This is a great video from Massey University that was filmed as during a live Radio Control interview the other morning.

The key thing is this video shows the strength of the relationships between the four students’ associations and the university senior management with the University Vice-Chancellor Steve Maharey leading the discussion.

The services and events that they discuss with be lost if Voluntary Students’ Association Membership comes into force. And it is a lot of these services that students won’t realise they have lost until they have lost them.

The Vice-Chancellor of Auckland University has an interesting article in the Herald today about education funding:

Over the last thirty years, our educational institutions have created a $2.3 billion per annum export education industry – now the fifth largest export earner in the country. We can surely do it again with research.

So what would I do to bring about this change?

I would invest in education, valuing our teachers – from pre-school to professors – as the professionals they truly are. I would focus on supporting our most able students to continue on to postgraduate study and research careers, rather than terminating the very scholarships that keep our best doctoral students in New Zealand, as the government has recently done.

The removal of the highest value scholarships for PhD students by the incoming National government was an incredibly silly thing to do.

Look at the number and value of scholarships available to Australians and New Zealanders provided by the Australian Government. Look at the way they are offering massive incentives to our young doctors to move to the lucky country. It is little wonder we have such a big brain drain when our smartest are being snatched by our neighbour. And it will require more than a rugby team and national pride to keep them here.

Sadly New Zealand has been reducing its investment in the tertiary education of each student for 20 years, choosing instead to directly support students, most recently with interest free loans. This must inevitably compromise the quality of education and research at a time when other countries are investing heavily in these areas.

Interest free student loans are a good thing for supporting students and giving them opportunities they would have been unable to otherwise afford. However, as I blogged a few days ago there needs to be much tighter controls on who is allowed at university to reduce wasteful spending on those who are never going to complete their degree.

I would concentrate our research investment on “blue skies” projects, the kind that will create radical innovation, and with it undreamt-of opportunities.

After all, the single most important technology in New Zealand’s history, refrigeration, came out not because of attempts to preserve dairy and meat products so they could be exported – though that was what it achieved – but rather from fundamental university research on the thermodynamics of expanding gases.

At the moment a lot of new products come out of private enterprise in New Zealand. Most of these products are not mainstream consumer products either but rather for specialised industry. However, little of these products are information sciences based, instead they are physical products. Investing in information sciences based research at university and CRI level makes sense. If we want to succeed in the knowledge economy we must first join it (by getting into the top half and higher of the OECD averages) then we must actively lead the way in new ventures in the economy and not just follow what others are doing. How about getting past web 2.0 and start thinking about cloud 3.0?

Students’ Associations appear to be up in arms about New Zealand universities kicking out students who perform poorly.

From the Stuff.co.nz article:

Financially stressed universities have revealed they will significantly increase the number of students who are shown the door, saying they only want “motivated students”.

The university has introduced a policy in which any student whose grade point average is less than 1.5, or who has not passed half or more of their courses will have their progress automatically reviewed. Grade point averages are ranked up to nine.

Student associations were concerned that toughening up admission requirements went against New Zealanders’ sense of fairness and their sentiment that people should be given a “fair go”.

Students are already given a fair go. They are given a fair go through doing well in the exams before getting into university or in their first semester. If they do not take their fair go to do well in their exams through study then they should be shown the door. If they are not then the education system in New Zealand becomes nothing more than people paying for the piece of paper they get after three years and not earning it through hard work. This cheapens the quality, value and prestige of the institute so good on them for taking a tough stance.

There is a big problem with attitude amongst students at New Zealand universities many students have the attitude that C’s get degrees. At the moment that is true. But it shouldn’t be. Passing with a GPA of 1.5 is hardly passing – it is the equivalent of 4 C- and 4 C grades. A pass yes. Success no. At a minimum to get into post-graduate study you need a GPA of 6.0 (B+ average). To pass a degree you should have to maintain an average of 3.0 (C+) throughout your study. This would allow you to do bad on those papers you are naturally not good at, but at the same time provide enough of a challenge for you to work hard at those that you are good at.

Everyone should be given a chance to get into university and do their best. But university is not for everyone and once you have been given your fair go and have not succeeded you should give up your space for the next person – this is a fair system.

I have just uploaded my thesis and source code for my honours research project to the site. You can find them in the Research section.

Earlier today I received my final grades for my research project and three papers from Semester Two. I scored an A+ grade in all three papers and the project. I am absolutely delighted with the marks and my overall performance this year. In total, for both semesters, I scored 7 A+ grades and 1 A grade. This is by far my best ever set of marks and as a result I have been accepted into a PhD programme at The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia beginning early next year.

In time I will blog about some of the challenges I have faced this year (it has not been all plain sailing), as well as this I am working on uploading some of my past assignments to the site (some with and without source code – and minor modifications). I never imagined I would progress so far in academia and now I feel like the journey has only just begun.

One of my papers this semester is focused on Google Android Mobile Operating System.

The brief for my final assignment is:

Your task is to write any application you like. The are no restrictions on what your application can do but it should show of the capabilities of the platform and be well written.

Marks will be awarded for interesting applications that make good use of the Android platform.

Make sure your application works on the emulator but I will also test it on a real device.

