Two a penny

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It doesn’t pay to be female, report shows

– Saturday, 27 December 2008

Women in public-sector jobs continue to lag behind the pay of their male equals by up to 35 per cent, a government report reveals.
The Human Rights Commission says the evidence of workplace gender inequality is now indisputable, and it calls on public organisations to take action.
"We want people to start fixing the problem, not just identifying it," equal employment opportunities commissioner Judy McGregor said.
The taskforce found:
Every organisation found a gender pay gap, ranging from 3% to 35%.
A progress report of the five-year pay and employment equity taskforce shows a gender pay gap persists across all 27 public-sector organisations surveyed.
Gender pay gaps widen after appointment, and men move more rapidly through the pay scale.
Starting pay rates between men and women differed within the same occupation.
All reviews except one found under-representation of women in a range of senior management.
Women were more likely to believe that performance appraisal systems were unfair.
Over half of staff said their organisations were not actively addressing or preventing harassment and bullying. "It seems to be almost unbridgeable for some reason.
McGregor said the gender pay gap had been a problem for some time.
"We still have a long way to go in relation to pay equity."
The average gender pay gap was about 12%. What these results show is that we need to move more quickly on the remedial work that follows," McGregor said. What these results show is that we need to move more quickly on the remedial work that follows," McGregor said.
Women got lower starting salaries in the same jobs in some occupational groups. Among the most common reasons were:
Female-dominated occupations were lower paid. .
Women had fewer promotion opportunities and/or progressed more slowly through pay scales.
Organisations got complacent after reviewing their gender pay gap.
"We want to see proper targets set and whether people regard that as positive discrimination, affirmative action or just redressing a natural balance doesn't matter; it's got to be done," she said.
"People commit to the review and they do the review and they think the job's done, but what we want now is more action around implementing the action plans.
"We have found that the implementation (of changes) is too slow," McGregor said.
The private sector was "pretty resistant to challenges" on how it paid and employed people."
Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly said the same issues identified in the public sector were also present in the private sector.
"It is often presumed that the man's job is more important than the woman's, so we give them the bonuses.
"It is often presumed that the man's job is more important than the woman's, so we give them the bonuses."
The report was the third from the taskforce, which is about three years into its five-year term.

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Good samaritans lose $1000 to robber

Monday, 22 December 2008

Two Wellington men who help itinerants have had their good deeds repaid by being robbed at knifepoint.
Phillip Thomas-Sam, 24, and a workmate were closing up the Gourmet Express Pie Cart beside the city's railway station about 2.
As the robber held a knife against the 18-year-old worker's stomach, Mr Thomas-Sam gave him about $1000 from the till, and was then pushed to the ground.10am on Saturday when a man came in and demanded money. .
Mr Thomas-Sam said the intruder told him he had a gun, and would shoot the pair if they called the police or followed him outside. I thought, `You're kidding me, how can you do this?'
"I have a tendency to take in itinerants or people who need help.
"I was completely shocked [when he came in to the pie cart].
"He was wearing a hat and the hood was up but he looked directly into the security camera. How did he think he could get away with it?"
His colleague, Robert Hughes, believed the robber wore a hoodie he had earlier lent him. He's obviously not the brightest. Then he came back on Saturday night wanting to speak with Phillip. "I've met some really awesome people and made good friends."
Mr Thomas-Sam said the "freaky" experience would not put him off helping others."
Police arrested a 23-year-old man in Cambridge Tce about 9. They are mostly travellers with no place to stay, so that's okay.
He will appear in Wellington District Court today.30pm on Saturday and charged him with aggravated robbery. "We sometimes get crimes like this around Christmas when people's finances are stretched. Detective Sergeant Damian Murphy said police were not seeking anyone else in connection with the robbery."

