The Wellington Demo Day saw highly polished presentations, with clear development plans and just as clear ‘here’s how we and our investors are going to make money’ to about 300 people at Te Papa’s Soundings Theatre. About half the audience were financiers.

Any investment secured goes to the next stage of development and expansion into global markets.

My initial underlying thought was jealousy.

Why? Because the participants have obviously learned so much.

Tui Te Hau, CEO of Wellington startup incubator Creative HQ up summed this rationale better than I can.

“Lightning Lab is turning out 30 entrepreneurs with a harder edge and keener and smarter drive to succeed than many. How far they go is up to them, but these companies are 12 weeks old and they already have more scars than most get in several years.”

These nine companies were whittled from 87 applications to LL late last year, and each received $6000 per head from a set of founding investors. By being part of a three month intensive acceleration programme, their digital concepts have been validated, built and established with early customers.

The startups have been mentored by local and international advisers, faced hard deadlines in growth targets and a structured model for accelerating early stage business growth based on international best practice.

When Te Hau talks about scars, she’s not exaggerating – but obtaining them so quickly and with the ability to ask advice such as “what should we do now” in such a concentrated manner – is something so valuable it really can’t be priced.

What is patently clear is that the 30 participants, and their wider networks, have had such an injection of entrepreneurial spirit and possibilities that multiplier spinoffs and benefits can only result for Wellington and New Zealand.

Put another way; this programme, with its hand-holding, arse-kicking and question-asking intensiveness will create a virtuous circle of increasing wealth.

And sure, like all of us, these startups have, and will make mistakes.

But, they know what needs to be done to get back on track, or alternatively how to fail-fast (and then get on with another project).

Because the Demo Day was asking for money, what can be reported publicly is limited.

Suffice to say that (and you’d have to imagine that the mentoring has been also strong in this area) the investment dollars being asked for by the startups seemed reasonable and appropriate.

Many of the companies had potential exponential growth rates, but realism ruled.

It is now up to the individual companies themselves to reveal if or what investment(s) have been made in them – and as this becomes known Lightning Lab will have its own raison d’etre validated.

For the record, those presenting were:

LearnKo – delivers online learning programs to English language organisations in Asia, harnessing Australasian tutors, training them and providing them with content to deliver through an online classroom

Publons – platform for crowd-sourced peer-review of academic articles, where academics build a reputation for their contributions. An alternative to the extremely slow, expensive and closed status quo of the past 300 years of academic publishing

Adeez – specialist mobile marketing platform, enabling brands and their agencies to increase their ROI on mobile marketing

Expander – tracking and analytics platform that protects brands by providing them with powerful tools to combat counterfeit, while connecting manufacturers and consumers

teamisto – turn a typical business sponsorship donation to an amateur sports club or team into an effective advertising channel with measurable results

Questo – works with organisations by providing a platform to create activities with incentives and rewards to engage their visitors. A mobile app and analytics engine provides the ability to track, measure and evaluate their visitors’ behaviour

promoki – social media platform that gamifies photo and video contests. Help brands co-create advertising campaigns with their audience and distribute crowd-filled media across multiple social networks

Kidsgomobile – software device to help parents teach their children to become responsible users of their first smartphone. Tool that notifies parents if their child engages in potentially risky phone behaviour and helps them resolve these issues

WIP – platform that enables professional video makers to share their work-in-progress videos with their team and clients to gather precise and meaningful feedback

Without doubt, some of these startups will go on to become much larger businesses. Without doubt too, most of them would not have got to this ‘go’ position without Lightning Lab.

The learning has been immense, and a thumbs up to those investors and sponsors who put their hands in their pockets from the get-go to kick the whole thing off.

Applications for the next Lightning Lab 2014 will open in September this year.

Gerald tries working out New Zealand growth rates for 1946-1952, contrasting Maddison’s data with others. The Reinhart-Rogoff data doesn’t look like Maddison’s. Then commenters, likely including at least one data maven from the bowels of the NZ bureaus, start helping out.

Commenter Oscar first points to an FT piece showing that Maddison uses calendar years while the Stats NZ series uses March years. Then Silverberg starts wondering whether 1951 was due to the waterside lockout or to the wool price boom, quipping:

Who would have thought that you would have to become an expert on NZ wool exports and labor relations in 1951 to decide if public debt affects economic growth.

