Every long weekend we hear how many people died, as though it means something, but there’s never any analysis beyond whether it’s more or less than last year’s number. It doesn’t help me know what’s going on: are we better drivers or worse? What’s the point of measuring if you don’t analyse? After all, I just kissed goodbye to my wife as she set out for a 100km trip to Auckland to see a friend. Should I have encouraged her to stay at home?

I’ve been conscientiously using Goodreads to review every book I read. I’ve used the Goodreads API, some Perl, and some Javascript to boil down my year’s reading. Without further ado, I present …

My Year in Books

Books: 100 Reading Rate: 3.6 days/book Monthly Breakdown: 8 books/month on average 11,9,12,5,6,6,7,1,9,15,6,13 Busiest Month: Oct (15 books) Slowest Month: Aug (1 book)

tl;dr: Charter schools aren’t a panacea, they don’t appear to be compatible with the emphasis on National Standards, and this seems like the top of a slippery slope which will result in us all being as stupid as Americans.

Background

New Zealand introduced “National Standards” last year. In the past, the curriculum talked about competencies and learning areas in general terms and defined stages through which children would pass. It didn’t say “at this age, children should be able to do X”. That was the gap that National Standards filled. The debate has been around timing (too fast) and how those standard age-based skills were arrived at (not soundly).

It was my pleasure to address the National and State Librarians of Australasia on the eve of their strategic planning meeting in Auckland at the start of November this year. I have been involved in libraries for a few years now, and am always humbled by the expertise, hard work, and dedication that librarians of all stripes have. Yet it’s no revelation that libraries aren’t the great sources of knowledge and information on the web that they were in the pre-Internet days. I wanted to push on that and challenge the National and State librarians to think better about the Internet.

Pondering the New Zealand fishing industry, I had an insight today. Forgive me if it’s old news to you.

You have three options to make more money:

1. Lower costs.
2. Sell more of the same stuff.
3. Make new types of stuff to sell.

In quota-limited systems such as fishing, you can’t catch more fish because you don’t have the quota to do so. So option 2 is out. All you can do to make more money is lower costs or find something new to sell.

There’s a trend now to question the value of a university education. It used to be that simply possessing a university degree gained you access to a Better Class of Job. That is no longer the case; now you have access to The Same Class of Unemployment Benefit. Even degrees in subjects without immediate business application (classics, art history, etc.) were valued as a sign of studiousness, discipline, etc. at least in so much as they put the possessor into the class of People Who Have A Brain. These days so many people are emerging with degrees that a degree alone isn’t enough to separate you from the herd.

Our band has two gigs coming up in Auckland and we’d love to see you there!

We play The Thirsty Dog on K Rd on Sunday, and the set is shaping up to be a good ‘un: the songs we were playing last year have really bedded down nicely. We are, if I do say so, getting good. That gig is Sunday Oct 2, and we’ll start playing around 4 or 4.30. It’s a 45m set, daytime, easy to get to if you’re in Auckland, just $10 at the door. The setlist features songs from Gillian Welch, Tim O’Brien, and Claire Lynch and some beauties I don’t want to tell you about just yet.

New Zealand has, for a long time, marketed itself as 100% Pure. In the last year, this slogan has taken a beating. The climax seems to have been when BBC Hardtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur gave Prime Minister John Key a colossal roasting over the discrepancy between reality and the slogan. The slogan was watered down to “100% Pure You”, and the pressure on politicians eased off. “Whew, our international PR slogan is saved!”

This post is about my 3 March 2011 appearance on Nine to Noon on Radio New Zealand. Listen to the show in MP3 and OGG. My notes below were made during research for the show, but we often depart from the script. In particular, this week I ad-libbed about the Christchurch Recovery Map project.

Something new this week: I solicited topics from my Twitter followers, and got some great story ideas that I wouldn’t otherwise have covered. Go team! Thanks to Don Christie, Bernard Hickey, and Daniel Spector.

We’re counting down the days here at the mothership, getting ready for the 5th Kiwi Foo Camp. It’s hard to believe this is year five already, the time’s flown by. I’ve had a few people ask for more details than are on the web site, so I thought I’d explain how it came to be and how it works.

In 2005 I returned from 10 years in the US tech world. We moved to the country because I wanted a bucolic NZ life for my kids, but I also wanted to find a way to help NZ. It’d done a lot for me and I wanted to give back. One of the things I’d seen work really well in America was the way O’Reilly Media’s “Foo Camp” brought together people from different fields who might not ordinarily meet to spark collaboration between them.