bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Learning to Disentangle the Complex Causes of Data
Authors:   , Butler-Yeoman Tony 
Published: November 2021

<p>The ability to extract and model the meaning in data has been key to the success of modern machine learning. Typically, data reflects a combination of multiple sources that are mixed together. For example, photographs of people’s faces reflect the subject of the photograph, lighting conditions, angle, and background scene. It is therefore natural to wish to extract these multiple, largely independent, sources, which is known as disentangling in the literature. Additional benefits of disentangling arise from the fact that the data is then simpler, meaning that there are fewer free parameters, which reduces the curse of dimensionality and aids learning. While there has been a lot of research into finding disentangled representations, it remains an open problem. This thesis considers a number of approaches to a particularly difficult version of this task: we wish to disentangle the complex causes of data in an entirely unsupervised setting. That is, given access only to unlabeled, entangled data, we search for algorithms that can identify the generative factors of that data, which we call causes. Further, we assume that causes can themselves be complex and require a high-dimensional representation. We consider three approaches to this challenge: as an inference problem, as an extension of independent components analysis, and as a learning problem. Each method is motivated, described, and tested on a set of datasets build from entangled combinations of images, most commonly MNIST digits. Where the results fall short of disentangling, the reasons for this are dissected and analysed. The last method that we describe, which is based on combinations of autoencoders that learn to predict each other’s output, shows some promise on this extremely challenging problem.</p>
The social effects of anger in international negotiations: The role of self-regulation and bargaining power
Authors:   , Bertram Steffen 
Published: November 2021

<p>This thesis addresses recent calls to investigate the influence of individual differences in a negotiation context. Specifically, I investigate the impact of the personality difference, action orientation versus state orientation, on concessionary behaviour in international negotiations. This personality difference was chosen because it measures a negotiator’s capacity to self-regulate (control their behaviour) in a cognitively demanding situation like an international negotiation. I propose that action oriented negotiators will display superior self-regulation ability, compared to state oriented negotiators. Specifically, action oriented negotiators will be able to adapt their response and concede less than state oriented negotiators, when a foreign counterpart displays anger. In two online studies, I measure how action oriented and state oriented negotiators respond to a display of anger from a foreign counterpart in an international negotiation. The first study of 159 negotiators showed that action oriented individuals conceded fewer points than state oriented individuals, regardless of whether the counterpart displayed anger. The second study of 260 negotiators showed that action oriented individuals can adapt their behaviour according to their level of power in an international negotiation when facing an angry counterpart. As far as I am aware, this research is one of the first to propose and test the salience of action orientation versus state orientation on displays of anger in international negotiations. My findings highlight the value of incorporating individual differences in negotiation studies and I propose their inclusion into the dominant theoretical framework of how negotiators respond to anger. In addition to extending the model, I discuss how understanding these personality differences can be useful for multinational companies and their international negotiators.</p>
Simulating Psychedelic Therapy Through Mediated Reality
Authors:   , Hillstead Andrew 
Published: November 2021

<p>Due to the illegality of psychedelic substances, and despite proven efficiency, people suffering from various psychiatric illnesses and disorders are unable to receive potentially life-changing psychedelic therapy. With the recent technological development of computer-mediated realities, designers and developers now have the opportunity to digitally recreate such treatments. Through practical application along with the review of literature and conferences, this study aims to analyse the potential of mediated realities to convincingly simulate psychedelic therapy. Augmented reality (AR) and modulated realities (ModR) such as modified and diminished reality show insufficient evidence for practical use in simulated psychedelic therapy. Augmented virtuality (AV), mixed reality (MR), virtual reality (VR) and modulated virtuality (ModV) contain a range of characteristics fundamental to potentially simulating mind manifesting psychedelic therapy. However, mediated reality in general appears to be extraneous for practical use in mind loosening psychedelic therapy. Currently, virtual reality (VR) shows the greatest potential for healing, trauma release, personal growth and exploration of the psyche by simulating closed-eye psychedelic experiences through adding virtual information via an HMD. Accordingly, the author of this study has proposed a proof of concept (POF) for a neurofeedback driven VR experience which simulates aspects of both mind loosening and mind manifesting psychotherapy. This POF is intended to simulate the transformation of phosphenes into complex geometric pattern based hallucinations. With further development in this field, one day people suffering from various mental conditions might be able to receive safe, accessible and legal forms of simulated psychedelic therapy.</p>
Localised Waves: Tightest Focus, Lorentz Transformation, and Polarization Singularities of Non-Paraxial Beams
Authors:   , Andrejić Petar 
Published: November 2021

