We all currently work at McAuley High School, a decile 1 Catholic girls’ school in Otahuhu. 88% of our students identify as Pasifika and a further 5% are Māori. Last year our NCEA results were a minimum of 21% above national roll-based pass rates at all three levels of NCEA. Our Pasifika students were a minimum of 32% above national Pasifika achievement rates, and at least 5% above the achievement rates for European students, again at all three levels of NCEA. Furthermore 100% of our 2011 cohort left with Level 1, 97.5% left with Level 2 and 71.2% left with Level 3.

Our Pasifika and non-Pasifika staff alike, take exception to Uesifili Unasa’s claim that the children of the poor are not taught and that we do not celebrate the Pacific-ness of our students. We certainly ‘want to’ and work extremely hard to continue to develop our understanding of ‘how to’ do so. Our results speak for themselves, and we see no evidence in our daily work of the “institutionalised second rate status reserved for ambitious poor Pasifika kids” of which the author talks. We also do not spend our extremely busy days “handwringing and writing endless reports” as stated by Susan St John, although we do support her point that the negative effects of poverty are both varied and many in our society. They are, of course, not an excuse for students not to achieve.

Dame Anne Salmond’s claim that success for Māori and Pasifika students “is not rocket science” demeans the extremely challenging but rewarding work we do every day. Whilst she is quick to criticise other initiatives, we would point out that comments about magic bullets as in – “just do these few ‘simple things’ and all will be well” are unhelpful at best. We are not part of the Starpath initiative and yet the evidence based practice of which she speaks is deeply embedded in our school culture. We can’t imagine how the schools involved in the project must feel to be criticised for not having these purportedly ‘simple and effective’ strategies already in place. Surely working with the schools to support on-going improvement would be a key element of any such project.

We would also point out that Dame Anne’s own use of ‘evidence’ is somewhat selective – the Annual Report for 2011 for the Starpath initiative talks only of increases in each of the five schools participating, but gives no measure of how large these were beyond the comments that there has been “some success in matching national pass rates” and that “the effects are variable across schools and time, but show consistent improvement at NCEA Levels 1 and 2”. The report also states that one school had parent participation rise from 15% to 85%. Our rudimentary analysis showed that in the five Phase 1 Starpath schools and across the three levels of NCEA there was improvement from 2009 to 2010 in 9 of these 15 roll based pass rates. Unfortunately this has not been sustained with the data in 2011 showing a decrease in 10 of the 15 pass rates, 6 of these to below the pass rates achieved in 2009. We suggest this is further evidence that there is no magic bullet in education. That said, it is wonderful that improvements in achievement are occurring in some areas of these schools. We feel an article focusing on these successes, whilst acknowledging both the hard work done by all concerned and the areas in which improvement could still be made would have been far more useful in advancing the cause of success for Māori and Pasifika students.

We believe fervently that it is a multitude of interconnected factors that contribute to our success and rigorous self-review of such that enables us to continue to have our students achieve at the highest possible levels. We would also certainly acknowledge the excellent support of our parent community and our motivated and hard-working students whose efforts and achievements are devalued by the airing of such ill-informed viewpoints.

Our strongly held view is that articles such as these do little to inform the debate around Māori and Pasifika achievement in New Zealand and respectfully suggest that their publication diminishes those of us working in the sector. The irony is that such opinions, which are not evidence-based, should be written by staff of a university that prides itself on being New Zealand’s pre-eminent research institution.

Louise Addison BA, BSc, DipTchg, PGDipEd

John Bower BA, GradDipTchg

Tim Gasson BTheol, GradDipTchg

Bridget Houghton BPE

Bronwyn Houliston MA, GradDipTchg

Salome Ioane MEd(Hons)

Makerita Loto BA, BSc, GradDipTchg

Moyeen McCoy MA(Hons), DipTessol

Angela McLaughlin BA, DipTchg

Christine Plank MEd(Hons)

Miles Sengers MSc(Hons), DipTchg

Victoria Sullivan BA, DipTchg, PGDipEd

Alicia Tapu Tauiliili BA, Dip Tchg

Rachel Williams BSc, DipTchg

What people wanted was a way of looking at New Zealand art and artefacts, Professor Detmar Straub argued, with expert knowledge supplied creatively to create opportunities for focused immersion. A new smartphone application for use with works in the University’s art collection combines text, image and the voice of the artist to give just such an experience.

