Afternoons for Wednesday 19 May 2010

1:10 Best Song Ever Written

Me and Bobby McGee by Kris Kristofferson is Mary Schumacher's choice for Best Song Ever Written. She's from Wellington.

1:15 Link 3 - music game

2:10 Feature story

Grand Master of International Correspondence Chess. That's the Grand tile Mark Noble of Lower Hutt has achieved. It's the first time a New Zealand has hit these lofty heights in the Chess world in nearly 30 years. The only higher ranking in chess is World Champion.

A fascinating study reveals there may be a link between a common childhood virus and breast cancer. The study by an epidemiologist at Otago University's Christchurch School of Medicine and Health Sciences has just been published in the British Journal of Cancer. Cytomegalovirus or (CMV) is a garden variety virus most people get at some time in their lives. The study shows women under 40 who develop breast cancer were more likely to have had recent exposure to CMV than women without breast cancer. Researchers think CMV infection in adulthood may be a trigger for some cancers

2:30 NZ Reading

The concluding part of our satirical, romantic saga from the 1990s, Emily Perkins with Can't Beat it.

2:45 He Rourou

Financial pressures have lead to a format change for the annual Maori language music concert Pao Pao Pao. Ana Tapiata talks with Ngahiwi Apanui about the format change, from one big concert at the Town Hall to two smaller concerts at Pipitea marae.

3:12 Virtual World

3:33 Auckland story

Thirteen thousand people are involved in preschool education-and-care-centres and kindergartens in this country. Of that thirteen thousand, fewer than two hundred are men. At the Manukau Institute of Technology's three-year early childhood degree course, there are five males out of 350-students. It seems plain old sexism may still be alive… plus the bad press following the Christchurch Creche Case in the 1980s.

3:47 Science story

This afternoon GNS Science is opening a new three million dollar accelerator mass spectrometer at the Rafter Radiocarbon Laboratory in Lower Hutt. The lab is the world's oldest continuously operating radiocarbon laboratory. Its facilities allow researchers in fields as varied as archaeology and environmental science to date objects such as wood and bone.

In 2003 lab scientist Nancy Beavan Athfield was asked if she could date a human bone from Cambodia, and her growing fascination with the mysterious burials from which the bone came has seen her return again and again to that country. Her most recent trip was in January this year, to a site known as Phnom Pel, as part of a University of Sydney team. She shows Alison Ballance a sample from that trip and explains the process of aging it, but first she tells her about the remarkable burial sites.

4:06 The Panel

Graham Bell and Denise L'Estrange-Corbet. We know the police in the Wairarapa were stretched and couldn't stay across all the child abuse cases, but why? Where does the buck stop? Is Mark Hotchin really a victim of the tall-poppy syndrome? Why isn't the Christchurch City Council emptying people's wheelie bins? Are they really all grossly over-full? And how safe are balconies on the high-rise buildings?