1. 

   Photo by Miho Tsumakura

   UCOL’s Andy Halewood has had his sun lounger accepted in a Waiheke Island-based design exhibition (picture below). I think it will get more media coverage than last year’s sideboard exhibition.

    

    

2. Following up on the beach theme, Environment Bay of Plenty is funding a professorial chair in coastal science at the University of Waikato. Waikato is doing a lot of work in this area, recently launching a research project with the University of Bremen (Germany) in the same area.
3. Maurice Williamson announced on Friday that the builder licensing scheme will be streamlined.
4. Helen Clark will receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Auckland – she was a former politics lecturer at the University before her practical politics career took off.
5. A Whakatane teenager is returning to Telford Rural Polytechnic after being involved in a crash last year that killed a fellow student and the driver of another car.
6.  Marketing research shows that men give bigger Valentine’s Day gifts early in a relationship than later on, according to a University of Auckland academic - who would have guessed?
7. A Masterchef NZ contender dropped out in the second episode but has gone on to enrol in Wintec this year.
8. Finally, while we’ve been talking in NZ about parents spanking kids, a university registrar in the UK has been spanking his students, apparently as part of his pain-management research – I kid you not.

There was also a lot of coverage of ACE cuts over the weekend and I’ll be writing a specific post on that later.