Back in 2008 when the National Gallery in London developed LoveArt, its application for the iPhone profiling 250 works in its collection, there was nothing else like it.

LoveArt has clocked up 250,000 downloads, putting it in the top 10 percent of all the apps available worldwide. Four years later, there are 425,000 applications for iPhone and Androids, and art collections are scrambling to capitalise on the success of the National Gallery’s initiative.

A recent survey by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa of 1600 visitors found that over half (52 percent) had an internet-enabled phone that could play apps. The University of Auckland’s student body of over 40,000 and nearly 5,000 staff is even more technologically endowed. The University Library mobile app met with instant success and huge uptake when it was introduced over a year ago, and now the Art Collection has tiptoed into this arena with an adaptation of the MyTours platform first spotted at Webstock by NICAI Professional Staff member Brent Simpson.

With ten art works featured, The University of Auckland Art Collection tour leads the curious around sculptures and paintings in public spaces. Beginning with AD Schierning’s bronze ginkgo tree plaque on Princes Street (an art work commissioned by Auckland City’s public art team in conjunction with the Learning Quarter art intitiative), the tour combines images of the work with a short text explaining who the artist is, what the work is, where it is, when it was made and why it is significant. Short recordings of the artist speaking about the work can also be listened to by those who remembered to bring their earbuds.

Unlike the National Gallery tour which links the art works by themes (love, passion, death and beauty), The University of Auckland Art Collection app at this stage just includes art works that have size and immovable public placement in common. From Princes Street, the tour takes in the Alberto Garcia-Alvarez ceramic “Cognitive Mind” affixed to the side of the Maths-Science Building before leading up to Symonds Street and past the new Francis Upritchard sculpture, “Loafers”, on the overbridge to Peter Nicholls’ “Measure”, hidden in the courtyard beside Building 421 housing the Schools of Architecture and Planning and Dance Studies.

During office hours, the large Claudia Pond Eyley and Pat Hanly mural “Flying Colours of Invention” can be visited in the Conference Centre foyer, while the Paul Hartigan neon in the Engineering lecture theatre block is best viewed at night. The tour crosses Symonds Street again to discover Chiara Corbelletto’s “Twins” beside the Kate Edger Information Commons (and perhaps the coffee shop adjacent) and then leads to the General Library, while stopping to admire Neil Dawson’s vertical sculpture Chevron en route. Finishing with two works by women artists made 40 years apart, Sarah Munro’s digitally enhanced image of a face called “Socket” and Robin White’s iconic “Sam Hunt at Bottle Creek”, the tour ends on Floor 1 of the General Library.

Reading all the text, and playing all the audio files, as well as walking between the art works will take the average able-bodied art enthusiast around three hours, allowing for coffee and comfort stops en route. As well as giving staff, students, alumni and others who undertake it a sense of accomplishment, it will introduce new audiences to the many and varied art treasures in the University’s care.

Linda Tyler, Director of the University’s Centre for New Zealand Art Research and Discovery.

Trustee and former neighbour and friend James Hill told the story of Eve’s background, of how she and her parents had to escape the persecution of Jews in Vienna in 1938. Eve’s father was a medical doctor and had to retrain in New Zealand, as well as learning a new language. Eve was bright and took to education – and to one of her lecturers, Ralph. The two went on to study at Oxford, Eve later becoming a prominent anaesthetist, assisting with pioneering heart surgery.

“Eve considered that New Zealand had been fantastic to her and her family and she and Ralph never took their education for granted. They both felt that they wanted to give something back to New Zealand.”

The discussions that followed led to the Ralph & Eve Seelye Charitable Trust being established in early 2004. While assisting in general charitable causes, the trust has a strong emphasis on education. It funds eminent researchers to visit The University of Auckland, and supports exceptional students across medical sciences, humanities and economics. To date, 38 fellowships and seven undergraduate/postgraduate scholarships have been awarded, with Eve actively involved as a trustee right up until her death in November 2010.

Seelye Scholarship recipient Marina Sardelic has found the financial support of great benefit while completing a conjoint degree in Law and Commerce. She hopes to sit her Law professionals next year and begin a career in the commercial field.

“It was great to learn more about Eve Seelye and her husband Ralph and the vision behind their generosity. Education was something they valued highly as it had contributed to their lives in such a profound way and they wanted to see it do the same for others,” she said.

