bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Online app to develop positive affect in adolescents - Positive Approaches to Life: A Smartphone-Administered Self-Help Program for Adolescents
Authors:   , Hudson Sarah 
Published: November 2021

<p>Psychological well-being has traditionally been viewed as the absence of psychopathology. However, there is an increasing focus on the development of psychological skills and resources, which may both promote psychological well-being and buffer the impacts of stress. There is a promising amount of research demonstrating that brief, positive, psychological interventions are effective in increasing psychological well-being and reducing psychopathology in individuals (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009). While the mechanisms behind successful positive psychology interventions (PPIs) are not well understood, it has been posited that positive, intentional activities may effect change by increasing positive emotions, cognitions and behaviours, which in turn lead to positive psychological outcomes. These interventions have traditionally targeted adults, and thus substantially fewer interventions have been conducted with adolescent samples (Mitchell & VellaBrodrick, 2009). Additionally, successful programmes have often not been widely implemented due to high resource cost for therapists and teachers. Researchers have suggested it might be worthwhile to improve methodological designs by using nontraditional approaches of delivery, i.e. smartphones, for psychological interventions (Munoz, 2012). The present study was designed to: 1) to investigate whether a smartphone technology delivering positive, intentional activities had a significant influence on levels of well-being in an intervention group when compared to a control group; and 2) to construct a mediational model to inform the relationships between core constructs of psychological well-being and emotions (e.g., subjective happiness, adaptive coping, and resilience). The study included 72 participants, aged 10-15 years, who were recruited from six schools in the wider Wellington region. Participants operated a smartphone-based application that required them to complete four modules designed to cultivate positive emotions. Contrary to predictions, two multivariate repeated measures analyses of variance (MANOVA) indicated that participants who completed the app did not display increases in positive emotion or of positive psychological outcomes compared to the control group. The mediational model showed that adaptive resources might lead to greater psychological well-being in adolescents. In particular, the model indicated that higher adaptive coping resources lead to increased psychological well-being through the variable of increased resilience. These results indicate that adaptive coping strategies may play a key role in positive adolescent development. The limitations of the study are discussed and recommendations were made for future research to determine the efficacy of smartphone applications in psychological research with adolescents.</p>
An Exploration of Building Energy Model (BEM) Calibration in New Zealand
Authors:   , Duff Ethan 
Published: November 2021

<p>This study explored the use of Building Energy Modelling (BEM) and BEM calibration techniques for existing buildings as currently employed in New Zealand Industry. Research on the use of BEM for existing building energy efficiency retrofits has increased dramatically over the past few decades. However, this use of BEM has been criticised for inaccurate and unbelievable results. These are often the result of not closely matching the building being modelled due to uncertainties around model inputs and modeller assumptions. As a result, researchers have responded by developing techniques to ‘calibrate’ models by comparing the simulated building with the actual building energy use thus providing quality assurance. However, many of these techniques are difficult, esoteric, convoluted or impractical for industry professionals. This research explored if a simple calibration technique developed at Victoria University of Wellington by Dr. Shaan Cory would meet the needs of industry practitioners. The technique was turned into a usable tool and student trialled to prepare it for industry assessment. Four BEM experts were then interviewed in a series of individual interviews and workshops trialling the use of the technique. The research concluded that the use of BEM is limited in New Zealand due to a perceived Industry value gap – building owners are not aware of the benefits of modelling whole-building retrofits. This leads to reduced uptake of calibration techniques from industry resulting in a credibility gap, where the modeller themselves may not be confident of their own BEMs. This is due, in part, to a lack of industry quality assurance guidelines, usable calibration tools, and certainty around model inputs. The adoption of the streamlined Cory method would be of significant benefit to practitioners. However, it was identified that it did not solve all issues relating to uncertainty estimation.</p>
Digesting Stigma: Exploring the Illness Experience of New Zealanders with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (‘It’s just shitty’)
Authors:   , Cunningham-Pow Bryony 
Published: November 2021

<p>This thesis is an anthropological exploration of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), and the first ethnographic study of people with IBS in New Zealand. It explores the illness experience of people with IBS and whether stigma plays a role within this experience. IBS is a gastrointestinal illness that affects 10-20% of New Zealand’s population. However, its aetiology is unknown, there is no cure, and the biomedical approach that informs its diagnosis and treatment is often incongruous with its lived experience. I posit that the illness experience of my participants and what is stigmatising for them must be understood not only in relation to its physical manifestations but also in relation to the biomedical and neoliberal influences that inform social expectations of the body and social participation. Further, participants experience their IBS simultaneously resisting and participating within these influences to make sense of and manage their illness in a way that aligns with their lived experiences. All work within this thesis is my own except where otherwise stated.</p>
Forgotten Interiors
Authors:   , Love Alexander 
Published: November 2021

