The orgasmic work of the Marsden Fund

Alf takes it back. The research into moa and crows he was banging on about yesterday at least is the stuff of what he reckons is proper science.

Some projects being financed by the Marsden Fund have a much stronger whiff of misapplied science money around them.

Example: “Young adults, drinking stories and the cult of celebrity”, the work of one Dr A.C.Lyons at Massey University. Good grief. The Marsden Fund has dished out $864,000 for it.

Then there’s “Beethoven’s middle period string quartets in context: ideology, performance, reception ”. Dr N.R.November, at the University of Auckland, is being given $285,000 for that lot.

Mind you, so far as Alf can see, none of the money this year has gone to lesbian writers for research involving orgasms.

Salinger’s sacking not a ministerial matter

Jeanette Fitzsimons is on the wrong tack, trying to embroil Wayne Mapp in the fuss over Jim Salinger’s sacking.

In Parliament yesterday she asked Mapp, our Minister of Research, Science and Technology, if he stood by his statement in the Dominion Post last Saturday that the dismissal of internationally renowned scientist Dr Jim Salinger from his position at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research is “an employment dispute, which must be handled by the chief executive and the board”?

Mapp stuck to his guns: “Yes, I do.”

NIWA curbs talk about the weather

Sounds like that Barmy Banana bloke – or one of the Fijian strongman’s henchmen – has taken over our National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

The result is the muzzling of NIWA scientists, most obviously manifest in the sacking of well known climate scientist Jim Salinger.

The story has been nudged along by Green Party expressions of outrage, although – true to form – if the Greens have a hot flush, they turn up the heat to grab a more sizzling headline. They described Salinger as a Nobel Prize winner.

Bollocks. But more of that later.