in May 2006, he had featured in other newspapers and was criticised in Parliament for his fundraising methods which included sitting in a chair, his legs apparently useless, to give the impression he was disabled.

When approached by The Press in City Mall on Friday, he said his current charity was the Disabled Children’s Trust, for which he had raised $20,000 over the past year.

He would not give a card or contact number for the trust’s director, saying it could be found on the internet.

Regardless of the charity a 75% commission is far far too much and looks to me like preying on people’s charitable impulses. And as for the charity:

However, internet searches found no trace of the trust except on the Companies Office website, which said it had been registered to Christchurch man David Williamson since 2002.

Williamson has another charitable trust registered under his name called the Hope for Children Charitable Foundation.

Williamson confirmed Peters’ claim that he had raised $20,000 for the Disabled Children’s Trust over the past year.

None of the money had been spent and it was sitting in a bank account, he said.

He planned to use it to buy wheelchair swings for Ferndale Special School in Merivale, which he said he had donated to in the past through a person he knew there.

Ferndale School chairwoman Annie Barnes said she had never heard of Williamson and, to her knowledge, the school had never received a donation from him.

The person he knew at the school had left three years ago.

Looks bloody dodgy to me.

ACT did not have Peters as a candidate in 2008 (he stood in Chch East in 2005), so presumably were also not too impressed with his methods. Nevertheless still an embarrassing association.

Finally signed up for twitter which is a sort of micro-blog – maximum 160 characters – more like the Facebook status updates.

Anyway my latest twitter updates are displayed on the sideroll, and if you are on twitter you can follow me directly.

All these different social networks get difficult it manage, so pleased to have Ping.fm referred to me. One can do updates there which flow into all your different networks. So for example it will update both Twitter and Facebook status updates. Aldo does Flickr, Bebo, various blog platforms.

Today’s Herald Editorial looks at the recent report on student success:

The number of children in a school classroom is obviously important to the education each can receive but for many years now we have been led to believe it is the single most important element. Class sizes, or teacher-pupil ratios, have been the profession’s explanation for every deficiency discovered in the service it is providing. Reducing class sizes has been its suggested solution to every problem.

If I was cynical, I would look at the loop – NZEI/PPTA advocate for more teachers, more teachers = more NZEI/PPTA members = more money for NZEI/PPTA.

Governments have generally accepted the profession’s advice and the ratios have been reducing, though the teacher associations always want them lower. When the Herald invited the main political parties’ education speakers to summarise their policies in the recent election campaign, Labour’s minister Chris Carter, began: “I would continue to support teachers, as we are doing with lowering class sizes, by dealing with the issue of pay.”

National’s spokeswoman, Ann Tolley, made no such commitment and now that she is Education Minister she must be glad she did not. For the results, just published, of an important research project by an Auckland University professor of education, John Hattie, have challenged the notion that class size is the most important factor in a pupil’s progress.

The 15-year study, drawing on results of 50,000 items of research on pupils’ performance around the world, came to the unsurprising conclusion that the quality of a teacher’s interaction with pupils, particularly the “feedback” they received for their efforts, was most important.

So the answer is better teachers, not just more teachers. And that means better pay for the better teachers.

Pay for performance may always be too hard for national negotiations that would need to find agreed measures of excellence. But it would present little difficulty if left to school principals and their boards. Principals have to know which of their staff make the effort to interact well with pupils, which of them the pupils readily trust to ask for help and receive a useful response. Dr Hattie says the desired level of trust is very rare.

The new Government appears to have no interest in challenging teachers’ national pay negotiating system but it may have to if it wants to encourage and retain the best. At least it now knows that the quantity of teachers is much less important than their quality. Ms Tolley says the Hattie research will have a profound influence on schooling. Let us hope so.

I’d have the national “award” as a guidline for schools, but let each board and principal pay teachers what they determine they are worth. The best teachers should be on over $100,000 – without having to become departmental heads.

Anita at Kiwipolitico writes:

In early December two new National MPs were welcomed as heralds of the new multi-ethnic National Party. The maiden speeches of Sam Lotu-Iiga and Melissa Lee were the perfect showcases of a new look party: ethnic heritage, community languages, younger faces, respect for the tangata whenua. Yet despite the effort National has put into the semblence, today’s party is no more more inclusive than it was under Brash or English, it’s just a little less out-dated in its conservatism.

Lotu-Iiga, with his Auckland Grammar schooling, his Cambridge MBA and his career in Finance and Law is not typical of New Zealand Samoans. Lee’s career as a TV journalist is far from the experience of most Asian immigrants. They are as unrepresentative of their communities as Key is of state house kids.