<p>Historic buildings play an important role in helping shape and characterise a city’s’ urban fabric. They extend beyond purely the aesthetic by enhancing our urban experience through providing a notion of continuity, and, by forming an enduring connection to our past, present, and future. In many instances, extending a historic building’s life that has fallen into a state of dilapidation, and, saving the rich history in which resides within its walls requires a rehabilitative or adaptive approach. Undertaking this process however, can become challenging when there lies an absence of interior documentation for the site. A clear understanding of the current, forsaken state in which the building’s interior has sunken into cannot therefore be established. The aim of this research is to therefore explore how a rehabilitative approach can be applied to the dilapidated, heritage listed, former Tramway Hotel to rejuvenate its forgotten interiors. By breathing another life into the building’s old bones, it seeks to make it fit for modern purposes once again whilst tangentially retaining the rich history that is housed within its weathered walls. Through the cyclical, reflective, and iterative nature of action research, this research investigates a range of techniques in response to the site’s forgotten interiors. By initially exploring the issue from various avenues, through the cycles of identifying, planning, acting and then critically self-reflecting, the design iterations produced refined in scope to eventuate in the act of strategically inserting, and then shifting newly built elements within the existing structure of the former Tramway Hotel. What was essential throughout the research and was therefore translated into a criterion for the evaluation of each iteration, was the need to add another life to the building, to allow it to persist, to live on without disrupting its historic integrity and character. Through the implementation and direct visual contrast of the newly built elements from historic ones, the developed design response seeks to establish a clear dialogue between the two so that each complements and enhances the other.</p>
Creative Territories: Exploring Territorialisation in Shared Transient Spaces
Authors:   , Trewin Jeanette 
Published: November 2021

<p>The physical spaces we occupy and inhabit are continuously changing and evolving, they are becoming increasingly transient. In response, this research is interested in learning how people occupy and inhabit transient space. Many of the spaces we occupy are affected by invisible systems controlling the amount of time we spend inside a space, and how we occupy a space. Through the study of spatial territorialisation [the creation and inhabitation of territory] this research looks at developing an understanding of behaviours and acts of territorialising in space to understand how transient space is occupied. This research looks at tertiary students as an example of people who inhabit transient spaces. Through a series of different observational experiments, students’ territories are studied to understand how they may be created and inhabited. Different techniques such as space occupation, accumulation of objects, and comfort enhancements are some of the findings of the way people have inhabited space. This thesis is interested in using this understanding of space inhabitation, learned through the different acts of territorialising, to explore how the way we design spaces might be informed from this. A final design strategy is proposed that uses the master’s studio at the Victoria University, Faculty of Architecture and Design as a site. The final design proposal uses research gathered through creative territory experiments by using installation as a tool for testing individual and communal responses to territorialising. The overall design strategy is a series of responses to the current acts of territorialising and spatial occupation occurring in the studio. The design encourages the good habits occurring in the studio such as leaving the studio for a break, and disrupts the less healthy habits, such as the permanent claiming of shared territory.</p>
Tika Tonu: Young Māori Mothers' Experiences of Wellbeing Surrounding the Birth of their First Tamaiti
Authors:   , Graham Aria 
Published: November 2021

