bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Evolution of Wahlenbergia (Campanulaceae) in Australasia
Authors:   , Prebble Jessica Mary 
Published: November 2021

<p>Wahlenbergia is a large genus of flowering plants within the family Campanulaceae. In this thesis the first molecular phylogeny of Wahlenbergia was reconstructed from approximately 20% of the genus, based on the nuclear ribosomal ITS (nrITS) DNA marker and the chloroplast trnL-F DNA marker, with samples from South Africa, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Additionally a large phylogeny with increased within-species sampling focusing on addressing taxonomic questions among the 45 Australasian species of Wahlenbergia was also reconstructed based on nrITS and trnL-F, plus an additional chloroplast DNA marker, trnK. Relationships and species limits of the New Zealand species of Wahlenbergia were further analysed using amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs). Wahlenbergia was found to be polyphyletic, though most of the species form a clade. Tree topologies and molecular dating analysis showed that the genus originated in South Africa about 16.2 million years ago (mya), then dispersed to Australasia before radiating there about 3.7 mya, thus refuting the hypothesis of Gondwanan vicariance for the Australasian species. Two dispersals from Australia to New Zealand are hypothesised, one leading to a radiation of species with the rhizomatous growth from about 1.0 mya and the other leading to a radiation of species with the radicate growth form 0.49 mya, although the radicate species might not form a clade. Low levels of genetic variation among individuals from Australia and New Zealand was revealed with all markers, and the phylogenies were poorly resolved as a result. The low genetic diversity is probably due to rapid and recent evolution during a period of geological and climatic change, coupled with incomplete lineage sorting and hybridisation. Phylogenies reconstructed using AFLPs were also poorly resolved, although AFLPs were found to be useful for species delimitation, as has been shown in studies of other plant groups. Despite the poor resolution, several morphological species and subspecies were recovered as monophyletic with DNA sequence data, notably the morphologically distinctive New Zealand W. cartilaginea, W. matthewsii and W. congesta subsp. congesta. Further research into species boundaries within the W. albomarginata/W. pygmaea complex is needed. Members of the New Zealand lowland radicate W. gracilis complex may all belong to the same morphologically variable species, although further research is needed to justify such a taxonomic change. The other New Zealand radicate species, W. vernicosa, is probably a separately evolving lineage, and is not conspecific with the Australian W. littoricola.</p>
Muslim Women in Wellington: Discursive Construction of Religious Identity in Personal Narratives.
Authors:   , Jessen Brie 
Published: November 2021

<p>Using a social constructionist framework this thesis investigates the construction of Muslim women's religious identity through an analysis of the discursive and linguistic features of their narratives. Muslim identity in the west is increasingly becoming a research focus for the social sciences and sociological and anthropological research on Muslim identity has much to offer sociolinguistics. Similarly, sociolinguistic research on ethnicity in narrative can also contribute to understanding the position of Muslim women. Following a review of the relevant research, the methods of data collection, transcription and analysis are described. An ethnographic approach, combined with small group discussions, was used to elicit data from eight Muslim women in the Wellington region. The women's narratives are analysed with a focus on the linguistic and discursive strategies used in identity construction. Three different dimensions of identity were identified: (i) comparative identity contrasts Muslim/Islamic identity with the West, constructing the self in opposition to the 'other'; (ii) Islamic identity is constructed on an intellectual/philosophical level, asking 'who am I within my religion, and how do I relate to the wider concept of Islam?'; (iii) Muslim identity focuses on the practical/physical level, integrating the guidelines and rituals of Islam into daily life; it asks 'how do I go about my everyday life as a Muslim?'. Patterns and similarities, as well as differences between narratives in each category are identified and discussed with particular reference to the discursive and linguistic features, which characterise each. In addition, attention is paid to the linguistic and discursive devices used to express Muslim identity through the subversion of societal discourses. Finally, suggestions for further research are presented.</p>
Testing Times: The Impact of Chinese Undergraduate Students' Perceptions of Two Examination Formats on Their Motivation, Study Strategies, and Approaches to Learning
Authors:   , Tait Carolyn Frances 
Published: November 2021

