Fry Up: Nation building

Are you listening Mr Joyce?

Nation building

It’s completely unscientific, but according to Orion Health CEO Ian McCrae, there are three times more jobs in IT than there are in all of the traditional scientific fields - biology, physics and chemistry - put together (he came to this conclusion after studying the TradeMe jobs site).

McCrae wants IT to be the first, and the most, important, science taught in schools. He’s fed up with IT being on a par with cookery and woodwork in the school curriculum. But who will teach this mega-IT (mega being the prefix du jour) science, when the average salary in education is $50,000 per annum and the average in IT is $85,000?

McCrae, who has five children, says he went to a parent/teacher interview once where the teacher handed him a curriculum vitae. His first thought was, ‘it’s not bad’.

How does Fry Up know this?

We listened to his interview on Radio NZ this morning.

And we read about his ideas first in Computerworld.

How to create a hi-tech nation
IT should become the fourth science in schools


Are you listening Mr Joyce?

We know that the Minister of Economic Development, who is also Minister of Science and Innovation, and Minister of Tertiary Education, and was previously Minister of ICT, Steven Joyce, is tweeting - his second ever tweet was delivered this week when Parliament was sitting, it was “Hello, Hello... is this thing working?”.

We know that the Minister of Economic Development..... Joyce is speaking – he delivered an address to Asia Pacific Science Policy Studies Research Conference in Wellington yesterday – it ended with this resounding paragraph:

“To paraphrase Ernest Rutherford with a quote I have used more than once in the context of developing the ultra-fast broadband project: “We don’t have a lot of money, so we will just have to think”. And that, of course, is the essence of innovation!”

But is the Minister of Everything listening?

Innovation at the White House

This in from Gawker: At a Science Fair held at the White House yesterday for a Science Fair an eighth grader called was the "unofficial winner of everything", the site reports.

Obama: Okay, can we demonstrate? Is it not safe to shoot a marshmallow in here?

Joey: Well, at 30 PSI, it will go 176 feet, so...

Obama: So it would, like, hit the wall up there?

Joey: Yeah.

Obama: Would it stick?

“Two excellent questions from the commander-in-chief,” says Gawker.

And we agree.