bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Local Beer: The construction of masculinity through the production and consumption of local beer
Authors:   , Saris Neave 
Published: December 2021

<p>Ideas of masculinity in Wellington, NZ are co-constructed in the creation of ‘craft’ or ‘local’ beer. This thesis explores the production and consumption of a commodity and its cultivation of ‘self’ to understand why only certain kinds of people drink beer. I draw on data gathered from interviews and participant observation to explore this self-making process. Results indicate that there is a movement from mainstream beer to craft beer locally produced and consumed. In the process of creating local beer the local consumer is also made. Beer is a self- making process. Key to my argument is the emergence of a particular type of masculinity. By producing and consuming locally, people reject the type of masculinity that has historically been established by mainstream beer, the white colonial male. Attributes include, hardworking, rugged, linked to the earth, and working class. Local beer, by way of contrast, promises a celebration of a myriad of identities in its celebration of all different styles and flavours of beer. My findings indicate that this is only a perception. In Wellington, a new kind of man is being made in craft brewpubs, the ‘cultural omnivore’. The cultural omnivore is a man of middle or upper-middle class, has ‘taste’ and appreciation for flavourful beer, and is metropolitan. A significant implication of this research is the insight gained on how a commodity, beer, can facilitate in the making of certain kinds of people. This research contributes to anthropological scholarship on the creation of self and gender, at the level of the local consumer.</p>
Code Optimisation Framework for Multicode Sonar Systems
Authors:   , Rashed Muhammad 
Published: December 2021

<p>The ocean is a temporally and spatially varying environment, the characteristics of which pose significant challenges to the development of effective underwater wireless communications and sensing systems. An underwater sensing system such as a sonar detects the presence of a known signal through correlation. It is advantageous to use multiple transducers to increase surveying area with reduced surveying costs and time. Each transducers is assigned a dedicated code. When using multiple codes, the sidelobes of auto- and crosscorrelations are restricted to theoretical limits known as bounds. Sets of codes must be optimised in order to achieve optimal correlation properties, and, achieve Sidelobe Level (SLL)s as low as possible. In this thesis, we present a novel code-optimisation method to optimise code-sets with any number of codes and up to any length of each code. We optimise code-sets for a matched filter for application in a multi-code sonar system. We first present our gradient-descent based algorithm to optimise sets of codes for flat and low crosscorrelations and autocorrelation sidelobes, including conformance of the magnitude of the samples of the codes to a target power profile. We incorporate the transducer frequency response and the channel effects into the optimisation algorithm. We compare the correlations of our optimised codes with the well-known Welch bound. We then present a method to widen the autocorrelation mainlobe and impose monotonicity. In many cases, we are able to achieve SLLs beyond the Welch bound. We study the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) improvement of the optimised codes for an Underwater Acoustic (UWA) channel. During its propagation, the acoustic wave suffers non-constant transmission loss which is compensated by the application of an appropriate Time Variable Gain (TVG). The effect of the TVG modifies the noise received with the signal. We show that in most cases, the matched filter is still the optimum filter. We also show that the accuracy in timing is very important in the application of the TVG to the received signal. We then incorporate Doppler tolerance into the existing optimisation algorithm. Our proposed method is able to optimise sets of codes for multiple Doppler scaling factors and non-integer delays in the arrival of the reflection, while still conforming to other constraints. We suggest designing mismatched filters to further reduce the SLLs, firstly using an existing Quadratically Constrained Qaudratic Program (QCQP) formulation and secondly, as a local optimisation problem, modifying our basic optimisation algorithm.</p>
Diversity of tropical macroalgae in the New Zealand marine aquarium trade
Authors:   , Woodhouse Kirill 
Published: December 2021