<p>The wellbeing experiences of young Māori mothers’ (ngā māmā) surrounding the birth of their first tamaiti and the impact of those experiences, often determine outcomes for wāhine Māori, their tamariki and whānau. A greater understanding and nurturing of young Māori mothers has far reaching implications that encompass hapū, iwi, community, Aotearoa and the health experiences and outcomes of Indigenous and other subjugated people in the global community. However, there is little exploration and information about the wellbeing experiences of young Māori mothers, and therefore little is known about their stories, thoughts, and feelings from their experiences. This thesis explores the experiences of young Māori mothers from their perspective, regarding pregnancy, birth and motherhood. Historical misrepresentation, western notions of gender and sexuality, negative statistics and reports have portrayed young Māori mothers as the least capable, least desired and deficient. Dominant western ideologies of motherhood and hegemonic perceptions fail to recognise the essence of wellbeing for young Māori mothers, and instead marginalise and render their aspirations invisible and irrelevant. This thesis brings to the fore the elements that ngā māmā signal as vital to their wellbeing. By utilising a kaupapa Māori approach to methodology, and a theoretical framework of kaupapa Māori and mana wahine, this thesis explores what matters to ngā māmā and their wellbeing, and how te ao Māori is an intrinsic part of those experiences. An integrated kaupapa Māori analytical framework is presented, which was developed for the thesis as a legitimate and authentic approach to research method and design to help make sense of and assemble the codes, symbolism and themes of the data. The findings of this thesis signify the power of the female to influence the wellbeing of ngā māmā through stability, guidance and empowerment. The thesis captures the tamaiti as ‘tohu aroha’, and explicates the journey of ngā māmā to greater rangatiratanga and identity. Furthermore, the vitality and balance of te ao Māori within the lives of ngā māmā contributes to what is significant to their experiences of wellbeing. The thesis emancipates ngā māmā from entrenched stereotypes by epitomising their experiences and thus denouncing deficit discourses, and advances the aspirations of ngā māmā and the lives of their tamariki and whānau. This thesis makes an original and complementary contribution to the growing knowledge around Māori maternal wellbeing, kaupapa Māori methodology and research.</p>
Re-Emerging Wetlands: Shaping Multifunctional Landscapes Through Integrated Flood Management Strategy
Authors:   , Kojima Yota 
Published: November 2021

<p>The Kapiti Coast is a unique cultural landscape, and while agriculturally-dominated, there are remnants of ecologically significant habitat along the coast that need to be protected. Moving forward, there are two major impacts that impose large-scale and influential change on landscape process and biodiversity: climate change and urban development. This compounded with current conflicts between the agricultural industry and natural water resources produces a slow release of complex issues that affect a wide range of land-uses and ecologies and negatively impact the growth and resilience of the Kapiti Coast. Moving toward planning the future of our rural landscapes, there is a need to shift toward a more multifunctional and resilient model that not only takes into considerations our movements and actions on the landscape, but also changes that occur within the landscape itself; climate change poses to accelerate these changes and exacerbate existing problems.</p>
Data Acquisition and Dissemination for the Internet of Nano Things
Authors:   , Yu Hang 
Published: November 2021

<p>Electromagnetic-based Wireless NanoSensor Networks (EM-WNSNs) operating in the Terahertz band (0.1 THz – 10 THz) will enable nano-scale applications and stimulate the evolution from the Internet of Things (IoT) to the Internet of Nano Things (IoNT). Data delivery, which is one of the key functionalities of EM-WNSNs, faces three major challenges that will affect network performance: the frequency-selective channel in the THz band due to molecular absorption, the limited ability to support networking functions due to their small size, and the limited bandwidth of the existing infrastructure for transferring sensed data to the Internet. However, to date, limited amount of research on data delivery has been done to address the peculiarities of IoNT from the networking perspective. To fill the gap, in this thesis, data acquisition and dissemination solutions are studied for IoNT to improve the resource utilization efficiency during data delivery. Different from existing literatures that focus on standalone nanonetworks, this thesis investigates solutions for connecting nanodevices to the Internet. In detail, the contributions of this thesis are composed of four components: First, a preliminary study namely the Channel-aware Forwarding (CForward) is conducted on multi-hop forwarding for THz networks; second, the On-demand Probabilistic polling (OP polling) is developed for IoNT with dynamic IoT bandwidth and channel conditions; third, a TTLbased Efficient Forwarding (TEForward) is designed for the polling-based nanonetworks under dynamic channel conditions; fourth, the Enhanced Adaptive Pulse Interval Scheduling (EAPIS) is implemented to collect data from event-based nanonetworks under limited IoT bandwidth.</p>
New Zealand weather extremes and climate-related events; a model-based assessment
Authors:   , Nistor Ben 
Published: November 2021

