Wednesday, August 03, 2005
A report into NCEA, due to be released tomorrow, is expected to bring changes to the secondary school assessment system. Officials at the State Services Commission have refused to reveal details of the report, but the NZ Herald understands it will prompt Education and State Services Minister Trevor Mallard into a series of alterations to improve standards-based assessment. A source told the Herald that the report was critical of agencies, including the Qualifications Authority, but supportive of NCEA as a concept and suggested ways to deal with variability in results.
Parliament is now calling for submissions on Sue Bradford's anti-smacking bill. No time limit has yet been set (it will be after the election).
How journalism went bad: "Before the war a common source of the reporter was an energetic kid who ran newsroom errands for a few years before he was permitted to accompany the most glamorous character on the staff, the rough-tough, seen-it-all, blood-and-guts police reporter. ...Some of us on that long-ago paper had college educations but we learned to keep quiet about it; there was a suspicion that a degree turned men into sissies....As journalism was increasingly learned academically instead of vocationally, the great curse of the campus descended, namely the abstraction of the real. Reporters, regardless of their perspective or biases, became removed from their stories. Instead, they were merely 'educated' about them. And the news stopped being as real."
"Today we confront a problem which is the antithesis of the liberal tradition, and that is political correctness," says National MP Wayne Mapp. "Where liberalism encourages competing political ideas, political correctness, by law, language or conduct, seeks to suppress the expression of ideas. ... It is their goal to capture the institutions of the state and mould them to reflect their views. The fact that their views may not reflect majority views, or indeed are specifically opposed to majority views, is immaterial. It is the imposition of these views that matters. That is the fundamental problem with political correctness. Political correctness has three features. First, political correctness is a set of attitudes and beliefs that are divorced from mainstream values. Second, the politically correct person has a prescriptive view on how people should think and what they are permitted to discuss. Third, and most importantly, political correctness is embedded in public institutions, which have a legislative base, and which have coercive powers. It is this third aspect that gives political correctness its authority. Without this capture of power the views of the politically correct would simply be another view in the marketplace of ideas. The attitudes and values of the politically correct may well have had their origins in the civil rights and equality campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, but political correctness is not about protecting the fundamental rights that lie at the heart of these campaigns. It is about limiting or suppressing the way people are able to think and express their views. Political correctness runs counter to the basic freedoms of society, precisely because it is intended to limit the debate on issues of rights and freedoms."
New Zealand is close to a syphilis epidemic, says an Auckland doctor. Writing in New Zealand Doctor, Sunita Azariah, an Auckland Sexual Health Service physician, said there was evidence that the incidence of infectious syphilis was increasing. Last year's sexually transmitted infections surveillance report by the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Research indicated a 53 per cent increase in cases of infectious syphilis diagnosed in public sexual health clinics since 2003.
With at least a third of college students in Uganda making good on abstinence pledges and the AIDS rate in the African nation plummeting, those who oppose chastity education have hatched a strange new argument: efforts to prevent Ugandans from having sex outside marriage have been too successful. The contention is that young people are waiting too long to get married and have children, meaning the resulting population rate will not be able to sustain a successful economy. As a means to their end, anti-abstinence groups, including the US Agency for International Development, are pouring millions into Uganda to promote condom use. Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, said the population-crisis argument is ludicrous. "Ugandan women are still having five, six, seven children. The birth rate is high. The death rate from AIDS is dropping because of
abstinence... it's not creating a population shortage in that country." The real problem, he added, is that many of Uganda's neighbors have not embraced the abstinence message. "You've got countries like South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia," he noted, "where the AIDS rate is so high that population growth has stopped."
Bad news for those who are holding off having children until they are older. Older fathers are up to five times more likely to have children with birth defects, according to a study in the US and Denmark. A 45-year-old man is almost three times more likely to father a Down Syndrome child than a man under 30.