University staff attending the event included the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart McCutcheon, and the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Professor John Morrow, who spoke in his role as Chair of the Seelye Selection Committee.

What you may not know is that the electromagnets used for embedding these ions are made at a factory in South Auckland using technology that was spawned from pure physics research at The University of Auckland – long before cell phones and silicon-based computers were developed.

In 1968, PhD student Hilton Glavish completed his physics research building an intense polarised ion source for use in the study of spin angular momentum effects in nuclear reactions. This attracted overseas attention and soon he was designing polarised ion sources in the University’s Department of Physics while the physical components were built by a young Auckland engineer, Bill Buckley.

When Hilton joined the Physics Faculty at Stanford University, the two men continued to collaborate across the Pacific. As Hilton became an acknowledged expert on ion beams and the complex electromagnets required to control them, they turned their expertise to designing and building the implanter beam lines which had rapidly become the preferred method for manufacturing transistors on silicon.

Bill’s company, Buckley Systems Limited, has now become a world leader in the manufacture of the electromagnets and vacuum systems used in ion beam lines, not only for the ion implanter industry, but also for the medical industry and the synchrotrons used in international nuclear laboratories. In September 2011 he was named New Zealand’s Ernst & Young New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year.

Hilton went on to form his own company, Zimec, in the USA and continues to design and patent ion accelerators and devices for the semi-conductor industry. His latest project with Bill, in conjunction with Nissin Ion Equipment of Japan, is high-definition silicon flat panel displays as large as 1500mm × 2300mm. The machines that implant the ions in these weigh 25 tonnes and contain the largest electromagnet ever built by Buckley Systems Ltd; they are already being produced at the rate of three per month.

“This $100 million a year industry in South Auckland has stemmed from the original pure research and good physics conducted at The University of Auckland,” says Bill. And that’s why, in 2004, he and Hilton jointly donated $1.5 million to endow a chair in Physics at the University. It was one of the first chairs of this kind in the world and was created for the purpose of applying physics research to a problem of great global significance, namely climate change.

“Just as pure physics research has spawned unimaginable industries in the past, I think this may well happen again with respect to climate change,” says Hilton, who won a University of Auckland Distinguished Alumni Award in 2005.

Now he and Bill are also funding a senior lectureship in climate physics at the University, to consolidate this work. “We wanted to give something back to the University,” says Bill.

“And we wanted it to be new, exciting and in a field where New Zealand could make a mark,” adds Hilton.

www.buckleysystems.com

www.zimec.com

This story was first published in Auckland Now, Issue 9, December 2011

That’s what sticks out from interviewing School of Architecture 1978 alumnus and New York-based cinematographer, Stuart Dryburgh.

It’s his phrase – he’s talking about the interesting places his job takes him and directs the conversation beyond a geographic answer to an experiential one: “I worked with a Chinese gaffer who had done a lot of the Ye Liu and Shi-Zheng movies, a fantastically skilful technician. We didn’t share a word of common language. We didn’t use an interpreter. We would point and jabber on in our own languages; we very quickly established a great working relationship – a delicious man – .”

Stuart Dryburgh is the talent behind the camera of The Piano, An Angel at My Table, Once Were Warriors, and In My Father’s Den: iconic New Zealand films that are etched into the collective Kiwi memory. Since leaving these shores in 1995 he’s been the director of photography on A Portrait of a Lady, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Runaway Bride, The Tempest and the HBO Sex in the City pilot among others.

“Although I didn’t get any formal training in film I am often applying what amounts to design theory to the process,” he says harking back to his architectural studies. From his early times he was influenced by other cinematographers: the films of Rainer Fassbinder shot by Michael Ballhaus which used a lot of colour to emphasise mood, a film called Lola which was very distinctly coloured. “It came from the Europeans – Robby Muller, the Dutch-Antilles cinematographer of Paris Texas – who used colour to support emotional tone. It was work that I liked and wanted to emulate.”

“Certainly in The Piano, in which the main character didn’t speak, we were very much using the language of photography and colour to signify place, mood and tone.” He shies away from any particular imprint on his films other than “a thread of a certain lighting style and an affinity for colour. “I try to make the photography of each film primarily serve the story we are telling rather than impose a cookie cutter style – and hopefully that works.”

