bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Popular Political Participation in the Late Roman Republic
Authors:   , Earley Claudine Lana 
Published: November 2021

<p>Roman democracy is in fashion. In particular, the publication of Fergus Millar's The Crowd in the Late Republic (1998) has stimulated debate on the democratic elements in Roman government during this period. In this thesis I examine the nature of popular participation in the late Roman Republic. I focus on the decision-making power of the populus Romanus and popular pressure to effect reform in the favour of citizens outside the senatorial and equestrian orders. My findings are based on analysis of ancient literary and epigraphic sources, along with a critique of modern research on the topic. The first chapter introduces the subject with a survey of current scholarly opinion and discussion of key concepts and terms. Chapter Two investigates how power was shared between senatus populusque Romanus and the distribution of power in the assemblies, concluding that participation was widespread as a result of the changing circumstances in the late Republic. As farmers and veterans moved to Rome, and slaves were freed and granted citizenship and the right to vote, the balance was tipped in the favour of the non-elite voter. Each class of the populus Romanus could participate in Roman politics, and certainly members of each did. Having concluded my analysis of the formal avenues of participation, I move onto the informal. Chapter Three is the first of three chapters of case studies focusing on demonstrations and collective action which form the heart of this work. The first set of studies cover secession, mutiny and refusal of the draft. Chapter Four continues with studies of popular pressure to gain reforms to improve the food supply, restore tribunician power, obtain relief from crippling debt and land shortage. The final chapter of analysis, Chapter Five, investigates collective action at contiones, legislative assemblies, trials, ludi et gladiatores, triumphs, funerals, and elections. The findings of these three chapters bring me to the conclusion that Rome was a democracy, if of a particular type. The nature of popular political participation in the late Republic resembled that of an emerging democracy with the non-elite gaining an increasing role in the decision-making process, albeit without constitutional definition. The citizens' right to participate in the formal assemblies was augmented by their ability to take part in less formal ways also. These informal methods ranged from popular involvement in contiones through to the application of pressure on senators through the threat of secession and mutiny. Only the rise of the principate, with formalised roles for the various sectors in society under one leader, brought these developments to an end.</p>
An Investigation into Expectations of the Chief Information Officer's Role and Knowledge, Skills and Experience that Support It: a Dyadic IT-Business Perspective in NZ Local Government
Authors:   , Bunker Beverley 
Published: November 2021

<p>The CIO role is changing and becoming more strategic, in fact some CIOs even have a role in formulating their organisations strategic direction based on technology innovations. Yet the research that indicates this new role for CIOs is often reporting the experience in large private sector organisations. Is the experience similar in the public sector, especially what are the role expectations of CIOs in small local authority organisations where resources are tight and IT expenditure is subject to public scrutiny? This research explored the expectation of the CIO role in the NZ local government context through the eyes of the CIOs themselves and their business colleagues. It found that, in this context, there was both an operational and strategic expectation of the CIO. While CIOs have a strategic role it is not in formulating strategy, but rather in advising potential technology solutions once strategies are formulated. The focus of the CIO's advice is "value-for-money" as much as it is "value-add", as councils deliver as set of defined services to a "captured" customer base. Operational aspects of the CIO role can take priority over the strategic aspects especially in smaller councils with limited resource where the CIO may need to assume a "hands on" role. The study used resource based theory (RBT) to identify which knowledge, skills and attributes CIOs required for each role they performed. Technology skills, general management and IT management experience are valued for the operationally focused roles while leadership, and high-level organisational and IT industry knowledge are needed for the more strategic roles. Highly developed interpersonal skills and attributes are essential for both types of role.</p>
Assessing the Economic Impact of North-South Free Trade Agreements -- China-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement and China-Australia Free Trade Agreement
Authors:   , Zhou Jinzhu 
Published: November 2021

