NEWSLETTER
|
UNITED KINGDOM Association NEWSLETTER |
| No 164 | September 2000 |
"The Telecommunications Industry is changing into a 'New World' ..."
Technology is moving at a rapid pace. Terms that meant nothing to us five years ago, are becoming common place; like Interactive TV, broad-band wireless, digital subscriber line etc. etc. What does it all mean? What does it mean to the future of how we go about business? How will it affect our everyday lives? And do we really need this?
This promises to be an interesting and informative presentation on the 'New World' of digital communications and media.
The presentation will not have a deep digital technology focus, so it will be applicable to all engineering disciplines (many telecommunications firms today come from a civil infrastructure background, not electronic).
Note the details:
| Location: | Pricewaterhouse Coopers No 1 Embankment Place |
| Date: | Monday, 6th November 2000 |
| Time: | 6:30pm for 7:00pm |
| Price: | To cover refreshments £5.00 |
Please gather your party, complete the reply slip and return it without delay so that the Secretary ran organise the catering and let Pricewaterhouse Coopers know the names for their security personnel.
For those of you who have never been to Australia House, it is a chance to see inside one of Australia's greatest London properties. The Downer room may not have a panoramic view of London but it makes up for this with rich furnishings and lavish proportions.
IEAust invite all members of the Institution of Professional Engineers, New Zealand UK Association together with their spouses and friends. Festivities will start at 7:00 p.m. for 7:30 p.m. and will continue until 9:30 p.m. Dress for the occasion should be 'lounge suit.'
The cost will be £15.00 per person. This will cover a buffet supper and will include a quantity of carefully selected Australian beers and wines.
Members and their guests are reminded that smoking is not permitted inside Australia House.
| Time: | 7.00 pm to 9.30 |
| Date: | Friday, 8 December 2000 |
| Location: | Downer Room of Australia House, Strand, London | Price: | £ 15.00 per person |
So gather your party together and make all speed to send in your return slips to reach the Hon. Secretary by 1st December at the latest. We have to let IEAust know our numbers and names for security and the necessary catering arrangements. Please make your cheques payable to "IPENZ UK Association."
Other UK Association News
Data Protection Act
The 1998 Data Protection Act places responsibilities on people and organisations who use personal information and includes a Code of Practice which governs how information may be obtained, stored and used. IPENZ UK Association keeps information about members both on computer and in paper files.
Clubs or Associations, such as ourselves, count as 'unincorporated members clubs' and, as such, may hold personal information on computer without having to register with the Data Protection Registrar provided that:
| 1) | They hold information only on members, they seek and obtain the consent of all members (if a member objects the club must delete that persons information or register), the information is disclosed only with the members consent or at the members request.
To be sure of satisfying these conditions, the Data Protection Registrar advises clubs to inform members as they join and/or make regular announcements in their newsletters about the information they are holding and the use that is being made of it, so that members have the opportunity to object should they wish. |
| 2) | Provided these conditions are met, the information held about members by or on behalf of clubs need not be restricted to basic membership data (name, address, etc.). |
| 3) | Clubs and associations who find the conditions in paragraph 1 irksome, who want to hold personal information on members who object, or who want to hold or use information about non members will need to register. |
| 4) | Although registration avoids the need to get everyone's consent before you hold their personal details, it does not necessarily mean that you can hold or use any information against peoples wishes. There is a general requirement to obtain personal information fairly and not deceive or mislead people about the purposes for which that information is held, used or disclosed. |
| Full Name | IPENZ Membership Grade |
| Home Postal Address | Qualifications |
| Work Postal Address | Discipline of Work |
| Email Address | Membership Status |
| Phone Numbers: Home, Work, Mobile |
The information was originally obtained from Wellington and updated based on information provided by individuals from time to time. This information is updated when informed by you, either directly, at renewal time or via function reply slips, not when changes are noticed in the information from Wellington. This is because many of you prefer to use a different address for correspondence from us, home instead of work or vice versa, and some of the information from Wellington looks dubious. Robert Minchin is in the process of producing a list of the differences between ourselves and Wellington's records. We will then do a mail shot to these people and hopefully we will manage to get some new members.
Currently your Hon Secretary holds the master database, from which I produce labels for distribution of the newsletters, with other members of the committee holding copies to enable swifter communication between you and us. The list is most useful for the Professional Review Co-ordinator to identify members who may be suitable to act as reviewers for professional reviews. The information held by us is not distributed outside the committee, apart from the distribution of names and addresses as mentioned above to financial members.
I hope you find that reassuring. If you object to IPENZ UK holding any of the above information about you, let the Hon Secretary know and it'll be removed.
News From New Zealand
Prime Minister Helen Clark says major progress on closing the gaps between Maori and Pakeha will not be seen for a generation. She told the Weekend Herald last week that while 'real progress' would be demonstrable in the short term, the major gains of her Government's Closing the Gaps policies could take 12 to 18 years. Her comments came after she opened the Maori Women's Welfare League's 48th annual conference in Mangere, Manukau City. The Prime Minister raised the prospect of the Government being 'made to look silly' over slow progress on Maori issues. She said the disparities between Maori and other New Zealanders had increased over time and it would take time to decrease them. Some had said the Government should never have started taking steps towards closing the gaps because its opponents would "pick us off and make us look silly," she said. "I say if you never start you never get there." Helen Clark said later that she was not expecting that the Government might be judged as not meeting its goals by the next election. It was only the 'media and commentators' who were suggesting that the Government's programme would prove too slow to deliver. She said progress by the next election would be measured by the increase of Maori getting into apprenticeships, quit-smoking programmes and early childhood education and by more Maori housing projects. The Maori Queen, Dame Te Atairangikaahu, had asked league members before the Prime Minister spoke whether they were waiting for Helen Clark to tell them where they should be heading. The league patron suggested that the women were old enough to make up their own minds. But Helen Clark stressed to the delegates that the process of reducing disparities was not about Maori adopting the aspirations of non-Maori. "It is not, heaven forbid, about Government and Pakeha patronising Maori." The Government wanted to share the league's vision for healthy, well-educated and secure Maori families and communities.
