What a Difference three years has made to the Media Class
Out the book came on its triennial pre-election rotation shaming mission this time of the military. Broadcasters adopted solemn visages to hype the soufflé. Print columnists responded piously in their customary and secondary Pavlovian pick-up role.
The public responded. With indifference. The media class had flailed away at the usual levers. They were no longer connected.
Less than a year has passed since the two New Zealand newspaper chains first lodged their merger application with the Commerce Commission. Yet industrially it is an epoch ago. It is as if during these 11 months that the age sail had given way to steam which in turn had given way to internal combustion. Consider what has happened during this short space of time:-
What a difference three years makes. What a difference 11 months makes.
The free model meanwhile scythes at ever accelerating speed through the communications sector, notably books and newspapers.
In the sector at large there remains though some curious ironies. For example this week Spark’s Xtra subscribers found that accessing what they were paying for, their email service, was labyrinthinely complex, if possible at all.
While access to the Spark free news service was instantaneous.
| From The MSCNewsWire reporters' desk || Wednesday 5 April 2017 |||
Foreign Minister Murray McCully welcomes the Angolan Minister of External Relations Georges Rebelo Pinto Chikoti, who he will meet in Wellington today.
“This visit presents an opportunity to deepen this relationship, including through discussing ways to increase trade flows. Angola had one of the fastest-growing economies of the past decade, and appointed its first ever Ambassador to New Zealand, resident in Singapore, last year,” Mr McCully says.
“New Zealand and Angola served together as non-permanent members of the UN Security Council from 2015–2016. Angola is a leader in the Southern African region, and it provides an important voice on African peace and security issues. Our mutual Security Council terms also provided an opportunity for increased engagement between our two countries.”
While in New Zealand, Minister Chikoti has also met with the Minister of Trade and the Minister for Primary Industries, and will discuss business opportunities with the fisheries sector.
| A Beehive release || April 05, 2017 |||
Air New Zealand has today revealed a new Economy seat design at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg to be introduced on the airline’s Airbus A320/A321neo (new engine option) fleet.
The airline has worked with UK aerospace seating company Acro Aircraft Seating on the slim-line design, a key feature of which is wider seats. The window and aisle seats will be one centimetre wider than those on the airline’s current international Airbus fleet, with the middle seat three centimetres wider ensuring a better sense of personal space across the row.
The design also features a new seat cover developed in conjunction with New Zealand company Flight Interiors which customer testing has demonstrated delivers superior comfort levels for longer.
Air New Zealand General Manager Customer Experience Anita Hawthorne says the design of the new seat was customer-led with the airline and Acro keen to address key areas of customer feedback and further improve the inflight experience.
“The slightly wider middle seat helps balance out the fact that window and aisle seat customers enjoy a greater sense of space. We currently have many customers who state a preference for window or aisle seats and it’s possible the new design may see the middle seat get a boost in popularity.
“We have a long history of innovating and of thinking outside the box for solutions so we were fortunate to work alongside a like-minded partner such as Acro. We believe what we’ve co-designed is not only practical from an operational perspective but importantly a more comfortable and spacious experience for our customers,” says Ms Hawthorne.
Acro Chief Executive Officer Chris Brady says the seat attracted plenty of attention at the Aircraft Interiors Expo when it was unveiled today.
“To reveal the new seat at this event, which showcases all the very latest innovations, technologies and products for cabin interiors was hugely exciting and piqued a lot of interest in the new product from other airlines and the wider industry alike,” Mr Brady says.
Air New Zealand has 13 Airbus A320neo aircraft on order to replace its current A320 fleet. The airline will receive a combination of A320neo and A321neo.
| An Air New Zealand release || April 05, 2017 |||
Corrections has signed up its 100th employer to offer prisoners jobs in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Waste Management today, says Corrections Minister Louise Upston.
The partnership will see Waste Management work with Corrections and offer prisoners jobs when they are released, including drivers, administration, computer operator, runners, landfill operators, general operators, labourers, diesel mechanics and call centre roles.