<p>Exotic species often slip through international borders undetected. Many perish but for some species introduction to a foreign land or sea brings release from natural enemies and a chance to establish a population. Increased global trade has increased the frequency of species introductions through stowaways and lapses in biosecurity. Once an invader is established there is the opportunity for explosive population growth at the detriment of native species and humans. The marine aquarium trade is a significant vector of species introductions, including algal introductions. The most publicized introduction from aquaria was the release of the green alga Caulerpa taxifolia from the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco. C. taxifolia introduction had large negative impacts on the invaded ecosystem. Molecular barcoding of tropical macroalgae entering the New Zealand aquarium trade was implemented using various molecular markers (cox1, cox3, rbcL tufA, LSU). Both NCBI Blast searches and maximum-likelihood phylogenies were used to identify the isolates. A total of 62 species of tropical macroalgae were identified from coral rocks imported into New Zealand, plus samples from reef hobbyists. Some species found are known as invasive elsewhere, for example, Caulerpa cylindracea, C. racemosa, C. sertularioides, Ulva ohnoi and Chaetomorpha vieillardii. All three major groups of algae were well represented in my findings with 26 species of red algae, 24 species of green algae and 12 species of brown algae. Temperature tolerance limits are the largest determinant in survival in algae, while salinity and pH are less significant. Temperature tolerance of tropical algae to the minimum Sea Surface Temperature in Auckland (14°C) and Wellington (11°C) was tested. My results show that one species Chaetomorpha vieillardii can survive at Auckland minimum winter sea surface temperatures. Our findings have important implications for New Zealand biosecurity, as not only are a large diversity of exotic macroalgae entering the New Zealand marine aquarium trade unregulated, but there is also the potential for them to survive in New Zealand waters.  </p>
Incredible but Very Real: 3D Cinema and Trauma in the Wake of WWII and 9/11
Authors:   , Fadlon Thor 
Published: December 2021

<p>This thesis investigates Hollywood and global Hollywood 3D cinema at the height of its box office success, the early fifties, and from 2009-2014. Discourse surrounding 3D cinema in both periods is governed largely by technological and economic arguments. While this discourse holds some merit, it overlooks the cultural and historical background against which 3D cinema rose to prominence. Shifting research focus from the technological and economic to the cultural, this project uncovers the presence of trauma in 3D cinema of the fifties and D3D of the new millennium, and argues 3D cinema to be a privileged form to engage with traumatic themes. As trauma is uncovered in 3D cinema, connections are drawn between the narratives and poetics of the films discussed and post-traumatic themes prevalent in the US post WWII, and post September 11 respectively. Focusing on questions of representation, embodiment and temporality, which hold a central role both in 3D cinema and trauma theory, this project finds that 3D cinema narratives and poetics of each period resonated with the cultural trauma that preceded it.</p>
The influence of culture on ethnic women's use of microfinance for empowerment in Luang Namtha Province, Laos
Authors:   , Tongnamavong Souasong 
Published: December 2021

<p>The empowerment of women is essential but remains challenging globally. It has been supported by microfinance projects, particularly in recent decades across poor countries. Yet the contribution of microfinance to women’s empowerment remains controversial given the complexity of empowerment itself. It is commonly acknowledged that empowerment starts from within individuals themselves. It is also acknowledged that culture plays a significant role in women’s empowerment. Despite these acknowledgements, the complexities remain unclear in the Lao context which is the target of this study. This study examines the contribution of microfinance to the empowerment of women in Laos with a focus on the elements of culture. It is based on a feminist perspective, with a focus on a personal empowerment conceptual framework which enables the core values of empowerment to be examined. The examination is undertaken by employing semistructured interviews and focus groups for data collection with three ethnic groups in northern Laos, namely Hmong, Khmu and Tai-Yuan, participating in the Access to Finance for the Poor (AFP) project. The results show that the approach of the AFP project tends to meet women’s practical needs rather than their strategic needs. This is because the project’s approach appears to be influenced by the national approach of Laos in which the provision of opportunities for women is emphasised. It is also because ethnic women’s participation in the project is driven by so many practical needs that it makes their strategic needs invisible. The results also revealed that the women’s strategic needs are diverse, due to their particular culture and traditions. The results showed several gaps in the empowerment of women in the country. If these gaps are to be closed, there is a need for efforts from many stakeholders, particularly in the education sector, as the gender agenda needs to be integrated into its national curriculum. Keywords: women’s empowerment, microfinance, village banks, culture, Laos</p>
Essays in the Regulation of Drones and Counter-Drone Systems
Authors:   , Shelley Andrew 
Published: December 2021