Captain James Cook is as recognisable a New Zealand icon as Sir Edmund Hillary, yet New Zealanders' knowledge of him is often restricted to the little they learned in school or to his many legacies from two voyages to New Zealand. On October 6, 1769, Nicholas Young, the cabin boy on Cook's Navy ship, His Majesty's bark Endeavour, sighted land on the southern end of Poverty Bay. Today, Young Nick's Head still bears the name of the cabin boy and Cook's legacy is found all round New Zealand - Cook Strait, Mt Cook, Cook's Beach, Endeavour Inlet and many others. Not even the moon has escaped Cook's influence. A crater on the south-eastern quarter of the near side has been named after him and two space shuttles have carried the names of two of Cook's ships into space - Endeavour and Discovery. Most names given by Cook to the headlands, bays, rivers, mountains and settlements around New Zealand remain, many of them the result of the influence on Cook of his early years in England, particularly in the Royal Navy. Yet Cook was also keen to use local place names from Maori who had settled in New Zealand nearly 700 years before he arrived. Mostly, Cook got it right in his choice of local names but when he got it wrong, he got it wrong in a spectacular fashion. Somehow, Tolaga Bay, on the east coast north of Gisborne, derived its name from the local Maori name of Uawa but how the translation or transliteration was made defies historians.
Cook author John Robson was born in Stockton-on-Tees, not far from Cook's birthplace in the Cleveland district of the North Riding of Yorkshire, in north-east England. Robson's mother often told him the family was distantly related to Cook but the link was never confirmed. However, Robson developed an early admiration for the deeds and brilliance of Cook which was to grow into a firm belief that Cook was one of mankind's greatest explorers and achievers. Robson says Cook's first visit to New Zealand, which followed a voyage to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus for the Royal Astronomical Society, was a greater achievement even than Neil Armstrong's historic moon landing in 1969.
Robson's book "Captain Cook's World" (reviewed on this page) is a collection of texts and maps covering Cook's life and voyages, including his two great voyages of discovery to New Zealand - the first from 1769 to 1771 in Endeavour and the second from 1772 to 1775 in two ships, HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure. He says few people, New Zealanders included, understood the scale of Cook's achievements. What little people do know tends to be just that he came to New Zealand. "I don't think they know much about his early life or what he did after New Zealand. They know he came here, he sailed around it and he left, not a great deal else." Comparing Cook's achievements, particularly during his first voyage to New Zealand in Endeavour, a converted, flat-bottomed, square-rigged collier, to Armstrong's moon landing, he says, "Armstrong at least had contact and had a back-up team. Cook, when he came here the first time, was on the other side of the world and no one knew where they were." Had Endeavour sunk, Cook would have disappeared into history, Robson says. The 32.3m ship was badly overcrowded by the time its complement, of nearly 100 crew, scientists and marines were on board. It was wet, uncomfortable and even for Cook, the privileges of rank extended only to a cabin measuring 2.4m by 1.5m - barely enough for a bunk and a desk. The ship could sail only a few points on either side of the prevailing wind and drew only 4.26m fully laden. For navigation Cook had a sextant, relatively crude clocks and little else. On top of his supreme navigational skills, Cook was also an astronomer, a surveyor, a cartographer, a superb sailor and a highly astute leader of men. Cook landed nowhere in the South Island during his first trip, yet the chart he produced was "quite wonderful" and so accurate that his soundings of Fiordland were used until a few years ago, Robson says. Cook made two glaring but uncharacteristic errors in his otherwise classic chart of the South Island. Banks Peninsula, named after botanist Joseph Banks, was originally called an island and Stewart Island was originally thought to be a peninsula. Both mistakes were thought to have been as a result of low cloud which obscured Banks Peninsula and Foveaux Strait as he approached from the north, and the pressure of time. Cook was also reluctant to take Endeavour too close to uncharted territory when he rounded the bottom of the South Island in March, 1770.
Cook died in Hawaii on February 24, 1779, when he went ashore to remonstrate with King Kalani'opu'u over thieving and other problems. A scuffle developed and Cook and 21 others died. The British retreated to their ships, leaving the bodies of Cook and the others on the beach. Cook's body was cut up and various body parts were distributed among the Hawaiian chiefs. Some days later several body parts were returned, including Cook's hand, which was identified by a scar caused by an explosion in Canada several years earlier. The body parts were buried at sea in Kealakekua Bay. The site of his death is marked with a plaque, now a metre under water after a rise in the sea level in the past 230 years.
Dates for Your Diary
| Joint Technical Meeting with IEAust | Monday, 6 November 2000 |
| Christmas Soirée at Australia House | Friday, 8 December 2000 |
| Possible failure/problem evening | To be decided |
| Graduates Evening | To be decided |
| Traffic Management talk | To be decided |
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