Surprisingly Stuart’s first passion was radio. He seriously considered an apprenticeship at the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation but was talked out of it in favour of doing something academic. “Maybe my dad, an architect, sold me architecture taking me to local architect association meetings and parties with these pretty interesting and flamboyant individuals, as was the Wellington scene in the late 60s. I wanted to join their club…”

By Stuart’s own definition, he wasn’t a very good student. “I had fits and spurts of achievement [at University]. To be honest, it was such an interesting time to be young and in Auckland there was a lot happening.” He pieces together a 70s montage: The Vietnam War was on and Auckland’s big anti-war mobilisation became the catalyst for one of his earliest forays into photography shooting with a friend and then art director for the University’s student rag Craccum, architect Malcolm Walker.

“We learnt how to cook the film up to stretch its ASA so we could shoot at night without a flash and go back to the darkroom to make the prints.

“The Australian film industry exploded. We were getting films from across the ditch by Australians about Australia. Being New Zealanders we were instantly competitive. It was literally: ‘We don’t have a film industry we have to invent one’.

David Blyth was at the University making punk movies; Judy Reimer went to work at the National Film Unit as an editor; Roger Donaldson made the first really big movie here, Sleeping Dogs.

Nishizawa’s work ranges from small houses to large sports facilities and has received numerous awards, particularly for his innovative use of wood and timber structures. He was Japan Institute of Architects Young Architect of the Year in 2005 and was selected by Architectural Record magazine as one of the world’s top 10 ‘Design Vanguard’ architects.

His best known project is the Forestry Hall To-mochi, a sports hall commissioned as part of the famous Kumamoto Artpolis program which matches public building projects with exciting young architects. He also recently completed a house as part of a to design a house for the future. Nishizawa’s design included a translucent ceiling that modulates light in harmony with the daily routines of the house’s occupants, and a façade of door-like panels that allow almost the entire perimeter to be opened up to the environment.

Nishizawa will be speaking at the University on 23 May as part of the School’s annual Communiqué lecture series. For more information: www.creative.auckland.ac.nz/communique or www.nzwood.co.nz

The Goldwater Wine Science Centre has been established with its first group of students getting acquainted with the vineyard’s facilities and practices. “It really is an immersive experience for the students. Our commercial team of professional wine makers get to introduce a wide variety of practical activities that sit outside the more academic experience to their education,” says Ken Christie, General Manager for Goldie Wines.

The first selection of wines released from the vineyard has proven very popular with the 2010 Goldie Chardonnay, the 2011 Island Chardonnay and the 2010 Island Rose all selling out. The vineyard has also released its first Goldie Cabernet Merlot Franc from the 2010 vintage – a move which should prove popular with those familiar with the quality of the Goldwater Cabernet Merlots.

“We’ve had strong interest in Goldie Wines from alumni through various alumni events held on the vineyard. The ability for alumni to purchase Goldie wines provides a tangible benefit to putting money towards education. By buying Goldie Wines alumni are supporting the University while receiving outstanding value for money in the process.” Purchasing wine has also been made simpler with the range now available through an online buying system on The University of Auckland’s Campus Store. Alumni pricing is available by entering the keyword “Alumni”, with savings of between 20 and 29% off recommended retail prices with the added incentive of free delivery.

To place an order, please visit www.aucklandcampusstore.com or contact Ken Christie directly on 09 923 5913

“The artist and film-maker Len Lye had such a colourful personality and eventful life that he fulfills the criteria for the central character of an opera,” says Roger, “but he was always such an innovator that we need to do things differently to be true to his spirit.” The opera brings together top-notch professionals from the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries at the University. The music is by leading composer Eve de Castro-Robinson.

The libretto comes from the author of the best-selling biography of Len Lye, Roger Horrocks. The Artistic Director and conductor, Uwe Grodd, enjoys a flourishing, international career. The opera will be directed by Murray Edmond, known for his innovative work as a director and dramaturge and award-winning filmmaker Shirley Horrocks is creating the moving images for the stage which will be designed by John Verryt. The opera will also feature a superb cast of singers including James Harrison (London) in the lead role as Len and stunning soprano Ursula Langmayr (Vienna), as well as New Zealand favourites Carmel Carroll and Anna Pierard.

