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On April 3rd, the New Zealand Association of Scientists is holding its annual conference to ask “What is the value of science in NZ?” (you can register here). As the conference chair, Dr Nicola Gaston, puts it: When scientists are asked to describe scientific research that isn’t done for short-term economic benefit, they call it [...]
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A few months ago, Sir Peter Gluckman made the observation in a discussion paper (“Which science to fund: is it time to review peer review?”) that While scientists pride themselves on objectivity, there is surprisingly little in the way of objective assessment of the nature and quality of peer review processes for grant allocation. Ironically, [...]
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This year’s Marsden Fund results were announced this morning. The full list of successful proposals is available on the Royal Society of New Zealand website, or, if you prefer, you can get a sampling of what the media made of the lucky winners via the Dom Post and the Herald. This year the success rate [...]
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Next week on June 7-8, we will be running an on-line game called Pounamu using the Institute for the Future’s foresight engine. The engine brings a large community of people to come together to investigate, explore and discuss a future scenario. Pounamu invokes a future New Zealand that is trying to make its way in [...]
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“Are we failing our scientists?” asks Nikki MacDonald in last Saturday’s Dominion Post. MacDonald posed this question after obtaining figures from the Ministry of Science and Innovation showing that the number of post-doctoral positions funded by the Ministry fell from 386 in 2007/8 to 323 in 2009/10. And this decline occurred before the government had [...]