<p>This research develops a model of assessing the economic impact of free trade agreements (FTAs) between developed countries and developing countries (north-south FTAs). This model goes beyond the conventional studies that use static effects in traditional gains as primary indicators of the economic impact, and incorporates dynamics effects as well as non-traditional gains for a more accurate assessment. The research uses China's north-south FTAs, namely, China's FTA with New Zealand - the first comprehensive FTA that China has signed with a developed country - and the proposed FTA between China and Australia. Both cases provide an ideal empirical basis for testing the proposed model. After introduction of the research problem, design and methodology, Part I of the study provides a general discussion of the FTAs between China and New Zealand, and China and Australia as a background to the research. Part II starts with the conventional model of traditional gains. It first demonstrates how the static effect of the north-south FTA is analyzed in Robson's three-country model. It shows that in his model, the trade creation effect is dominant in the free trade area. The study then introduces the concept of dynamic effect of traditional gains. The study first uses the Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) index to analyse the competition effect of trade in goods by industries among China, New Zealand and Australia. It then discusses the competition effect of trade in services in categories through Trade Competitive Power (TC) indexes. The study further examines the effect of investment creation after the China-New Zealand FTA and China-Australia FTA entered into force. The findings of this section on the dynamic effect are that China would have negative impact on cattle husbandry, forestry, mining and some categories of services which are also the industries that New Zealand and Australia would further develop in China's market. In Part III, the study discusses non-traditional gains as important indicators of the economic impact of FTAs. It incorporates the hub & spoke theory (H&S) with Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) strategies of China, New Zealand and Australia. The study shows that the north-south FTAs are important components for both developed countries and developing countries' RTAs strategies. The China-New Zealand FTA and the proposed China-Australia FTA are the wedges between China and the advanced economies system. Meanwhile, the China-New Zealand FTA will be a model for future north-south FTAs involving China. This thesis contributes to our understanding of the complicated and dynamic relationship between FTAs among countries of different levels of economic development and their overall economic growth and development. It also adds to our knowledge about how this relationship can be better analyzed and explained.</p>
Electronic Structure of the Rare-Earth Nitrides
Authors:   , Preston A. R. H. 
Published: November 2021

<p>The rare-earth nitrides (ReNs) are a class of novel materials with potential for use in spintronics applications. Theoretical studies indicate that among the ReNs there could be half-metals, semimetals and semiconductors, all exhibiting strong magnetic ordering. This is because of the complex interaction between the partially filled rare-earth 4f orbital and the nitrogen 2p valence and rare-earth 5d conduction bands. This thesis uses experimental and theoretical techniques to probe the ReN electronic structure. Thin films of SmN, EuN, GdN, DyN, LuN and HfN have been produced for study. Basic characterization shows that the films are of a high quality. The result of electrical transport, magnetometry, and optical and x-ray spectroscopy are interpreted to provide information on the electronic structure. SmN, GdN, DyN are found to be semiconductors in their ferromagnetic ground state while HfN is a metal. Results are compared with density functional theory (DFT) based calculations. The free parameters resulting from use of the local spin density approximation with Hubbard-U corrections as the exchange-correlation functional are adjusted to reach good agreement with x-ray absorption and emission spectroscopy at the nitrogen K-edge. Resonant x-ray emission is used to experimentally measure valence band dispersion of GdN. No evidence of the rare-earth 4f levels is found in any of the K-edge spectroscopy, which is consistent with the result of M-edge x-ray absorption which show that the 4f wave function of the rare-earths in the ReNs are very similar to those of rare-earth metal. An auxillary resonant x-ray emission study of ZnO is used to map the dispersion of the electronic band structure across a wide range of the Brillouin zone. The data, and calculations based on GW corrections to DFT, together provide a detailed picture of the bulk electronic band structure.</p>
Data Mining in Automotive Warranty Analysis
Authors:   , Teo Her Guan 
Published: November 2021

<p>This thesis is about data mining in automotive warranty analysis, with an emphasis on modeling the mean cumulative warranty cost or number of claims (per vehicle). In our study, we deal with a type of truncation that is typical for automotive warranty data, where the warranty coverage and the resulting warranty data are limited by age and mileage. Age, as a function of time, is known for all sold vehicles at all time. However, mileage is only observed for a vehicle with at least one claim and only at the time of the claim. To deal with this problem of incomplete mileage information, we consider a linear approach and a piece-wise linear approach within a nonparametric framework. We explore the univariate case, as well as the bivariate case. For the univariate case, we evaluate the mean cumulative warranty cost and its standard error as a function of age, a function of mileage, and a function of actual (calendar) time. For the bivariate case, we evaluate the mean cumulative warranty cost as a function of age and mileage. The effect of reporting delay of claim and several methods for making prediction are also considered. Throughout this thesis, we illustrate the ideas using examples based on real data.</p>
Understanding Empathy in Children
Authors:   , Chan Kah Hoe 
Published: November 2021