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Searchers recover sixth body from Air NZ wreckage

Sunday, 21 December 2008

Divershave now recovered the bodies of six of the seven people who died in the previous month's Air New Zealand plane crash off the southern coast of France.
The most recent body was recovered last week from wreckage, situated in 40m of water, 7km off the coast of the resort town Canet-en-Roussillon. Identification has been proving difficult due to the impact of the crash.
French authorities say they hope to identify the remains, which have been taken to the Institute of Forensic Research at Montpellier, by mid-January. The dead New Zealanders were senior pilot Captain Brian Horrell, 52, engineers Murray White, 37, Michael Gyles, 49, Noel Marsh, 35, and Civil Aviation Authority inspector Jeremy Cook, 58. .
A team of 12 divers will continue searching the wreckage for the remaining body this week, assisted by an observation robot being brought from Marseille. The two German pilots, who have not been named, worked for XL Airways, a German company which had leased the aircraft for two years.
German media have speculated the plane's de-icing gear might have failed resulting in it to nosedive into the sea, but the official investigation has yet to establish why the four-year-old aircraft crashed on what should have been a routine "acceptance" flight. Authorities plan to lift parts of the cockpit out of the water. The plane's black boxes have been sent to their US manufacturer for analysis, but it's unknown whether the flight data can be retrieved.

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Searchers recover sixth body from Air NZ wreckage

Sunday, 21 December 2008

Divershave now recovered the bodies of six of the seven people who died in the previous month's Air New Zealand plane crash off the southern coast of France.
The most recent body was recovered last week from wreckage, situated in 40m of water, 7km off the coast of the resort town Canet-en-Roussillon. Identification has been proving difficult due to the impact of the crash.
French authorities say they hope to identify the remains, which have been taken to the Institute of Forensic Research at Montpellier, by mid-January. The dead New Zealanders were senior pilot Captain Brian Horrell, 52, engineers Murray White, 37, Michael Gyles, 49, Noel Marsh, 35, and Civil Aviation Authority inspector Jeremy Cook, 58. .
A team of 12 divers will continue searching the wreckage for the remaining body this week, assisted by an observation robot being brought from Marseille. The two German pilots, who have not been named, worked for XL Airways, a German company which had leased the aircraft for two years.
German media have speculated the plane's de-icing gear might have failed resulting in it to nosedive into the sea, but the official investigation has yet to establish why the four-year-old aircraft crashed on what should have been a routine "acceptance" flight. Authorities plan to lift parts of the cockpit out of the water. The plane's black boxes have been sent to their US manufacturer for analysis, but it's unknown whether the flight data can be retrieved.

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Shakespeare gets school reprieve

Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Amajor education review that some principals fear will spell an end to Shakespeare in schools is being held back a year by the new education minister.
Anne Tolley said yesterday that a review of NCEA standards papers used to assess pupils against the curriculum would be pushed back by 12 months to ensure greater consultation with worried principals and teachers.
"The timeline was so short at a very busy time of year," Mrs Tolley said.
It means changes due to be implemented from 2010 affecting thousands of high school pupils would not come into force till 2011."
Her decision follows a meeting on Friday with the Auckland Secondary Schools Principals Association, which represents a quarter of the country's high schools. "I think it was too ambitious. .
Some members had called for a moratorium on the proposed changes, saying they would "dumb down" the education system. She had instructed officials that wider consultation was required with principals and teachers, who were responsible for implementing changes in schools.
Mrs Tolley said she would meet Education Ministry chief executive Karen Sewell today.
"They're already struggling with what they've got, so the thought of putting more assessment on them is a real concern.
Proposed increases to internal assessment had huge potential effects on teachers' workloads, Mrs Tolley said."

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100 years since Rutherford’s Nobel Prize

By MICHAEL FOX – Wednesday, 10 December 2008

PROUD MOMENT: Ernest Rutherford, described as one of the greatest-ever New Zealanders, received the Nobel Prize for his work on radioactivity on this day in 1908.

