News 13/7 – Robots in the Vines, Loan Problems and FRST $$
July 13th 2010 at 8:57am, By Dave Guerin
- UCOL’s Nursing Mannequin UCOL has just bought Anne, a training mannequin that can even scream. Cool. Anne can also become Andy with some quick rearrangement.
Robotics The University of Canterbury is introducing robotics to horticulture to prune vines. It’s a cool idea, especially if it looks like the photo.
- Loan Problems? It seems that some students might be hit by the new student loan limit of seven EFTS but the examples are rather unusual – students who do a degree before medical studies, or those who do a double degree and honours before a masters. Steven Joyce has said he’ll look into them and deal with genuine problems, but to me, the double degree, honours and masters example would fall completely within the rules.
- New FRST $$ FRST has approved $48m of research spending for 42 contracts with 18 organisations. Most of it is going into freshwater, primary sector and high-value manufacturing research. My favourite was for “novel sauvignon blanc wines”.
- Otago Research Maori and Pacific people are less likely to take up medical prescriptions, according to University of Otago research. Wellingtonians “grossed out” researchers with their swine-like behaviour around swine flu, while other researchers were looking at genetic markers for aortic aneurysms.
- Sex but no Brothels The Massey academic’s advice on Queenstown’s sex life continues – Michelle Mars advises them to not to develop brothels.
- Snow at AUT AUT will be hosting a snowboarding exhibition as part of the stduents’ association re-orientation.
- Moko Massey vets are pretty sure that the dolphin found last week was Moko.
- Events University of Waikato is running a new event management paper.