<p>Health, particularly diet and everyday nutrition, as the ultimate causal factor in life is an important aspect of every child's education. Meanwhile, computer generated (CG) 3-dimensional (3-D) graphics is a medium often used by entertainment and advertising. Educational intervention to help children make appropriate dietary choices can be designed by employing similar methods used by entertainment and advertising, such as 3-D characters aimed at children. The question that this research asked is: can creating an empathic bond between 3-D characters and children communicate a healthy nutrition message effectively? This thesis is based on qualitative research founded on the constructionist theory that focuses on exploring the perspective of children via focus groups. Educational designs based on familiar computer-generated graphics will help equip children to deal with nutritional and dietary choices, ultimately initiating behavioural change as their relationship with food matures earlier. Empathy on the children's and adult's sides of the healthy nutrition conversation is important to establish this relationship in children's nutritional decisions. The main challenge for nutrition education is not in short-term diversions, but long-term changes in behavioural responses in media literacy. A constructionist approach of helping children work through advertising by improving their media vocabulary would be a more sustainable approach to enhancing their ability to decode advertising rhetoric and in turn forming their own informed opinion and responses. Industry referenced educational content intent on healthy lifestyles can balance the prevalent advertising messages leading to a more balanced overall media that children are exposed to.</p>
The Structured Hedging of Financial Value: With Applications to Foreign Exchange Risk Management
Authors:   , Zhu Zhenghong 
Published: November 2021

<p>The objective of the thesis is to develop a structured financial hedging framework that is empirically implementable and consistent with a corporate finance perspective. Value at risk provides a suitable framework for this purpose. The aversion implied in the value at risk and its generalised theory arises from a firm's concerns about contingent financial distress costs, which can be considered as the payoff of a put option written by stockholders of firms in favour of third parties. This enables the development of a hedging framework to explore how a firm's welfare might be enhanced by replacing natural exposures with hedged outcomes. An ideal hedging decision is to maximise the financial value in good times at minimal cost in terms of the generalised value at risk penalty function. In an efficient market, a fully hedged policy using forwards is generally the optimal decision, while alternatives should be taken into account where markets are not efficient. In such cases, the underlying empirical methodology should be able to detect inefficiencies and feed into the objective functions for maximising firm value. The empirical implementation is explored with a variety of econometric methodologies. These include the development of new semi-parametric or nonparametric techniques based upon wavelet analysis, as well as an incomplete forecasting algorithm. Such methods have been preferred to classical linear and stationary models, because they have broader application in an inefficient market where information is technically fuzzy and financial data may exhibit non-linearity or non-stationarity. Further decision dimensions concern exposure duration or path risk, in which individuals' perspectives of risk is time-dependent and linked to the evolution of value at risk through time. The proposed approaches find their main application in foreign exchange risk management, a topic of considerable importance and sensitivity in New Zealand. A statistically well-adapted hedge object for an exporter such as the dairy industry is the corporate terms of trade, which balances up output and expense prices as a single index related to the net profit margin. Further applications are to strategic fund management where the objective is to derive optimal foreign exchange forwards based hedges.</p>
Vicarious Traumatization: The Impact of Nursing upon Nurses
Authors:   , Davies Lesley 
Published: November 2021

<p>The aims of this research were to explore mental health nurses' knowledge and experience of vicarious traumatization (VT). Literature linking mental health nursing and VT is sparse. VT is an enduring trauma that affects those who engage empathically across time and with different patients. Mental health nurses form ongoing therapeutic relationships with patients to foster healing. This empathic engagement leaves nurses vulnerable to VT. This project is qualitatively designed using narrative enquiry with in-depth, semistructured interviews of mental health nurses. Data gathered was thematically analysed and four main themes identified: the impact of VT; self-knowledge/self-awareness; self-care; and burnout. Participants in this study felt unprepared for the negative impact of mental health nursing and learned of VT 'on the job'. My recommendations include education on identifying VT, and self-care, including clinical supervision, to ameliorate the effects of VT. Further research is needed to explore the links between VT and mental health nursing.</p>
Tourism Distribution Channels in the Northern Tourist Circuit of Tanzania
Authors:   , Mkumbo Peter Judca 
Published: November 2021