Today marks one hundred years since New Zealand's greatest scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Ernest Rutherford, described as one of the greatest-ever New Zealanders and whose face adorns our $100 bill, received the award in 1908 for his work on radioactivity."
Lord Rutherford biographer John Campbell, a physicist at Canterbury University, says Rutherford's work changed history.
His official citation for the prize reads "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances.
"He is to the atom what Darwin is to evolution, Newton to mechanics, Faraday to electricity and Einstein to relativity," he said.
"New Zealanders don't appreciate the international importance of, and immortality of Rutherford.
Rutherford's three major discoveries helped shape modern science and saw Albert Einstein call him the man who "tunnelled into the very material of God".
The discovery had huge implications, revealing atoms were not stable as was previously believed, and lead to the development of carbon dating.
His first major discovery, which earned him the Nobel Prize, was of radioactive decay and showed atoms could naturally change their structure.
The technique is still used today to date anything from fossils to artefacts.
Carbon dating helped solve a debate which had been raging between physicists – who thought the earth was relatively young – and earth scientists, who hoped it was much older.
The irony is not lost that Rutherford was himself a physicist, who had previously said: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Rutherford's revelation supported the view of the earth scientists and proved the earth was hundreds of millions of years older than previously thought. ."
Born in rural Nelson in 1871, the fourth of 12 children, Rutherford began his academic career at the Canterbury College before heading to Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England in 1895.
Rutherford's new experiments, deflecting particles off gold leaf, showed the atom was as we know it today – a nuclear structure of mostly empty space, with electrons orbiting an incredibly dense nucleus at the centre.
In 1907, the year before he received his prize, Rutherford returned to England to Manchester University where he made his second major discovery when he identified the structure of the atom.
Rutherford converted nitrogen atoms into oxygen, artificially forcing the transformation and thus ‘splitting the atom' – the feat for which he is probably best known in New Zealand.
His third major finding was in 1917 and built on his discovery of the nuclear model of the atom.
He founded the Academic Assistance Council, which helped more then 1000 German-Jewish academics find work after they were displaced by the Nazis.
Rutherford's achievements outside the lab are also formidable but not as well recognised.
Rutherford also led Allied war research during WWI into the development of sonar technology to track submarines under water.
He also campaigned for equality for women at Cambridge University and promoted scientific research for industrial development in areas such as rail and paint production.
Dr Campbell says nine future Nobel Prize winners were tutored early in their careers by Rutherford.
Described as a humble and extremely likable man who shared credit for his work, Rutherford helped with many other prize-winning experiments.
He points to the Nobel Prize committee's reason for declining Rutherford's nomination in 1923.
He points to the Nobel Prize committee's reason for declining Rutherford's nomination in 1923.
"His standing outside Sweden would not markedly increase by the award of a new Nobel Prize, nor would it markedly increase his possibilities for research, as these are already as great as possible," it said.
Auckland University physicist David Krofcheck, echoed the sentiment.
"Professor Rutherford is rightly lauded for his studies of the natural radioactive decay of atomic nuclei, but most people are not aware that he also discovered the proton, which really deserved a second Nobel Prize," he said.
Rutherford's work on protons is part of the science behind the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which has been in the news recently, he said.
Rutherford was knighted in 1914, made a member of the Order of Merit in 1925 and a Baron in 1931.
He included a Kiwi and a Maori warrior on his Coat of Arms as well as Hermes Trismegistus, the patron saint of knowledge and alchemists.
Lord Rutherford died in 1937 from hernia complications aged 66.
On his death, the New York Times summed up the legacy of a great New Zealander. "It is given to but few men to achieve immortality, still less to achieve Olympian rank, during their own lifetime. Lord Rutherford achieved both."

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Uncle devastated

By JO-McKENZIE McLEAN – Monday, 01 December 2008

The elderly uncle of one of the men killed in the Air New Zealand Airbus crash in France says his nephew planned to visit him in Christchurch this week, then take him on holiday.
Rodney Eastgate, 92, said he was close to his nephew, Jeremy Cook, 58, who worked as an airworthiness inspector for the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in Wellington.
"He had three weeks holiday, which was long overdue, and he had invited me to go to Wellington and stay with him. It was so unexpected. It's been a great shock for me. He was very popular.
"He was very outgoing and made friends very easily."
Cook is survived by his wife, Sally, and two children in their early twenties a son who was a student at Otago University and a daughter who was a speech therapist in London, Eastgate said.

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The family left for France on Saturday