“Lye died in 1980 but his thinking was ahead of his time,” says Horrocks. He used to say: ‘I think my art will be pretty good for the 21st century,’ and that is being borne out by the rising interest in his work. So there’s no contradiction involved in making ‘a 21st century opera’ about such an original 20th century artist!”

Len Lye: the opera will premiere 5th-8th September at the Maidment Theatre. Visit www.lenlyeopera.auckland.ac.nz

He heads New Zealand’s largest health research and professional training institution, with a 2012 roll of more than 4,000 students and 1,000 staff. The faculty is ranked in the top one percent of biomedical universities in the world.

John’s groundbreaking research in molecular aspects of the immune response was ignited during his postdoctoral years in the laboratories of Professor Jack Strominger at Harvard University, where his work led to the investigation of the structure, function and role in disease of superantigenic toxins.

John’s research resulted in the now widely accepted model of how superantigens work.

“We’ve got very good reason to believe that the outer edge of our solar system is 500 – 1000 times further out than we first thought,” he says. “We have a pretty good idea what our solar system out to Pluto and Neptune looks like … and a little beyond. But somewhere around Pluto it becomes too faint to detect with any telescope.”

Charles, who heads up the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) with a staff of some 900 and a budget of over $100 million, made his reputation in the 1990s when he and a colleague at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California engineered a telescope system to look for a phenomenon called Gravitational Microlensing.

This is based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and is now used by astrophysicists around the world to monitor Into space and beyond millions of stars each night.

“If you have a distant star and any object or mass passes between us and the distant star, it creates a gravitation field which acts like a magnifying lens making the object appear brighter,” explains Charles.

“Only one star in two million might be magnified at any one time so we developed a telescope and camera system that could measure 30 million in a night.”

His team took dozens of images of the sky and then measured the brightness of 10 or 20 million stars. “We kept coming back night after night. We would get a digital image on the star in the sky and then with computer algorithms we could measure the brightness of every star we were looking at – all of this was automated and we wrote all our own analysis codes.”

Using these Gravitational Lensing techniques and simple maths equations and physical laws, Charles and his team tried to monitor dark matter, often called MACHOS (massive compact halo objects) and WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles), which make up at least 20 percent of the Universe.

Amid screeds of data, his first major success came when he detected a star brightening over weeks, before fading again indicating a massive, too-faint or invisible object (dark matter) passing in front of it. Over the next six years 15 more events were observed.

As a direct result of this Gravitational Lensing work, Charles got the job at the CfA in 2004. Today he leads projects across the globe – building a Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, for example, or installing a radio telescope in Greenland – but he’s kept one research project “alive for myself. And it’s much closer to home than my previous research,” he chuckles.

Using techniques similar to microlensing and collaborating with scientists and astrophysicists in Taiwan and with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he aims to go where no man has yet gone before – documenting and surveying what are called the Kuiper belt objects in our outer solar system.

“We’ve just had no observations out there,” he says. “And the reason that’s the case is that the objects appear to be rather small, smaller than Pluto, maybe only a few kilometres in diameter. We see them in reflected sunlight. The further away they get, the fainter they get. So I’m developing an indirect technique to detect these. It’s very much like microlensing. We follow bright stars and can watch an object a few kilometres in diameter pass between us and in front of a star. It blinks it out briefly and from the frequency of these events we can determine how many of these objects there are. And then from how dark the star goes and how long the events last, using our equations, we can determine how big these objects are.

What makes it challenging is that these events are over in a second or so. We have to take measurements 20 or 30 times a second and analyse all our data 20 or 30 times a second. So a very significant amount of technology development is going on.” As well as a laboratory and advanced ground-based telescopes at the CfA, the project has a small system of telescopes in Taiwan and a second generation system is being developed in Mexico. In parallel with this programme, Charles’s team is collaborating with NASA’s Jet Propulsion lab and will try and do some of this work in space.

“The advantage of space is that it’s such a clean environment.”

For Charles, the quest to probe our outer solar system is “thrilling”.

“We think that when the planets were formed, particularly the larger ones – Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn – they moved around a great deal in the first tens of millions of years so our solar system was a very dynamic place.

“What’s interesting,” he adds, is that “while the big planets were doing this they scattered or kicked everything else out. They were gravitational bullies. A lot of bits ended up in the outer solar system so when we study it now in some senses we’re studying the fossils of this early period.”