<p>Rapid growth in the use of drones potentially delivers significant economic benefits, but it has also given rise to considerable public concern about safety risks, infringement of privacy, and other unwelcome surveillance and observation. Drones are able to be operated remotely from the pilot, making it difficult to identify the operator and attribute liability for harm caused. This in turn means that existing regulatory frameworks might not induce an efficient level of drone-related harm. The first substantive chapter of this thesis considers measures to address concerns about privacy and surveillance. I propose the adoption of a package of measures including: tort law reform, the promulgation of a "Code of Practice for Drone Operations" under New Zealand's Privacy Act 1993, a remotely-readable identifier to identify approved operators, provision for aerial trespass by unmanned aircraft, provision for the destruction of unmanned aircraft committing trespass, and the clarification of what constitutes a privacy violation by broadcast or closed-circuit television and video systems. Fundamental to those proposals are the concepts of drone registration and the legalisation of the right to self-defence against drones. Registration requires that a drone is registered with the regulatory authorities, with a registered drone being traceable back to the owner of the drone. Registered drones may also be required to carry a remotely-readable identifier. Legalisation of self-defence allows bystanders to take defensive actions against drones, with the potential for a drone to be destroyed. Both of these mechanisms provide a means by which the operator of a drone faces some cost if they are causing harm, and thus may induce more efficient actions by the drone operator. This thesis establishes a theoretical framework for self-defence, registration, and registration in conjunction with self-defence. Conditions are established under which each will be the preferred form of regulation. It is also established that the status quo, with neither registration nor self-defence, is likely to be optimal when harm from drone activity is relatively low. The conditions established around when self-defence is efficient also provide the conditions for the regulation of counter-drone systems. I identify the legal impediments to the implementation of drone-detection systems and counter-drone systems in New Zealand, and propose a regulatory framework to allow the adoption of those systems.</p>
The significance and impacts of a youth-led empowerment program and youth-led community development interventions in Myanmar
Authors:   , Soe Thu Maung 
Published: December 2021

<p>In Myanmar, youth are traditionally perceived as a less significant segment of the society. Hence, youth development issues and problems around youth have attracted little attention from community members. Youth empowerment is a human resource development tool and a process designed to help the development of young individuals, by enabling them to solve their own problems and contribute to the development of their community. This qualitative study examines youth empowerment initiatives of one youth-led organization and its alumni by employing Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and conducting semi-structured interviews. This study focuses on how a youth-led organization has empowered youth to become socially engaged for social transformation and get involved in the country’s development sector. Results show that empowerment is an ongoing process and reveal a new dimension of youth empowerment in the Myanmar context. This study found that the nature of youth-led development organizations for youth and social change movements differed. Youth-led empowerment actions offer learning opportunities and create spaces for young people to participate in community movements. Moreover, Socially Engaged Buddhism (SEB) is an alternative to the conventional empowerment approaches, which offers Buddhist principles for individual development of young people and stimulates youth to get involved in collective social change movements to tackle structural injustices.  </p>
Quantum Entanglement in Time
Authors:   , Rajan Del 
Published: December 2021

<p>This thesis is in the field of quantum information science, which is an area that reconceptualizes quantum physics in terms of information. Central to this area is the quantum effect of entanglement in space. It is an interdependence among two or more spatially separated quantum systems that would be impossible to replicate by classical systems. Alternatively, an entanglement in space can also be viewed as a resource in quantum information in that it allows the ability to perform information tasks that would be impossible or very difficult to do with only classical information. Two such astonishing applications are quantum communications which can be harnessed for teleportation, and quantum computers which can drastically outperform the best classical supercomputers. In this thesis our focus is on the theoretical aspect of the field, and we provide one of the first expositions on an analogous quantum effect known as entanglement in time. It can be viewed as an interdependence of quantum systems across time, which is stronger than could ever exist between classical systems. We explore this temporal effect within the study of quantum information and its foundations as well as through relativistic quantum information. An original contribution of this thesis is the design of one of the first quantum information applications of entanglement in time, namely a quantum blockchain. We describe how the entanglement in time provides the quantum advantage over a classical blockchain. Furthermore, the information encoding procedure of this quantum blockchain can be interpreted as non-classically influencing the past, and hence the system can be viewed as a `quantum time machine.'</p>
Adoration of the Joint
Authors:   , Honore Marc 
Published: December 2021