This is unbelievable.  Anita says while it is good they have achieved, it means they are not a sign of social inclusion, because they are now sucessful.

Sam was born in Samoa, grew up in South Auckland and went to Mangere Central Primary School. But hey that does not count towards social inclusion because he has dared to do well. Never mind he grew up with up to 16 people sharing a three bedroom house – he is not declared to be unrepresentative of his community.

Likewise Melissa Lee was born in Korea, grew up in Malaysia. To help support her family once they moved to NZ, she would work during the day as a reporter for Sunday News, and then work in the family dairy until 11 pm. But again she is declared unrepresentative of her community because she has done well.

I guess Anita saw Taito Philip Field as a better sign of social inclusion.

But more of a concern, is how many on the left might share this viewpoint – that no matter what your background is, if you do well, then you no longer represent “mainstream New Zealand”.

Greer McDonald has a review of Yes Man:

I went and saw Yes Man on the weekend. Not being a Jim Carrey fan but having seen an interview with Danny Wallace, the guy who wrote the autobiographical book that it is based on, I was keen to splash out my hard-earned dosh to see if it was any good.

I cringed at the start, not only was Carrey up to his face-pulling, can’t-act-to save-himself mode, he was also incredibly old. Like, wrinkly and stuff. When did that happen?

The movie did get better, namely with the introduction of Rhys Darby’s character. The role was perfect for him, he was essentially channelling his role of Murray the manager of Flight of the Conchords and doing a mighty good “cringe coz it’s so Kiwi” job of it.

I also saw the movie last week. Greer is right – Jim Carrey does suddenly look old. And I am not sure he fitted the role of a social recluse who neer wants to socialise or go out.

But overall the movie was worth seeing as a light and fluffy comedy. Murray the manager was hilarious, as was his Harry Potter party.

The scene with Carrey’s elderly neighbour was hilarious. It was sick and wrong, and I winced, but it was funny. Remember this is a film about Carrey having to say yes to everything.

I thought Zooey Deschanel did well as the love interest – she was quirky.

The ending was a bit lame and flat, but overall it wasn’t a bad watch. More a movie to watch on DVD though than the big screen.

This table comes from Whats my Pass (via BoingBoing). It’s fascinating insight into what people use.

Also for the non geeks:

ncc1701 The ship number for the Starship Enterprise
thx1138 The name of George Lucas’s first movie, a 1971 remake of an earlier student project

I wonder how many people worldwide have used those as passwords?

IrishBill notes at The Standard that submissions are open on the review of the ETS, and close 13 February.

He says it is of particular concern that the TOR include:

identify the central/benchmark projections which are being used as the motivation for international agreements to combat climate change; and consider the uncertainties and risks surrounding these projections

I disagree. Anyone who actually has read the IPCC reports knows there are significant uncertainties and risks. In fact almost every page of their reports detail these uncertainties. They even detail in their fourth report what specific terms mean:

1. virtually certain >99%
2. extremely likely >95%
3. very likely >90%
4. likely >66%
5. more likely than not > 50%
6. about as likely as not 33% to 66%
7. unlikely <33%
8. very unlikely <10%
9. extremely unlikely <5%
10. exceptionally unlikely <1%.

So when you read:

It is very likely that cold days, cold nights and frosts have become less frequent over most land areas, while hot days and
hot nights have become more frequent. {WGI 3.8, SPM}

It is likely that heat waves have become more frequent over
most land areas. {WGI 3.8, SPM}It is likely that the incidence of extreme high sea level3 has increased at a broad range of sites worldwide since 1975. {WGI 5.5, SPM}

This means there is a higher degree of confidence in the assertion there are more frequent hot days than in the assertion that extreme high sea levels have increased.

Effects of temperature increases have been documented with
medium confidence in the following managed and human systems: agricultural and forestry management at Northern Hemisphere higher latitudes, such as earlier spring planting of crops, and alterations in disturbances of forests due to fires and pests {WGII 1.3, SPM}

Now medium confidence is also defined as about 5 out of 10, so far less certain.

It is very likely that the observed increase in CH4 concentration is predominantly due to agriculture and fossil fuel use.

And much higher confidence here for the source of CH4, but still only 90%, not 95% or 99%.

So when you hear people rail against the considering the uncertainties and risks of projections, they are actually railing against people understanding the science, and reading the IPCC reports.

We see this with IrishBill who goes on to say:

Which is the opening to question the basic science of climate change. We’re about to become the nation state equivalent of the flat earth society.

Nope the flat earth society is those who think you can’t question or consider risk and uncertainty.