<p>Chinese undergraduate students from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan may have different language backgrounds and previous assessment experiences compared with most students studying in a western university. This mixed methods study examines their perceptions of how two examination formats - multiple-choice and essay questions - impact on their motivation, approaches to learning, and study strategies at a New Zealand university. Quantitative data were gathered using a modified Biggs' two factor study process questionnaire and a modified Patterns of Adaptive Learning Study questionnaire. Survey results were integrated with qualitative interview data gathered and analysed using a constructivist version of grounded theory. The participants reported combining deep and surface approaches to learning for both examination formats, preferring deep approaches. In comparison to study strategies used for multiple-choice examinations, more deep strategies were reported for essay examinations. Participants described combining memorisation with understanding in a sequence of study strategies for both examination formats. Predicting and practising both types of examination questions allowed participants to align their perceptions with possible examination requirements. Participants' confidence in their English language ability impacted on memorisation for essay questions. Analysis of the findings supports a model of the interrelationship of motivation, approaches to learning, calculating to develop perceptions of task demands, and the development of discipline-specific discourse skills in English. Perceptions of examination formats impact on study strategies with deep and surface strategies linked through practising. The implications of these findings for assessment of culturally and linguistically diverse tertiary students support the use of well designed multiple-choice questions in examinations to promote deep learning for these students, combined with formative assessment.</p>
Transitioning Peer Consulting: a Technology-in-Practice Approach
Authors:   , Watson Julie Abbott 
Published: November 2021

<p>The purpose of this study is to examine the application of ICT to enhance the peer consulting activities of groups of professionals. In this study, peer consulting is defined as the sharing of people's experience through action and reflection in the context of actual practice (Eisen, 2001). The research is undertaken within two New Zealand counselling services organisations, one for-profit and one not-for-profit. The primary guiding research question is: "How do NZ social services organisations apply online technologies to enhance the professional development of their staff?" The study is qualitative in nature, and follows the action research methodology. Within one in-depth action research cycle, key participants of each organisation and the researcher collaborate to describe the problem situation, and select and set up pilot online systems. Groups of counselling practitioners then participate in actual online peer consulting sessions, after which the outcomes of the sessions are evaluated and learnings gained. Data gathered through interviews, observations and systems statistics are analysed to derive the first of two major theoretical contributions of this research, the Model of Peer Consulting Transition. This model reflects the experiences of the research participants as they move through the developmental stages of Defining, Structuring, Experimenting, Engaging and Embedding. The second theoretical contribution of this study is the novel application of the Technology-in-Practice framework developed by Orlikowski (2000). This framework is the lens through which the environmental factors that exist within each organisational situation and influence peer consulting transition are explained. The theoretical models developed in this study provide an important contribution to the use of ICT in facilitating professional development. In addition, the participant organisations benefitted directly from being part of the study. The development of an alternative way to engage staff in professional development activities saves time and financial resources, and engaging in actual peer consulting sessions offered participants the opportunity to further develop their respective professional capabilities.</p>
The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic
Authors:   , Jones Timothy Graham Stanford 
Published: November 2021

<p>Gothic studies, the specialist academic field that explores the Gothic text, has developed substantially over the last twenty-five years. The field often frames the Gothic as a serious literature, involved in historic discourse, and having special psychological acuity; this thesis suggests that there are a number of problems with these argumentative strategies, and that the academy now makes claims for the Gothic that are discontinuous with how this popular genre is understood by most readers. While Gothic studies is the study of a genre, curiously, it has seldom engaged with theorisations of genre. Nevertheless, an understanding of what genre is, and how it alters reading practice, is crucial to understanding the Gothic text. This thesis attempts to reconcile and develop a number of disparate approaches to genre through Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. It argues that genre is not a set of textual conventions but a group of procedures that facilitate and modify both writing and reading practices. Consequently, genres like the Gothic should be seen as discrete historicised phenomena, which retain a cohesive practical sense of how they ought to be performed before they hold discursive properties. Rather than arguing for the literary value of the Gothic, this thesis understands the genre as a popular practice. The consequences of this theorisation of the Gothic are explored in case studies of particular moments in three separate Gothic fields. Firstly, the American Gothic of the mid-nineteen-eighties, particularly Stephen King's It, Joyce Carol Oates' Mysteries of Winterthurn, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, facilitates a discussion of the relationship between Gothic and literary practices. The Gothic text has its origins in 'lowbrow' popular culture, even as it sometimes aspires to 'highbrow' literary performances. Secondly, the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties is used to stage a discussion of both the way that readers become involved and immersed in the Gothic text, creating a distinct subjunctive 'world', and of the way that Gothics define themselves in relation to each other. The discussion refers to Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, which heavily influenced the field, as demonstrated in works by Susan Howatch, Kingsley Amis, Robert Aickman and Mervyn Peake. Wheatley's depiction of the black mass became a key Gothic procedure, and can be read as this particular field's metaphor of its own practice. Thirdly, New Zealand's underdeveloped Gothic field provides a venue to explore the Gothic's relationship with nation and national literature, and how the practice is involved in landscape. Frank Sargeson's stories and his novella The Hangover, together with Janet Frame's A State of Siege are texts authored by canonical New Zealand writers that participate in a local Gothic, although their participation in popular genre has been little recognised. This thesis argues that the Gothic is a commonsense cultural practice, facilitated through the canniness of habitus.</p>
ParA: A Novel Target for Anti-Tubercular Drug Discovery
Authors:   , Nisa Shahista Yasmin 
Published: November 2021