“It’s great to have Waste Management on board,” says Ms Upston. “There is huge potential in this partnership and I look forward to seeing it to develop and offer more employment opportunities for prisoners on release.
“Through these partnerships, Corrections is providing employers with motivated and skilled workers for a wide range of meaningful jobs.”
“We know that having stable employment plays a huge role in reducing the likelihood of reoffending once someone leaves prison. That is good for the prisoner, their whanau and the communities they return to.”
Alongside Waste Management, other employers that have signed MoUs with Corrections include Global Bus and Horticulture NZ to provide career training and sustainable employment.
Corrections delivers a wide range of education and employment training programmes in prisons including horticulture, manufacturing, construction, painting and hospitality. In the last financial year, around 9000 offenders were engaged in employment-related activities.
“The training and rehabilitation programmes in prison ensure that these people are well-equipped with quality, employable skills that are widely recognised by employers,” says Ms Upston.
“Many prisoners have limited work experience before going to prison and it’s fantastic to see these programmes making a real difference and helping get them successfully placed into employment.”
Corrections has its own recruitment service to connect offenders with meaningful jobs once they are released from prison. Over the past five months, around 300 people with convictions have been placed into long-term, sustainable jobs.
Corrections has also run an Employment Support Service over the last three years which provides job placement and in-work support for prisoners due for release and for offenders on community sentences. To date the programme has helped 137 offenders find jobs.
To support Corrections’ employment partnerships, Ms Upston will be hosting employer breakfasts in Hamilton, Christchurch and Wellington over the next few months. Employers will be invited to come and learn more about partnering with Corrections to provide jobs for offenders.
| A Beehive release || April 04, 2017 |||
Water may cover the majority of the planet's surface, but thanks to a huge helping of salt, it's hard to tap into as a source of drinking water. Once again, graphene could come to the rescue. Researchers at the University of Manchester have developed a graphene-oxide membrane with a scalable, uniform pore size that can filter out even the smallest salts, without affecting the flow of water too much.
Desalination plants already use a variety of techniques to produce safe drinking water, including shocking the salt and water into separating, using salt-attracting membranes, or harnessing the power of ocean waves to purify water and pump it back to shore. Graphene has already lent a hand before, too, acting like a big sponge that sits on the water's surface, drawing water up through it and cleaning it in the process.
The wonder material has also been put to work as a water filtering membrane that performed well at removing some particles, organic molecules and salts, but according to the Manchester researchers, it couldn't catch the smallest common salt ions. That's thanks to the fact that these membranes tend to swell up when submerged in water, which messes with the spacing between the graphene-oxide layers and lets the salt molecules slip through with the water.
The Manchester researchers claim they've found a way to limit how much the membranes swell in water, by physically confining the material. That allows them to precisely tune the size of the pores, and keep out the unwanted salts, particles and molecules by simply making them smaller than the diameter of the common salt ions. The team reports that 97 percent of sodium chloride ions are rejected by the membrane, while still allowing water to flow through fairly freely.
Scalability is one of the big factors in how viable the method is, and the researchers believe that their graphene-oxide membrane could comfortably scale both up and down. Upwards, and the method could help improve the efficiency of desalination plants. Scaling down, the filters themselves could be used as inexpensive water purifiers for developing countries with limited access to clean water or large-scale desalination plants.
"Realization of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology," says Professor Rahul Nair, co-author of the study. "This is the first clear-cut experiment in this regime. We also demonstrate that there are realistic possibilities to scale up the described approach and mass produce graphene-based membranes with required sieve sizes."
Longer term, the team points out that the basic idea of tuning the pore sizes to filter out specific ions could be applied to different membranes, for different purposes.
"The developed membranes are not only useful for desalination, but the atomic scale tunability of the pore size also opens new opportunity to fabricate membranes with on-demand filtration capable of filtering out ions according to their sizes," says Jijo Abraham, co-lead author of the study.
| The research was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. \ April 5, 2017 |||