My position on climate change is I accept the IPCC reports. I know there are legitimate criticisms of them, but I think overall they do a good job of documenting what they beleive to be happening, and why.

The problem is the nutters who then preach doomsday, if nothing is done in the next couple of years. You hear scare mongering about ten metre increases in the sea level. In fact the IPCC has six different scenarios for sea level rises and even the worst one is an increase by 2100 of only 26 to 59 cms. The best scenario is 18 to 38 cms.

Now that is still undesirable, and why I support putting a price on carbon (either through an ETS or a tax). But when you hear people talking about sea level increases of metres and metres, or who scoff at any suggestion of uncertainity – well they probably have not even read the IPCC reports themselves. They are going off the hype.

There is uncertainty. Not enough to warrant doing nothing. A price on carbon is needed. But we have to be aware of how much we don’t know, as well as how much we do know.

I found this on Jim Donovan’s blog. Most larger businesses that get mentioned online should consider having something like this to guide them as to when it is useful to respond, and when not to.

I actually talk on this issue to quite a few business groups, so may include this in my standard presentation. The guide is from the US Air Force. Good to see the military encouraging staff to respond on blogs when appropriate.

It is sometimes tempting to regard all of Africa as poorly as Kenya and Zimbabwe, but there are beacons of hope. The Herald reports that Ghana has just sen the Opposition Leader elected President.

It was very close and the party of the incumbent (who was not standing again) had threatened to reject the results, but the President urged them to do so, and the new President has stressed he will be President for all Ghanaians, not just his own supporters.

It is that putting of the national interest ahead of tribal or party interests that is so lacking in much of Africa, and is perhaps the greatest contributor to the poverty brought about by bad governance.

I’ve all along said the Fees Maxima policy was stupid. Now look who is campaigning to get rid of it? The man who introduced them – Steve Maharey.

But, he says, individual policies should change over time, and one on which he will campaign is the fee maxima.

“When I put that policy in place, it was for three years. It’s now five years and it urgently needs to be changed.

I say get rid of it for all universities except Massey

On Trade Me a letter from Muldoon is being auctioned, and the reserve is one million.

Closes in an hour. Get in quick

Greg Ford in the SST reviewed the finalists for the Halberg Awards. He is upset that Mahe Drysdale did not make the finals.

Ford has contradictory logic. On the face of it Drysdale should not be a finalist as he only won a bronze, yet Ford argues:

The often controversial judging panel has done it again, this time overlooking Drysdale, who, while in the process of winning his bronze in Beijing against immense odds, restored our faith in sport and New Zealand sportspeople alike.

So he argues the fact he won a bronze while sick from food poisoning means he should be a finalist. But then later on he argues:

And, by including Paralympics swimmer Sophie Pascoe ahead of Erakovic, the judges seemingly blew any chance to argue there is no room for sentimentality when comparing and weighing the performances of athletes (see Drysdale).

The photogenic Pascoe performed with distinction. No ifs, no buts. She did a great job and, like Drysdale, stole our hearts by overcoming the odds.

But the cold, hard reality, is that the Paralympics can’t be compared alongside the real deal, or Wimbledon for that matter.

But now overcoming the odds doesn’t count when you are a paralympian. Ford manages to dismiss all paralympians (and make no mistake the top competitors there spend just as many hours a day training as other professional sportspersons, if not more), reduces Sophie Pascoe’s three gold medals (and one silver) to “performed with distinction” and then belittles her further by labelling her “photogenic” as if that is why she was made a finalist.

A pretty patronising article.

Very good from the Dim-Post:

The New Zealand Herald: Key – the Cold Hard Facts

Freelance journalists Kevin Taylor and Jason Ede ask the difficult questions about the mysterious past and future plans of National leader John Key. The result is a candid unflinching take-no-prisoners account of Key as a husband, leader, dad and the best mate our nation could ever hope for.

The Sunday Star Times: Five Celebrity Sex Scandals the Government Doesn’t Want you to Know About

Anthony Hubbard and Nicky Hager reveal the shocking truth about the New Zealand Intelligence Service and their role in protecting Shortland Street stars from tabloid newspaper journalists.

New Zealand Herald on Sunday: Going down on Lloyd Geering

Caroline Meng-Yee interviews the ninety year old distinguished theologian and member of the New Zealand Zealand Order of Merit about fashion, fab restaurants, clubbing and his favourite sex positions!

The Dominion Post: Are Winston’s Masturbation Fantasies Illegal?

The story that brought the government to its knees. Phil Kitchen’s explosive scoop revealed the Foreign Ministers inner erotic life and asked if it broke electoral law.