Here's the next episode in the development of podcasting (home-produced audio and video). Former US vice-president Al Gore has launched a cable network, Current TV, with short, fast-paced programmes, or "pods", for internet-savvy viewers 18 to 34 years old. Billed by Gore as a TV outlet that encourages a "two-way conversation" with its audience, the network offers professionally produced segments and viewer-produced videos running from a few seconds to 15 minutes in length.
Parliament is now calling for submissions on Sue Bradford's anti-smacking bill. No time limit has yet been set (it will be after the election).
How journalism went bad: "Before the war a common source of the reporter was an energetic kid who ran newsroom errands for a few years before he was permitted to accompany the most glamorous character on the staff, the rough-tough, seen-it-all, blood-and-guts police reporter. ...Some of us on that long-ago paper had college educations but we learned to keep quiet about it; there was a suspicion that a degree turned men into sissies....As journalism was increasingly learned academically instead of vocationally, the great curse of the campus descended, namely the abstraction of the real. Reporters, regardless of their perspective or biases, became removed from their stories. Instead, they were merely 'educated' about them. And the news stopped being as real."
"Today we confront a problem which is the antithesis of the liberal tradition, and that is political correctness," says National MP Wayne Mapp. "Where liberalism encourages competing political ideas, political correctness, by law, language or conduct, seeks to suppress the expression of ideas. ... It is their goal to capture the institutions of the state and mould them to reflect their views. The fact that their views may not reflect majority views, or indeed are specifically opposed to majority views, is immaterial. It is the imposition of these views that matters. That is the fundamental problem with political correctness. Political correctness has three features. First, political correctness is a set of attitudes and beliefs that are divorced from mainstream values. Second, the politically correct person has a prescriptive view on how people should think and what they are permitted to discuss. Third, and most importantly, political correctness is embedded in public institutions, which have a legislative base, and which have coercive powers. It is this third aspect that gives political correctness its authority. Without this capture of power the views of the politically correct would simply be another view in the marketplace of ideas. The attitudes and values of the politically correct may well have had their origins in the civil rights and equality campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, but political correctness is not about protecting the fundamental rights that lie at the heart of these campaigns. It is about limiting or suppressing the way people are able to think and express their views. Political correctness runs counter to the basic freedoms of society, precisely because it is intended to limit the debate on issues of rights and freedoms."
New Zealand is close to a syphilis epidemic, says an Auckland doctor. Writing in New Zealand Doctor, Sunita Azariah, an Auckland Sexual Health Service physician, said there was evidence that the incidence of infectious syphilis was increasing. Last year's sexually transmitted infections surveillance report by the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Research indicated a 53 per cent increase in cases of infectious syphilis diagnosed in public sexual health clinics since 2003.
With at least a third of college students in Uganda making good on abstinence pledges and the AIDS rate in the African nation plummeting, those who oppose chastity education have hatched a strange new argument: efforts to prevent Ugandans from having sex outside marriage have been too successful. The contention is that young people are waiting too long to get married and have children, meaning the resulting population rate will not be able to sustain a successful economy. As a means to their end, anti-abstinence groups, including the US Agency for International Development, are pouring millions into Uganda to promote condom use. Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, said the population-crisis argument is ludicrous. "Ugandan women are still having five, six, seven children. The birth rate is high. The death rate from AIDS is dropping because of
abstinence... it's not creating a population shortage in that country." The real problem, he added, is that many of Uganda's neighbors have not embraced the abstinence message. "You've got countries like South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia," he noted, "where the AIDS rate is so high that population growth has stopped."
Bad news for those who are holding off having children until they are older. Older fathers are up to five times more likely to have children with birth defects, according to a study in the US and Denmark. A 45-year-old man is almost three times more likely to father a Down Syndrome child than a man under 30.
Here's the next episode in the development of podcasting (home-produced audio and video). Former US vice-president Al Gore has launched a cable network, Current TV, with short, fast-paced programmes, or "pods", for internet-savvy viewers 18 to 34 years old. Billed by Gore as a TV outlet that encourages a "two-way conversation" with its audience, the network offers professionally produced segments and viewer-produced videos running from a few seconds to 15 minutes in length.