<p>I explore the limits of how tightly a beam can be focused, and derive a focal parameter for scalar beams that can be symbolically evaluated for most beams, and is guaranteed to be convergent for physical beams, that compares peak in- tensity to the total intensity in the beam profile. I argue that this parameter is superior to spot size, and use this to derive a rigorous limit of focusing for scalar beams. A particular beam known as the proto-beam achieves this tight- est focus possible. I show the generalisation of this measure to electromagnetic beams, and place a lower bound on the focal extent of electromagnetic beams. I also propose the use of exponential regulators as alternatives to moment based measures, as a solution to the convergence issues created by the power law decay of exact solutions. I explore the Doppler shift for finite beams, and how monochromatic beams become polychromatic under a Lorentz boost. The local frequency is also explored, and I show that a deviation of the local frequency from the Doppler frequency will occur due to wavelength broadening near the focus. Lekner and I examine a beam that closely approximates a paraxial Gaussian beam radially, and examine the phase singularities for optical beams that occur near the zeros of the beams wavefunction. We also investigate attempts to find exact solutions with Gaussian profiles, and show that this is impossible; any such beam will be evanescent and exponentially grow. Finally, I investigate the property of finite classical electromagnetic pulses having a zero momentum frame, and show that for quantum single photon pulses this property holds for the expectation value. I show that any individual measurement however, still measures a light-like four-momentum for the photon.</p>
Explaining the moderate platform of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood: Against the inclusion-moderation hypothesis
Authors:   , Booysen Hanlie 
Published: November 2021

<p>Throughout its existence, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) has consistently maintained a moderate policy on governance. The main aim of this study is to explain this moderation. Previous literature has usually explained moderation in similar movements by an “inclusion-moderation hypothesis”, which holds that moderation results when movements have the opportunity to participate in pluralist political processes. However, the SMB has been progressively excluded from the Syrian political arena since 1963. The inclusion-moderation hypothesis implies, as its converse, that exclusion leads to radicalisation. This study shows that contrary to this expectation, the SMB’s ultimate exclusion from the Syrian political arena in 1982 was in fact the primary driver of its moderate policy. The SMB also participated in parliamentary politics in its early history, and therefore has not moderated over time, as the inclusion-moderation hypothesis would require. Thus, the inclusion-moderation hypothesis does not work for this case, and this dissertation advances an alternate explanation for the SMB’s continued commitment to a moderate policy on governance. This study’s central thesis is that the SMB’s moderate policy on governance can be explained by the Brotherhood’s primary target audience, that is to say, the political force which, in the SMB’s view, can deliver its political objective. As this definition implies, the target audience shifts over time, in accordance with changing circumstances. In 1980, the primary target audience comprised diverse actors in opposition to the al-Asad government: the Fighting Vanguard, the Syrian ulama, and the secularist opposition. In 2001, the audience was the Bashar al-Asad government. In 2004, it was the secularist opposition; and in 2012, it was the foreign sponsors of the secularist opposition.</p>
Revitalization and gentrification in Newtown: Can urban regeneration strengthen an existing community?
Authors:   , Wilson Jennifer Bernice 
Published: November 2021

<p>This thesis examines gentrification and the process of urban regeneration through proposing an adaption of a modernist heritage building in Newtown, Wellington, New Zealand to prevent the displacement of an existing community. Council policies for urban regeneration support future residential development in Newtown (eg. Adelaide Road – Planning for the Future, Wellington Urban Growth Plan 2014-2043, NZ Transport Agency (Let’s Get Wellington Moving Project)) and, as funding is geared towards upgrading the city to become more liveable, private investment will potentially occur. These initiatives may attract affluent user groups, increasing the likelihood of lower income residents becoming displaced. Newtown therefore is a suburb where existing residents may be displaced as gentrification occurs. Although there have been studies on urban regeneration and the effects of gentrification in Wellington, none have attempted to offer a built environment design solution to mitigate the adverse effects of gentrification on an existing community in Wellington. The Riddiford Building, which is part of an Institutional Precinct - a hospital site, and may be demolished. This thesis argues that building adaption to accommodate a new user group for this building is feasible and could save a building with cultural significance from demolition. Further, the building could accommodate students and lower socio-economic occupants in order to prevent the displacement of existing Newtown residents.</p>
Avoidance and overgeneral memory
Authors:   , Ganly Tim 
Published: November 2021