Green MP Keith Locke wants New Zealand to take in the “detainees” from Guantamamo Bay.

Poneke notes:

While the inmates there are undoubtedly being held in flagrant breach of international law, it is quite obvious that most of those inmates are also ruthless terrorists. They need to be put on trial in somewhere like the Hague, not brought to New Zealand to learn to fly planes. It was honourable of New Zealand to welcome the Tampa refugees to our country in 2001. They were refugees from the Taleban and Al Qaeda. The Guantanamo Bay inmates are the Taleban and Al Qaeda.

Indeed. As TVNZ reported:

Top US general John Altenburg says 30 Guantanamo inmates who were released have since been involved in terrorist acts or have been recaptured on the battlefield.

This reminds me of just after the 9/11 attacks, when the Greens marched just days later to demand the US not respond, and they merely negotiate with the Taliban.

1. Neil Sanderson has research from Pew. In 2008, the number of people gettign their news off the Internet went from 24% to 40%, beating newspapers at 34% for the first time.  Tv remains top at 70R% but is slowly declining.
2. Chris Trotter has a repost of a 2001 address he gave on defence. Many may be surprised by his views. I found myself agreeing with much of it!
3. Tim Blair notes that *only* 1,147 cars were burnt in France on New Year’s Eve, which was described by authorities as “rather calm”
4. MacDoctor finds the new English requirements for foreign nurses as idiotic at a time of nursing shortages, and points out most NZ nurses could not meet the new standard.

Bill Ralston does a Hot or Not list for 2009:

HOT

• John Key
• Working in the Beehive
• Government Press Secretaries
• Jonathan Coleman
• Lockwood Smith
• Lobbyists
• Consultants
• Heavy construction companies
• Taxpayers

NOT

• Labour MPs
• NZ First ex-MPs
• Public servants
• Policy analysts
• Trade unions
• Investment bankers
• Oil companies
• Beneficiaries

The Herald on Sunday reports on an ASB report on the top places for families to live. They are:

1. Wellington
2. Queenstown Lakes
3. Selwyn
4. North Shore
5. Ashburton
6=. Auckland
6=. Waimakariri
8. Porirua
9. Christchurch
10. Rodney

I’m very amused that Ashburton is above Auckland and Porirua above Christchurch

The Herald reports that Israeli ground forces have entered Gaza. This is a sad day, after they voluntarily left it some years ago.

Whether Israel will be sucessful with its aims to cripple Hamas remain to be seen.

While I am a defender of Israel’s right to respond to the thousands of rocket attacks Hamas launches at Israel, it doesn’t mean I agree with every aspect of their response.

Will this make things worse in the long run? Sadly it may.  The status quo of “Let Hamas keep firing rockets without a response” seems a pretty bad strategy also. This is the problem in the Middle East – there are no good options, just a series of bad to very bad options.

The SST reports on a “study of studies” on student achievement done by Professor John Hattie of Auckland University. It has been a 15 year study that merges results from 50,000 indiidual studies of 83 million pupils.

So what does it show:

… that the key to effective teaching is the quality of the feedback students get and their interaction with teachers.

Anne Tolley is welcoming it:

The research has been dubbed “teaching’s Holy Grail” by an influential UK education journal, the Times Educational Supplement. National’s new education minister, Anne Tolley, says it will have a “profound influence” on the future of schooling in New Zealand.

Hattie says:

Auckland University professor John Hattie, who authored the study, says some of the results fly in the face of National’s popular election promise to reduce class sizes. He believes extra money should instead be spent on boosting teacher salaries. “Class size has a pretty small effect… and I wonder why they would spend a penny on it.”

He also believes it is time to revisit the controversial idea of performance-related pay for teachers.

I am all in favour of higher pay for teachers, so long as there is proper performance pay. The top teachers should be earning six figure salaries. But none of this automatic pay scale nonsense.

Hattie used these studies to rank 138 aspects of schooling and found that overwhelmingly, student-teacher interaction at schools came out on top.

Number one is “self-reporting” when the student knows exactly how well they are doing and can explain this, as well as any gaps in their understanding, to their teacher.

Tactics such as letting students take turns to teach the class, and teachers doing post-mortems on their own lessons, are also key.

Heh I used to teach the maths class – even at intermediate school!

And teachers, Hattie says, should ask themselves, “how many of the kids in your classroom are prepared to say, in front of the class, `we need help’, `we don’t know what’s going on’ or `we need to have this retaught’?”

He says that sort of trust is too rare which is why he wants to work out a way of paying teachers extra for excellence, rather than experience.