<p>Extreme weather and climate-related events can have pronounced environmental, economic and societal impacts, yet large natural variability within Earth’s constantly evolving climate system challenges the understanding of how these phenomena are changing. Increasingly powerful climate models have made it possible to study how certain factors, including anthropogenic forcings, have modified the likelihood and magnitude of extreme events. This study examines climate observations, reanalysis fields and model output to assess how weather extremes and climate-related events have changed. Part 1 investigates the detection and attribution of surface climate changes in relation to ozone depletion. Part 2 uses probabilistic event attribution and storyline frameworks to evaluate the role of anthropogenic forcings in altering the risk of extreme 1-day rainfall (RX1D) events for Christchurch, New Zealand in light of an unprecedented rainfall event that occurred in March 2014. Extremely large simulations of possible weather generated by the weather@home Australia-New Zealand (w@h ANZ) model found ozone forcings induced significant changes globally (< 3 hPa) in simulations of mean sea level pressure for 2013. A clear seasonal response was detected in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) circulation that was consistent with prior studies. Ozone-induced changes to average monthly rainfall were not significant in New Zealand with large natural variability and the limitation of one-year simulations challenging attribution to this climate forcing. In Christchurch, model and observational data give evidence of human activity increasing the likelihood and magnitude (+17%) of RX1D events despite significant drying trends for mean total rainfall (-66%) in austral summer. For events similar to that observed during March 2014, the fraction of attributable risk (FAR) is estimated to be 27.4%. This result was robust across different spatial averaging areas though is sensitive to the rainfall threshold examined. Unique meteorological conditions in combination with anomalously high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the tropical South Pacific were likely important to the occurrence of this extreme event. These results demonstrate how human influence can be detected in present-day weather and climate events.</p>
Bits + Pieces : Investigating the Procedural Ideation of Architectural Massing for Early Stage Design
Authors:   , Rhodes-Robinson Jacob 
Published: November 2021

<p>The architectural discipline is constantly experiencing change to the way in which its practitioners operate. The continual evolution of computing hardware and the substantial development of Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) has seen Architecture shift from a discipline of predominantly analogue techniques to one that relies almost entirely on the digital medium. As a result, the role of the practicing architect has seen considerable change. Architecture, once a discipline of pencil and paper, now shares creative techniques and tools with Computer Science, Film, Visual Effects, Interactive Media, Robotics, and Computer programming. Such new partners are providing alternative views of what it is to be a creative practitioner, challenging the discipline of architecture to step beyond the preconceived boundaries and means of operating embodied within conventional practice. Architects now have the opportunity to adopt new methods for the production of the built environment. This research engages with developing computational techniques designed for film and interactive media and explores how they can be utilised to augment the way in which architecture may be produced. This body of researches adopts the technique procedural generation as a vehicle for this investigation; a technique used for content creation in interactive media and game design. This research also adopts the use of a computational design software called Houdini - an industry standard procedural software used widely within film and game. Through an architectural lens, it explores the re-purposing of this software and procedural design, developing an understanding for how they can both aid in the ideation of built form during the infancy of the design process. This research initially addressed the question: ‘how can conventional architectural practices be augmented by procedural computational design techniques, to further explore the impacts of opportunity and ideation on architectural design?’ As a result of refinement, it came around to focus on asking ‘how can the application of procedural generation design techniques augment the ideation of architectural massing for early stage design?’ It identifies how procedural techniques can be used in the process of ideating architecture and aims to investigate how procedural generation offers an alternative methodology to the production of architecture in early design stages. It explores, through computational design, the limitations and constraints that occur in the process of mastering design orientated procedural techniques. It subsequently develops, through computational design, an understanding of how procedural techniques can be applied to the early stage design of architecture. Finally, through architectural design, it examines how procedural design techniques can be partnered with specific architectural conditions such as site, function, and form, in order to augment the architectural ideation process.</p>
The impact of public managers' leadership styles on results-based planning practices in Vietnam
Authors:   , Pham Ha 
Published: November 2021

<p>Over past decade, there has been increased use of results-based management in Vietnam and other countries, but little empirical research exists on results-based planning (RBP) in the planning functions of public organizations. Some experiences suggest that managerial leadership may be among the determinants of success, affecting whether and how RBP is used. This thesis answers the following question: What is the impact of leadership styles by public managers on the practices of RBP? Using empirical observations of current RBP in Vietnamese public organizations and a multiphase mixed method design, this study finds that transformational, transactional, and autocratic leadership styles are often concurrent among public managers (but in varying intensities), and these ‘combined’ leadership styles have a direct, positive, and strong effect on the use and outcomes of RBP practices. This study also finds that leadership effects on RBP are stronger than other organizational factors examined (RBP-related training, bureaucratic culture, funding). Furthermore, among three components of these combined leadership styles, transformational leadership has the greatest contribution to the higher performance of RBP practices. The findings of this research also show the specific leadership behaviors by public managers that are most associated with the increased RBP. This study contributes to the literature by offering empirical evidence of the role of leadership in deploying reforms such as results-based planning in a context of a developing country. It also provides public organizations with knowledge of leadership styles for implementing such reforms.</p>