<p>Overgeneral memory is a phenomenon that occurs in depression in which people tend to remember temporally non-specific autobiographical memories. Overgeneral memory may be functional; by avoiding specific memories, potentially distressing emotions can avoided. This “functional avoidance” may be part of a repertoire of avoidance strategies people use when they are under stress. The question of the relationship between avoidance, stress, and overgeneral memory has been investigated using only laboratory-based stressors, and no previous research has examined the relationships in both non-clinical and clinical samples. Across four studies, this thesis investigated the relationships between avoidance and overgeneral memory in clinical and non-clinical samples and whether every-day stress moderates this relationship. Studies 1, 2, and 4 engaged undergraduate samples in which mean depression scores were low (non-clinical samples). Study 3 engaged a sample from a university counselling service in which the mean depression score was high (clinical sample). Participants completed self-report measures of avoidance and stress. They were also asked to remember specific events to a series of emotion cue words on the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT). This thesis also investigated the possibility that avoidance may be associated with a reduction in memory performance on other tests of autobiographical memory besides the AMT, perhaps because other types of memories, not just specific, can be distressing. Thus, in Study 1, participants also completed the Autobiographical Memory Test-Reversed (AMT-R) in which they were asked to retrieve general memories. In addition, across studies, the pleasantness of events remembered to positive and negative cues was examined. In Study 4, the possible moderating role of rating pleasantness on the relationship between avoidance and overgeneral memory was examined. Results from the non-clinical samples indicated higher avoidance was associated with less overgeneral remembering on the AMT. In the clinical sample, there were no significant relationships between avoidance and overgeneral memory. There were no significant relationships between avoidance and AMT-R performance. Overall, stress did not moderate the relationship between avoidance and overgeneral memory. Mean pleasantness ratings for events remembered to positive and negative cues were congruent with cue valence. However, individual positive and negative cues did not always elicit memories for pleasant and unpleasant events, respectively. Rating (vs. not rating) the pleasantness of remembered events did not moderate the relationship between avoidance and overgeneral memory. Overall, findings suggested that functional avoidance is not part of a repertoire of avoidance strategies. Ironic process theory is discussed as an explanation for why higher avoidance was associated with a lower proportion of overgeneral memories in the non-clinical samples.</p>
Magister Ludi: Hermeneutics in Architectural Representation
Authors:   , Coetzee David 
Published: November 2021

<p>Written narrative has the ability to enchant the imagination of a person into a heightened emotional state, all without being directly visual. How, when existing almost entirely within a visual sense, does architecture and interior space so often lack this quality? How can I design spaces that will move me with as much impact as a few words on a page? Spurring from a frustration in attempting to understand my own design motivations as a student of interior architecture, this research grew from two seeds of interest planted throughout my life; an affinity with the visually artistic and the capturing mystery of written narrative. How can the translation of written narrative help to enhance the visual representation of interior architecture?</p>
Nurse practitioners and pharmacist prescribers in primary health care: A realist evaluation of the New Zealand experience
Authors:   , Officer Tara 
Published: November 2021

<p>Internationally, health workforce redesign provides a means to cope with an increasing demand for health services. The development of advanced practitioner professions provides a major change in health service delivery that challenges traditional practice boundaries. Yet, we know very little about how to introduce such roles into existing health systems successfully. This research investigates how nurse practitioner and pharmacist prescriber roles are developing in New Zealand primary health care, and what is needed to better support the future development of these roles. A realist methodology guided this research. The study used a qualitative research design involving semi-structured interviews of (1) policy, training, and advocacy stakeholders; (2) primary health care nurse practitioners, pharmacist prescribers, and general practitioners; and (3) patients of advanced practitioners and carers of patients using such services. Documents provided by interviewees relating to practice-specific roles supplemented these interviews. Data analysis facilitated the generation, testing, and refinement of theories on nurse practitioner and pharmacist prescriber role development. This research provided an account of the complexities of developing new health professional roles in an already established health system. Theories formed in this research considered advanced practitioner role creation, realisation, and subsequent delivery of health services. Mechanisms for their development included: (1) engagement in planning and integrating roles; (2) establishing opportunities as part of a well-defined career pathway; and (3) championing role uptake and work to full scopes of practice. Various health system and workplace contexts, practitioner goals, and patient needs influenced the ability for these mechanisms to trigger and thus have an effect on role development. Theories arising from this research emphasise the complexity inherent in the development of advanced practitioner roles. In addition, the findings demonstrate that a structured and informed health workforce redesign could improve use of roles, such as those of the nurse practitioner and pharmacist prescriber. In light of these results, this study recommends, implementing a national strategy that aligns policy and practice decisions if we are to succeed in making better use of such practitioner skills and expertise.</p>
Characterising the Biological Activity of a Trichlorovinyl Cysteine-Containing Mycothiol Analogue
Authors:   , Harmos Phoebe 
Published: November 2021