“It’s a lot easier to throw money at smaller classes, more equipment, more funding, to worry about the curriculum, to worry about the exams. “It’s a hell of a lot harder to differentiate between good and bad teaching… I think we need to spend a lot more policies on worrying about this.”

Tolley says that although rewarding teachers for excellence is a “tricky issue” it needs to be on the table, particularly as Hattie is close to defining what makes an excellent teacher.

I think this research and its implications are terribly exciting.

Of course the PPTA is against:

Kate Gainsford, head of the secondary teachers’ union, defended teachers, saying they deserved praise for being in the classroom despite in many cases poor resources, pay and support.

She says teachers are already using many of the interactive methods. But she points out that to have time to interact with students, classes need to be kept smaller and that some now have more than 30 students, despite what schools’ teacher-student ratios claim.

“This is not rocket science. We know that relationships between students and teachers are very important. And we know how those relationships can be supported, and how they can be eroded.”

She emphasises that teachers need to be backed up by resources, policies and training.

Gainsford says it would be “extraordinarily problematic … on so many fronts” to work out an excellence-based pay formula. She would like to see the focus on supporting “all kids, in all classes, in all schools”, rather than on a sorting mechanism for teachers.

Why does there need to be a formula? Other workplaces do not have formulas. They have employers who agree on a pay rate with you, based on their judgement of your experience, ability and worth. This is not some untested concept, but the norm in most sectors.

The world university debating champs have been happening in Cork.

Congrats to the Vic A team of Stephen Whittington and Polly Higbee who made the semi-finals. They were Opening Government on the topic “That governments should subsidise home ownership.” There are four teams in a debate at worlds (Opening Gov, Opening Op, Closing Gov, Closing Op). Opening opposition was Harvard A – featuring Lewis Bollard, son of Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard. Harvard A won the semi and were 2nd Gov in the final with the topic “This house would ban abortion at all stages of development”.

The overall winner was Oxford A on a 5-4 split.

Also congrats to former Vic student Christopher Bishop (G2) who was a judge, and chaired the judging panel for the other semi-final.

The car radio stopped working a few weeks back, so I finally went in today to get a new one. It was just a tape player and radio, so replacements were in the $80 or so range.

But the crafty salesperson commented on how I look like someone who might have a lot of songs on my iPod or on a computer, and wouldn’t I like a system where you plug in your iPod or a USB memory stick, and hey have thousabnds of songs to choose from.

So yeah I am thinking that will be good for the long journeys. And then he sees my phone and asks if I use it much when in the car. I say, yes I do. He then shows me a bluetooth model steros which will automatically link to my phone, access my numbers allowing me to dial from the stereo, and allows me to talk hands free, using the speakers. Well that would be damn useful so I go up another model and price again.

He then went in for the kill – the full DVD steros system, but as this would push my $80 purcahse into a four figure sum, I managed to hold off (plus I think it may not have enhanced road safety as much as the other one) and settled for the iPod stero with bluetooth hands free phone.

So I have done my part for increasing GDP. Quite a lot to pay, but hey I love new toys.

WCC is looking at whether to impose an entry charge for overseas visitors to facilities such as the Cable Car Museum, City Gallery, Capital E! and the Plimmer’s Ark conservation project on Queens Wharf.

I’m certainly in favour of user pays for overseas visitors, so long as the costs of collection were not too high. I also support Charles Finny:

Wellington Chamber of Commerce chief executive Charles Finny said he favoured an amalgamation of local bodies in the Wellington region “rather have that than some sort of discriminatory pricing”.

“We think that having nine councils for a population of 450,000 people is absurd.”

If an amalgamation happened, funding problems would “just go away”.

Indeed Wellington does not need four city councils and five district councils.

The prisoner who stabbed another inmate because he scared a cat was being prepared for release as he was in a standalone self-care unit.

The Dom Post reveals he was convicted of murder and rape in 1987 and been refused parole on eight occasions. Obviously someone in authority had thought 21 years was enough and signals had been sent he would get parole in the near future.

If the alleged stabbing is accurate, then he would have almost certainly offended once he released – maybe even killing again.

Most disturbing is this:

Corrections Association president Beven Hanlon said guards had raised concerns about McKinley for six months. The victim could have died if a third inmate had not intervened.

Corrections Department support service manager Karen Urwin said she was not aware of any staff concerns about inmates in the self-care unit. The department would investigate whether the inmates were “appropriately placed”.

It sounds like the Burton case all over again. The actual prison guards knew he was a bad sort likely to offend, yet this neer makes it way through to management or those who make the decisions.

If I was the Minister, I’d want an inquiry or at the minimum a report into how this happened.