<p>This study investigates the structure of tourism distribution channels in the northern tourist circuit of Tanzania. It explores factors influencing channel structures and also examines operational characteristics of the channels. It is a destination-based study that takes a supply-side approach. The study is based on in-depth interviews with different businesses across tourism sector at the destination. The northern tourist circuit is the heart of tourism industry in Tanzania; it is a core in a peripheral country. Tourists in the northern tourist circuit are primarily attracted by mountain climbing adventures, photographic and hunting safaris. Putting together different activities involved in a safari or adventure product requires the presence of ground tour operators. The former have links with all the suppliers at the destination and are the most knowledgeable about the destination among channel members in the destination. There is a complex relationship among channel members in the northern tourist circuit which partly contributes to the complexity of the distribution channels used. The majority of tourists who visit northern tourist circuit book their holidays through overseas agents; a few purchase directly from the suppliers. The majority of those who shop through overseas agents are package or customized tourists while most independent travellers buy their holidays directly, often making multiple purchases. Ground tour operators in Kenya are important channel members as well. This is because a significant number of tourists who visit the northern tourist circuit come through Kenya and ground tour operators there pass them down to their counterparts in Tanzania. Hunting tourists access the destinations through professional hunters, either directly or through overseas marketing agents. Secondary activities like cultural tourism rely more on "at destination" distribution as their drawing power is less than wildlife resources and adventure attractions. Factors which influence the structure of distribution in the northern tourist circuit include size of the business, nature of the attraction, tourists' preference, distance from market to destination, lack of capital and marketing knowledge. Channel performance is based on two main criteria: volume of clients the channel produces and the profit generated from the channel. Indirect channels produce more clients while direct channels are observed to generate more profit per client than indirect channels. Information technology is mainly used for creating awareness and communications. All the businesses interviewed have websites for those purposes.</p>
Consumer Satisfaction with Emergency Department Nursing: a Descriptive Correlational Study
Authors:   , Buckley Clare Alison 
Published: November 2021

<p>This descriptive, correlational study was designed to describe levels of consumer satisfaction with emergency department (ED) nursing and to identify the key determinants of satisfaction with ED nursing in a regional New Zealand hospital. The relationship between satisfaction with ED nursing and with overall satisfaction with the ED visit was also explored. Satisfaction is an important indicator of the quality of healthcare and an understanding of satisfaction and its determinants has the potential to improve healthcare services and consumer health outcomes. The study employed a survey design using the Consumer Emergency Care Satisfaction Scale (CECSS) which is an internationally recognised tool that has demonstrable reliability and validity. It consists of 19 items divided between two subscales - Caring and Teaching. Respondents indicate on a five point Likert scale the extent to which they agree or disagree with each item. In addition to the 19 items in the scale, respondents were also asked to provide some consumer characteristic data and to answer two open-ended questions. The survey was posted to a convenience sample of 410 ED attendees within 24-48 hours of their visit to the emergency department. The final sample comprised 100 completed or partially completed surveys. The majority (n = 65, 88%) were either satisfied or very satisfied with ED nursing. There were no statistically significant relationships between any consumer characteristics and satisfaction; however the following visit characteristics were demonstrated to affect levels of satisfaction - triage category, self-rated acuity, the times consumers arrived at and were discharged from the ED, being able to differentiate between health professionals, being kept informed about the visit and any delays, length of stay (LOS), and number of previous visits to the emergency department. There was a strong positive correlation (r = 0.571, p = 0.000) between consumer satisfaction with ED nursing and with overall satisfaction with the visit. Thematic analysis of the data from the question about what consumers liked about ED nursing revealed four themes - personal qualities of the nurse, professional qualities of the nurse, interpersonal qualities of the nurse, and miscellaneous comments. Thematic analysis of the data from the question about what the nurse could have done to make the visit better also revealed four themes - nothing, staffing/service, information giving, and the environment. The study concludes that ED consumers want to know who their nurses are and to have nurses who communicate well with them and keep them informed about their visit. The most significant implications and challenges for researchers are in exploring the area around the consumer health journey as it is these visit characteristics that this study has demonstrated affect levels of satisfaction with ED nursing.</p>