<p>Cancer is a disease characterised by the uncontrolled growth of mutated cells, and is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, with over a third of people diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. Despite extensive investment of both time and money in cancer research, poor patient outcomes and quality of life, and the evolution of treatment resistant cancers indicates that continued research, and more efficacious therapies are required. A recent investigation identified a mycothiol analogue which displayed significant toxicity in the promyelocytic leukemia cell line (HL60). Designed as a negative control, no biological activity was expected from this compound and its cellular target and mode of action are unknown. This thesis describes the synthesis of a toxic trichlorovinyl cysteine-containing analogue of mycothiol, and the attempted synthesis of a propynylated and fluorescent derivative of this. The research also details immunomodulatory investigations, which were undertaken to probe the mode of action of the lead compound, and to determine whether its precursor, N-Boc-S-trichlorovinyl cysteine, induced toxicity through the same mechanism. The lead compound demonstrated mild immunomodulatory activity in splenocytes isolated from euthanised C57BL/6 mice, and enzyme linked immunosorbent assays revealed a likely Th2 mediated response, induced by the production of IL-4. The precursor however appears to promote a strong pro-inflammatory response, by inducing IL-17a production, which is widely considered a deleterious immune response in cancer. Whilst further work is required to determine the cellular target of the lead compound, the research described demonstrates the potential for this compound as an anti-cancer agent, while the precursor appears inappropriate for further development.</p>
Epistemic guidance of visual attention for robotic agents in dynamic visual scenes
Authors:   , Bhakta Arindam 
Published: November 2021

<p>Humans and many animals can selectively sample important parts of their visual surroundings to carry out their daily activities like foraging or finding prey or mates. Selective attention allows them to efficiently use the limited resources of the brain by deploying sensory apparatus to collect data believed to be pertinent to the organism's current task in hand. Robots or other computational agents operating in dynamic environments are similarly exposed to a wide variety of stimuli, which they must process with limited sensory and computational resources. Developing computational models of visual attention has long been of interest as such models enable artificial systems to select necessary information from complex and cluttered visual environments, hence reducing the data-processing burden. Biologically inspired computational saliency models have previously been used in selectively sampling a visual scene, but these have limited capacity to deal with dynamic environments and have no capacity to reason about uncertainty when planning their visual scene sampling strategy. These models typically select contrast in colour, shape or orientation as salient and sample locations of a visual scene in descending order of salience. After each observation, the area around the sampled location is blocked using inhibition of return mechanism to keep it from being re-visited. This thesis generalises the traditional model of saliency by using an adaptive Kalman filter estimator to model an agent's understanding of the world and uses a utility function based approach to describe what the agent cares about in the visual scene. This allows the agents to adopt a richer set of perceptual strategies than is possible with the classical winner-take-all mechanism of the traditional saliency model. In contrast with the traditional approach, inhibition of return is achieved without implementing an extra mechanism on top of the underlying structure. This thesis demonstrates the use of five utility functions that are used to encapsulate the perceptual state that is valued by the agent. Each utility function thereby produces a distinct perceptual behaviour that is matched to particular scenarios. The resulting visual attention distribution of the five proposed utility functions is demonstrated on five real-life videos. In most of the experiments, pixel intensity has been used as the source of the saliency map. As the proposed approach is independent of the saliency map used, it can be used with other existing more complex saliency map building models. Moreover, the underlying structure of the model is sufficiently general and flexible, hence it can be used as the base of a new range of more sophisticated gaze control systems.</p>