It gets much much wonkier from there. Mark Sadowski provides a short history of the waterfront dispute and the wool boom:

I was convinced from the start of the HAP/R&R controversy that the New Zealand part of this story was explained by the 1950-1951 New Zealand Wool Boom and not the 1951 New Zealand Waterfront Dispute.

The 1952-53 New Zealand Yearbook shows that wool sales were 47.1 million NZ pounds in 1949-50, 107.5 million NZ pounds in 1950-51 and 52.7 million NZ pounds in 1951-52.

Most of this was caused by a change in price, not a change in output. The average price of wool rose from about 38 NZ pennies a pound in 1949-50 to 88 NZ pennies a pound in 1950-51 and fell back to 40 NZ pennies a pound in 1951-52. (There were 240 pennies to a New Zealand pound.) Production was about 298 million pounds in 1949-50, 294 million pounds in 1950-51 and 315 million pounds in 1951-52.

According to the HAP/R&R dataset New Zealand’s nominal GDP (NGDP) was 1.101 billion NZ pounds in 1949, 1.396 billion NZ pounds in 1950 and 1.446 billion NZ pounds in 1951, so that was a substantial proportion of New Zealand’s economy.

A good paper about the New Zealand Wool Boom is here.

I can’t locate a free copy, nor can I save a PDF file I can cut and paste but I would summarize the episode as follows.

Demand for wool had been strong since WW II ended but supply had been unresponsive to elevated prices. When the Korean War started in June 25, 1950 there was an immediate elevation in the price of wool. Between that date and March of 1951 the price of wool went up two to three fold depending on grade (lower grades went up more, mainly because that was the kind of wool the military was buying). Demand wasn’t simply driven by US military stockpiling as retailers actually used rising prices to induce even higher sales.

In January 26, 1951 the United States Office of Price Stabilization (OPS) imposed a general price ceiling measure designed to freeze the pre-war price-wage structure. The price ceiling on wool brought trading in Boston (the central US wool market) to a standstill and caused US participation in New Zealand wool auctions to more or less cease. This led to falling New Zealand prices until February 7 when an emergency exemption was granted to the US military through April 1. This caused prices to recover but once the exemption expired prices fell sharply. By June 1951 they had fallen by 50% and by March 1952 they had fallen a total of 70%.

Now, my sense from reading the history of the Waterfront Dispute is that it was less a strike than a lockout. The government brought in 3000 troops an unknown number of scabs to keep the dockyards running, and thereby crush the union.

The 1954 New Zealand Official Yearbook shows the Cargo Manifest Tonnage “cleared” (exports) fell from 1,163,934 tons in 1950 to 1,129,629 tons in 1951. It rose up to 1,173,577 tons in 1952.

In other words the mass of cargo moved fell by only 2.9% and rose by 3.9% the following year.

What about the actual value of exports? Exports *rose* from 183,752,000 NZ pounds in 1950 to 248,127,000 NZ pounds in 1951, and fell back to 240,561,000 NZ pounds in 1952

Wool exports rose from 74,653,000 NZ pounds in 1950 to 128,176,000 NZ pounds in 1951 and fell to 81,998,000 NZ pounds in 1952. Note that wool exports increased by over 70% in 1951 and amounted to nearly 52% of all exports that year.

So it would appear that the 1951 Dockyard Dispute had little effect on actual exports.

[note: links tidied from source]

And all of this over one cell in a rather large Excel table. Raise a toast tonight to the wonks whose work provides every cell of every spreadsheet on which we rely.

* Except at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, somehow.

No, seriously - ignore the atrocious cover image & listen to the ideas therein. (I suppose one could argue that the image would get more people to view Thunderf00t's message than a more mundane title, but would those who came for the cars & women stay for the serious sci-comm message?)

One concern with the paper is individuals who were not taught certain aspects of the NCEA Level 3 curriculum. This is a major issue that has resulted from the preference of schools to not teach certain aspects of the course. There NEEDS to be consultation to standardise the NCEA curriculum as well as ensuring that the gap is bridged with communication between teriary education providers and secondary education providers. As I understand it there is significant concern over the changed NCEA Level 3 Biology course, which now does not teach genetics in year 13. I don't know the answer in the resolution of this issue, however it will greaty impact on future acedemic success as well as future funding when grades drop.