For this assignment I decided to create a Blog Reader that reads the RSS XML feeds off blogs to display them in a Android Application.
I have spent around three days coding this assignment. I will not release the code until after the assignment has been marked, however here are some screen shots of the work

My Application Sitting in the Android Application Menu on my phone

The applications home screen

Adding a new blog feed into the application

Viewing a list of blogs

Removing a blog feed

Viewing a list of blog posts

Viewing list of blog posts

Viewing single post

No right turn is reporting that Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill (Roger Douglas) has been drawn from the ballot this morning:

http://norightturn.blogspot.com/2009/08/drawn_20.html

10 months. That is how long National has been in power for before this issue came up again. I sure as hell hope National do not support it. Everything they have said so far is that they support the current law. So leave it as it is.

More to follow later.

I walked to uni this morning because it was a nice day and I am sick of not being able to get a park when driving. On the way I took a few photos of the new Library under construction at uni. It is huge. By far the largest building on campus. It is a bit of a pity that I may longer be a student by the time it is open.

The Library as seen from afar dwarfing the other buildings on the campus

The library as seen from behind.

Massey have also created a photo slideshow of progress on the building:

From: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10589738

He believes that if the Government does not lift its cap on student numbers, universities could be forced to turn away school leavers with University Entrance for the first time in living memory.

Again the question must be asked, what happened to the knowledge economy and life long learning?

However, universities have been stripped of doctoral scholarship funding and $37 million in small funding, including cuts to adult community education that have caused widespread outcry.

This will only make the brain drain larger not smaller.

Professor McCormack, who is also deputy chairman of the New Zealand Vice Chancellors Committee, said what was most worrying was the fact universities had not been given any money to cope with students queuing at their gates.

This year, AUT got 14,000 applications from new students – up from 11,000 to 12,000 in each of the previous five years – and rolls had risen to 5.5 per cent above funding levels.

AUT has a roll of about 20,000 this year.

But despite soaring demand, Education Minister Anne Tolley has told the university it will be penalised if its student numbers top 3 per cent of its cap.

Professor McCormack said the university sector was not asking for a lot of money – just tens of millions from a billion-dollar Budget – to help address the high number of students wanting to get in.

Ms Tolley said yesterday that she was watching the situation carefully and working with the Vice Chancellors’ Committee.

Watching the situation will not make things better, action is required to improve it.

The University of Auckland’s vice chancellor, Professor Stuart McCutcheon, shared Professor McCormack’s concerns, particularly on the loss of doctoral scholarships.

He said his university decided this year not to increase its roll numbers and was now selecting students with “high ability” for all its courses, with the aim of encouraging them through a graduate programme.

The prospect of qualifying school-leavers been turned away from universities has worried student leaders.

Jordan King, a co-president of the New Zealand Union of Students Associations, said he would be “highly concerned at any situation where school-leavers who have the appropriate qualifications at the end of high school are unable to access tertiary education”.

At the moment I am busy looking at options for my PhD study and methods to support it… aka… scholarships.

Now I know that a few government departments have scholarships available and one of them is the Tertiary Education Commission Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarships.

So off I go to the page to take a look: http://www.tec.govt.nz/templates/standard.aspx?id=675

And what do I find?

As part of the Budget announcement made on 28 May 2009, the Government announced that the Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship scheme will be disestablished.

Say what?

Where is the commitment to educating the future. The government has made it clear they want to focus education on youth. How is applying for a PhD at 22 not youth? You can’t get through to that level much earlier.

Does the government now expect that each person pay their entire way through a PhD?

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

At least I have a few others to look at. And they are not all in this country either.

Another week, time for another video.

This one shows changes that have been made to the intersection controllers within the Traffic Simulator.

The give-way controller makes all the cars give way to all the other roads connected into the intersection with a minimum of 2.5 seconds between vehicles.

The traffic lights controller makes all the cars on the green road go at 2 second intervals and makes the others queue with a minimum wait time of 16 seconds.

The round-a-bout controller makes each car give way to the right and then go with a minimum of 3.9 seconds between each car on a road, but multiple cars from multiple roads can cross the intersection at the same time… hence the chaos on the video.

This one turned out much better than the first one, enjoy.

Silly computer has taken almost two hours to process this single video into a usable format but at least it can show some of my work.

This morning I had my first lecture for the new semester.

159.734 Intelligent Systems.

The lecturer enters the room and announces that he is taking the paper because the lecturer who was meant to be taking it had moved to a different uni in Singapore and then announces how much he does not like the paper and how we know just about everything in it already.

Therefore he will be renaming the paper to 159.736 Studies in Operating Systems and we will be doing an in depth study of one operating system in particular: Google Android OS.

I just about fell off my chair when he said this. Not only do I have a brand new cellphone, one of only a handful in the world running Android, I am now doing a whole paper on it at uni. How cool is that.

At the moment there are going to be two assignments for the paper one on building a device driver under Android say something to run bluetooth. And the second assignment will be building some awesome app for the OS.

I now wonder if I can claim my new cellphone back as a course related cost. ROFLOL.

Okay, a few weeks ago it was reported that Massey was looking at a possible Henderson campus…

Now both the Herald and The Press are reporting that Massey wants to merge with Lincoln.

I think the Massey Monster is hungry for another campus.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/christchurch/2544551/Lincoln-open-to-Massey-merger

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/education/news/article.cfm?c_id=35&objectid=10581047

Traffic flowing freely with two roads connecting to each other.

Traffic Congested as three roads merge and they have to give way to the road on the immediate right as they enter the intersection, notice how many cars are queued up as compared to those that are leaving.