<p>Tuberculosis (Tb) continues to be one of the world's greatest challenges in the public health arena. The current treatment for Tb entails a long duration of therapy making adherence to the whole course difficult. This has given rise to drug resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis which are posing a significant threat to Tb control strategies. To counteract this problem, there is an urgent need to develop alternative anti-tuberculous drugs which target processes that are critical for the growth and/or survival of this microbe. To identify such targets in M. tuberculosis, I used comparative genomics and mutagenesis data to identify conserved essential genes as viable targets for the development of broad-spectrum antibiotics. In addition, I validated the essentiality of three cell division genes in Mycobacterium smegmatis using conditional antisense RNA expression under different culture conditions. Furthermore, I performed high-throughput screens (HTS) using a differential susceptibility assay against one of the validated targets to identify its cognate inhibitor(s). Lastly, I developed a novel biochemical assay of the target to validate the specificity of the inhibitors identified in the HTS and evaluated the potency of the inhibitors against M. tuberculosis. This study identified 261 conserved putative essential genes as broad-spectrum targets. I hypothesized that antisense RNA expression of such genes will lead to its down-regulation and thereby affect the viability of the cells if these genes are essential. I also hypothesized that an essential gene will be required under all culture conditions. One gene, parA, demonstrated that it was essential under various culture conditions. This gene encodes for a protein which contain the conserved Walker A motif thus I theorized that it may posses ATPase activity. The results illustrated that the M. tuberculosis ParA protein possesses ATPase activity. This biochemical activity was used to validate two specific inhibitors of ParA, phenoxybenzamine and octoclothepin, which were identified in the cell-based HTS. Kinetic studies suggest that phenoxybenzamine is a mixed inhibitor while octoclothepin is a competitive inhibitor of ParA. This data is also supported by in silico docking. Both these compounds show low minimum inhibitory concentrations in M. smegmatis under nitrogen starvation conditions. In summary, this thesis illustrates that ParA is a viable target for anti-tubercular drugs. It demonstrates that ParA is an ATPase which has the potential to bind competitive and non-competitive inhibitors that can be exploited to target cell division in M. tuberculosis. Finally, this study presents phenoxybenzamine and octoclothepin as inhibitors of ParA. In conclusion, these compounds can either be developed to increase potency or be used as reference structures to screen for more potent inhibitors of the enzyme.</p>
"Shaping and Cutting and Improving and Adding": Acknowledged and Hidden Influences in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials
Authors:   , Ross Isabel Walker 
Published: November 2021

<p>This thesis aims to identify and analyse the most prominent influences on Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. It looks particularly at the difference between the authors' attitude towards influences they happily acknowledge and those influences which they attempt to conceal because they cause them anxiety (in the case of Westerfeld) or embarrassment (in the case of Pullman). This focus, combined with the speculative analysis of His Dark Materials' influence on Extras, the fourth book of the Uglies series, is intended to show the variability of literary influence. Comparative close readings throughout the thesis display the variety of ways influences are used within the texts, and illustrate the factors on which their use is dependent: the compatibility of the latecomer text with its precursor, the author's opinion of the earlier work, and the reading the author makes of the precursor text. Pullman's acknowledgement of influences is dependent on whether he considers them worthy precursors (in the case of Heinrich von Kleist, William Blake, and John Milton) or an embarrassing ancestor (in the case of C. S. Lewis). Westerfeld's is dependent on how similar his precursor works are to his own texts, as he does not acknowledge the obvious influence of Aldous Huxley, but happily names Ray Bradbury, John Christopher, Ted Chiang, and Charles Beaumont as influences. The thesis shows that the use of literary influences is not straightforward as one author may, as Westerfeld and Pullman do, display different attitudes to and appropriate precursor texts in differing ways within one work.</p>
Broadcasting Policy Advice 1986-88: a Critical Evaluation of New Zealand's Broadcasting Policy Framework
Authors:   , Hay David Robert 
Published: November 2021