<p>At many sites across New Zealand, industrial demands and the built environment have taken precedence over considerations for neighbouring natural settings, with a lack of threshold or transitional space between the two often leading to heavy contextual clashes. This is a prominent issue where the Korokoro Recreation Reserve meets the numerous industrial sites at Cornish Street in Lower Hutt, Wellington. The aim of this research is to address these fragile contextual issues with an architectural intervention that acts like a joint on multiple theoretical levels, furthering our understanding of how architecture can contribute to the landscape, establishing a narrative between two conflicting conditions while establishing a transitional threshold between them. Marco Frascari and Kenneth Frampton write on the theory of synecdoche in architecture and the capacity of details as generators, evidencing the skilful joining and consideration of parts, defined as ‘a process of signification’ resulting in synecdochal architecture, in which a part is made to represent the whole and vice versa. When architecture evidences synecdoche, a sensitive viewer can understand an architectural intervention’s underlying meaning and understand architecture as a set of dialogues. Through these means of enabling a greater understanding of architecture, the humble joint provides a didactic role, and through this didactic capability people may come to see and understand the important role that architecture can play in the context of its natural environment.</p>
Investigating Extended Linker Analogues of Risperidone for Treatment of Multiple Sclerosis
Authors:   , Bird Thomas 
Published: December 2021

<p>Risperidone is a second-generation antipsychotic used to treat psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism. It targets dopamine D2 and serotonin 5-HT2A receptors and has immunomodulatory properties. Multiple sclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects over 2 million people worldwide and currently has no cure. Recent research at Victoria University of Wellington has shown that risperidone is able to reduce disease severity in mouse models of multiple sclerosis. Further research has demonstrated that truncated and unsaturated analogues of risperidone have varying immunomodulatory effects in immune cells. The current research describes the synthesis and preliminary in vitro testing of four extended-linker analogues of risperidone. Structure-activity relationship studies with neurotropic drugs have shown that altering the length of the alkyl chain found in many of these compounds can have significant effects on receptor binding profiles. Synthesis and cytokine production assays of these analogues begin to provide further insight into how risperidone exerts its immunomodulatory effects and may contribute to the development of new treatments for multiple sclerosis.</p>
Adapting CRISPR/Cas9 Lentivirus Technology for Functional Studies of GATA6 & GATA4 during Bovine Preimplantation Embryogenesis
Authors:   , Ni Shicheng 
Published: December 2021

<p>In recent times, cattle embryology has been under the spotlight of investigation due to its apparent economic values. This is especially relevant in the case of New Zealand, owing to its high percentage of livestock export. Specifically, the period of peri-implantation development has been of particular relevance. During this stage, the developing zygote will establish 3 key lineages – epiblast, hypoblast and trophoblast. Previous studies have elucidated that a significant number of embryos die prior to implantation, therefore highlighting the importance of correctly establishing these 3 lineages to overall embryonic survival. However, while embryological stages of the preimplantation embryo have been extensively studied in their eutherian cousin, mice, the molecular regulation of that of cattle remains much less addressed. Whereas the regulation of bovine embryo development is orchestrated by many transcriptional regulators, or genetic regulatory networks (GNP), we aimed to focus our studies on 2 key transcriptional regulators, GATA4 and GATA6. During early embryogenesis, both these transcriptional factors are known molecular regulators that drive the establishment of the hypoblast lineage in mice. By and large, while their respective expression has been documented in cattle embryos, functional studies towards these markers have not yet been performed. Latest advances in molecular biology have given us novel methods to study the mechanism of bovine embryogenesis. To this end, the continuing perfection of CRISPR technologies in the last decade - in particular its delivery through lentiviral vectors, has established an ability to generate stable, targeted knock-out mutants. Therefore, it is aimed in this thesis to design and test lentiviral particles that induce knock-out mutants of GATA4 and GATAT6, to test their efficacy in primary cell cultures (bovine cumulus cells) and to functionally analyse the effect of GATA4 and GATA6 knockdowns in early bovine embryos.</p>
Absraction for Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Authors:   , Telfar Alexander 
Published: December 2021

<p>Successful reinforcement learning requires large amounts of data, compute, and some luck. We explore the ability of abstraction(s) to reduce these dependencies. Abstractions for reinforcement learning share the goals of this abstract: to capture essential details, while leaving out the unimportant. By throwing away inessential details, there will be less to compute, less to explore, and less variance in observations. But, does this always aid reinforcement learning? More specifically, we start by looking for abstractions that are easily solvable. This leads us to a type of linear abstraction. We show that, while it does allow efficient solutions, it also gives erroneous solutions, in the general case. We then attempt to improve the sample efficiency of a reinforcment learner. We do so by constructing a measure of symmetry and using it as an inductive bias. We design and run experiments to test the advantage provided by this inductive bias, but must leave conclusions to future work.</p>