This student has hit the nail squarely on the head. Teachers reading this will be working on the following Achievement Standards with their year 12 students this year (where previously gene expression was handled in year 13): AS91157 Demonstrate understanding of genetic variation and change, and AS91159: Demonstrate understanding of gene expression. (You'll find the Biology subject matrix here.)

And as my student says, this has the potential to cause real problems unless the university staff concerned have made it their business to be aware of these changes and to consider their impact. For the 2014 cohort of students coming in to introductory biology classes will have quite different prior learning experiences (& not just in genetics) from those we are teaching this year and taught in previous years. We cannot continue as we have done in the past.

Richard Treadgold, New Zealand climate pseudosceptic and blogger

I have often got into heated debate with this guy – my main concern being his willingness to effectively accuse honest climate scientists, include New Zealand scientists, of scientific fraud. He also has a bad habit of misrepresenting climate science and climate scientists on his blog Climate Conversation Group. I have often raised with him his moral obligation to apologise for such misrepresentation and accusations (see Apologies would be nice).

Without result. But now he has apologised for recently misrepresenting local climate scientist Dr James Renwick (see Hide sticks it to Renwick,  Renowden a scaring warmist,  and  Renwick blames drought on man-made global warming, which has been now changed to Renwick doesn’t blame AGW for drought).

In his post today, Climate porkies from TV One, Richard actually says (and we have to get this on record):

“I apologise to Dr Renwick for misquoting him so badly — that is, over a statement so disastrously incorrect.”

So, good on you, Richard.

This whole incident started with Richards thoughtless endorsement (Hide sticks it to Renwick) of a snakey NBR article by failed NZ ultra-conservative politician Rodney Hide (see Faith, not facts, drives global warming) and I won’t rehash the time line here (read my posts “Incontrovertible” is it, Rodney?,  Confusion and distortion – has global warming stopped?   and  Pseudosceptics are at it again – misrepresenting and attacking climate scientists for details).

Richard admits he wrote his misleading posts “after reading the transcript and studying the video,” but the final blow for him seems to be Renwick’s email which “politely confirmed that he never blamed the drought on global warming: “This is just not so.””

I believe the transcript and video were extremely clear and am surprised Richard’s apology only came after personal confirmation from Renwick  (see transcript at Lack of govt leadership on climate change – Renwick, and video of interview at Q+A: Corin Dann interviews Dr James Renwick).

Mind you, some other climate pseudosceptics are more resistant than Richard. On of the commenters on Richards blog responded to Renwick’s confirmation by accusing him of “splitting hairs.” And one faithful climate change denier on twitter I debated  refused to take the video and transcript as evidence – instead claiming that the offending claim had been made while the camera wasn’t running, or had been edited out. Poor soul.

I am also aware that local climate change pseudosceptics will have not qualms twisting Renwick’s confirmation into another misrepresentation. Some of the commenters on Richard’s blog already seem to be doing so. Renwick’s confirmation – that he never declared global warming had directly caused our recent extreme drought and that there was no other explanation -  to mean he claims that global warming will play no role in future extreme weather events. Richard himslef comments:

“. . it’s useful to have his firm statement on record that weather events are not caused by global warming. Everyone and his dog has been looking around at this warm record or that storm and saying that’s global warming, we’re all doomed. It will be handy to slap them with Renwick’s authoritative statement.”

Let’s be clear, the current scientific thought is that while one can never prove a direct link to specific events, global warming will probably increase the frequency of such extreme weather events in the future. Renwick made this clear in the interview – read the transcript Richard.

Meanwhile, I hope Treagold’s ethical chickens really have come home to roost for good – there are still a few apologies outstanding. For example his egregious  claim that NIWA scientists had manipulated New Zealand temperature data to create evidence for warming (see  his infamous article “Are we getting warmer yet?” and my posts New Zealand’s denier-gate and Painted into a corner?).

However, let’s celebrate this rather rare event – a scientists getting an apology foir their misrepresentation.

There’s a few other New Zealand bloggers who should take note and start thinking about their own ethical obligations.

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