<p>In August 1988, the Labour Government announced its policy to deregulate the broadcasting industry. The policy was comprised two of major initiatives; 1. Commercialising the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand, and 2. Creating property rights out of the right to broadcast and establishing a market mechanism to allocate these. The policy was based on an economic analysis of "the Economics of Broadcasting and Government Intervention" presented to the Royal Commission on Broadcasting and Related Telecommunications in a submission devised and presented independently of any political authority or mandate by the New Zealand Treasury. This thesis is presented as a piece of "public" policy analysis, in the sense that it seeks to explain, to a non-expert audience, the strengths, weaknesses and ethical implications of Treasury's analysis as well as the outcomes or effects that deregulation has had for New Zealand society. In doing this, it seeks also to explain to the community of policy analysts and advisors - using, as much as possible, the language of modern public administration and economics - the limitations of applying 'orthodox' economic theory to the role the media plays in mediating the relationship among audiences, the state, the market and society.</p>
The Euclidean Steiner Tree Problem: Simulated Annealing and Other Heuristics
Authors:   , Grimwood Geoffrey Ross 
Published: November 2021

<p>In this thesis the Euclidean Steiner tree problem and the optimisation technique called simulated annealing are studied. In particular, there is an investigation of whether simulated annealing is a viable solution method for the problem. The Euclidean Steiner tree problem is a topological network design problem and is relevant to the design of communication, transportation and distribution networks. The problem is to find the shortest connection of a set of points in the Euclidean plane. Simulated annealing is a generally applicable method of finding solutions of combinatorial optimisation problems. The results of the investigation are very satisfactory. The quality of simulated annealing solutions compare favourably with those of the best known tailored heuristic method for the Euclidean Steiner tree problem</p>
The Wellington Waterfront and Tourism Development: Planning Process and Legislative Framework
Authors:   , Nguyen Thi Hong Hanh 
Published: November 2021

<p>Over the last two decades, the redevelopment of the Wellington waterfront has become one of the most contested urban development projects in New Zealand, with the involvement of many varied interests. There have been a number of changes in planning, development concepts, rules, and regulations in order to manage its ongoing redevelopment. However, many development projects on the waterfront have been delayed and cancelled. It might be argued that regulatory and plan changes may be influencing the progress of this redevelopment. However, to date, no one has explored this relationship. Therefore, this study is aimed at filling this gap by using the Wellington waterfront as a case study and focusing on tourism development, the planning process, and the legislative framework surrounding this redevelopment. Its objectives were: (1) to explore the role of tourism in the redevelopment of the Wellington waterfront; (2) to identify the key players involved in the waterfront redevelopment, and specify their involvement and influence on planning and decision-making processes; and (3) to define the existing legislative framework for this redevelopment and examine the way in which it impacts tourism development in this area. This study adopted a qualitative research method. Data in this study was collected from a wide range of documents relevant to the Wellington waterfront and through face-to-face and semi-structured in-depth interviews. 18 representatives from local authorities, waterfront organisations, tourism entities, as well as urban planners, developers, community groups, and property owners were interviewed. Data triangulation was used in data analysis to validate and deepen the findings. The study found that tourism was not recognised as one of the key driving forces of the redevelopment of Wellington waterfront as a whole, although within specific development proposals tourism has been used as a rationale to support these developments. This suggested that to a certain extent tourism was considered in this redevelopment. In this research, while Wellington City Council (WCC) and its controlled entities were identified as the key players influencing the planning and decision making process, the involvement of the public may also play an important role in slowing down this redevelopment. There was firm agreement among participants about the impact of legislative framework on this redevelopment. This study found that there is a legislative framework within which the waterfront redevelopment works. However, the legislative framework tends to impact specific developments rather the waterfront redevelopment as a whole. Several implications and recommendations arise from this study, including the need of continuing research on impact of legislative framework on tourism from a legal perspective. Additionally, it is recommended that the extent to which legislative framework accommodates tourism should be emphasised in understanding its impact.</p>