title: Realizing an Acoustic Vector Network Analyser

authors: MacDonell, Marcus Scott Glengarry

abstract: Acoustic absorption, reflection, and transmission is typically measured using an impedance tube. We present the design and initial measurements of a radically different measurement system. The instrument builds on the rich history and deep mathematics developed in pursuit of electromagnetic Vector-corrected Network Analyzers (VNAs). Using acoustic directional couplers and a traditional VNA mainframe we assembled an “Acoustic Vector Network Analyzer” (AVNA). The instrument measures acoustic scattering parameters, the complex reflection and transmission coefficients, of materials, transmission lines, ported structures, ducts, etc. After the fashion of electromagnetic VNAs we have constructed millimeter-wave measurement heads that span the 800 Hz–2200 Hz (420–150 mm) and 10 kHz–22 kHz (35–15 mm) bands, demonstrating scalability. We present initial measurement results.

text: Realizing an Acoustic Vector Network Analyser Acoustic absorption, reflection, and transmission is typically measured using an impedance tube. We present the design and initial measurements of a radically different measurement system. The instrument builds on the rich history and deep mathematics developed in pursuit of electromagnetic Vector-corrected Network Analyzers (VNAs). Using acoustic directional couplers and a traditional VNA mainframe we assembled an “Acoustic Vector Network Analyzer” (AVNA). The instrument measures acoustic scattering parameters, the complex reflection and transmission coefficients, of materials, transmission lines, ported structures, ducts, etc. After the fashion of electromagnetic VNAs we have constructed millimeter-wave measurement heads that span the 800 Hz–2200 Hz (420–150 mm) and 10 kHz–22 kHz (35–15 mm) bands, demonstrating scalability. We present initial measurement results.

year: 2019

title: The Great Recession and the New Frontiers of International Investment Law: The Economics of Early Warning Models and the Law of Necessity

authors: Alvarez-Jimenez, Alberto

subjects: Social Sciences

abstract: The Great Recession has prompted unparalleled economic research on the causes and handling of crises. It is then important for international investment law to catch up with the new conceptual developments. This article is an attempt in this direction. Its first part presents a description of one of the main tools to avoid economic collapses— early warning models (EWMs)—which have received increasing attention by the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Fed. This part also presents the debate among economists about the meaningfulness of EWMs. The second part shows how international investment law should respond to this debate and proceed with an assessment of the role that EWMs may have in the interpretation of emergency clauses in BITs and the customary rule of necessity. In particular, this part deals with the question of what happens in international legal terms when a State, which relies on EWMs to adopt measures aimed at preventing a crisis, adversely affects foreign investors. The section also discusses the level of deference that investor/State tribunals may accord to States relying on EWMs when taking economic preventive action and illustrates how international arbitration tribunals should deal with debates on the quality of the given EWMs.

text: The Great Recession and the New Frontiers of International Investment Law: The Economics of Early Warning Models and the Law of Necessity The Great Recession has prompted unparalleled economic research on the causes and handling of crises. It is then important for international investment law to catch up with the new conceptual developments. This article is an attempt in this direction. Its first part presents a description of one of the main tools to avoid economic collapses— early warning models (EWMs)—which have received increasing attention by the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Fed. This part also presents the debate among economists about the meaningfulness of EWMs. The second part shows how international investment law should respond to this debate and proceed with an assessment of the role that EWMs may have in the interpretation of emergency clauses in BITs and the customary rule of necessity. In particular, this part deals with the question of what happens in international legal terms when a State, which relies on EWMs to adopt measures aimed at preventing a crisis, adversely affects foreign investors. The section also discusses the level of deference that investor/State tribunals may accord to States relying on EWMs when taking economic preventive action and illustrates how international arbitration tribunals should deal with debates on the quality of the given EWMs.

year: 2014

title: Poetic lives: Verse biography in Aotearoa New Zealand

authors: Anderson-O'Connor, Aimee-Jane

subjects: Verse

abstract: Bringing together a selection of Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographies, and drawing on perspectives deriving from decolonizing methodologies, and from historical and feminist revision and reclamation, as well as my own experience as a creative practitioner, this thesis explores verse biography in Aotearoa New Zealand, with special reference to common thematic and personal preoccupations, and the settings in which these play out.  I am led in this research by a few key questions. What techniques are available to the verse biographer, and what opportunities for innovation and intervention do these techniques afford? What limitations remain? What key settings shape and are shaped by the lives of those who live here? What can we learn by exploring the relationship between the individual life story and the cultural stories which take shape in what Philip Fisher has called the ‘privileged settings’ of any national literature? I focus in particular on a selection of longer verse biographies: Allen Curnow’s ‘An Abominable Temper’ (1973), Ian Wedde’s ‘A Ballad for Worser Heberley’ (1993), Robert Sullivan’s Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002), Airini Beautrais’s Dear Neil Roberts (2014), Chris Tse’s How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014), Gregory Kan’s This Paper Boat (2016), Karen Zelas’s The Trials of Minnie Dean: A Verse Biography (2017), and Nina Powles’s collection of chapbooks collectively titled Luminescent (2017). I have chosen longer works because of the scope they offer to trace the broader sense of the life story and pick up on imagery and voices which repeat and echo within the texts. I am also interested in the way that Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographers often extend their subject’s life story beyond the barrier of death and imagine their subjects’ afterlives in sensory poetic terms. While this selection is diverse, and showcases a wide range of subject matter, poetic approach and voices, each of these verse biographies dramatizes the subject position of the poet, and partakes in a poetics of intersectional revision and reclamation. 
 My exegesis identifies and explores the fundamental role of setting in the canon and analyses the energizing concerns that verse biographers unpack in these settings. I am interested in the ways that Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographers maintain attention to key local settings throughout their works, and critically engage with the cultural stories which persist in and around them. I am especially interested in the way these poetic explorations afford space for decolonial and feminist approaches. Four major settings appear often. The beach is a space of encounter in which ongoing processes of colonisation and crossing unfold. The home is marked by instability and hidden harm, in which domestic disorder is unearthed. The police station is exposed as a space of class and gender power imbalance which informs law making and enforcement. The beyond constitutes a liminal space of exchange and unrest, as the poets grapple with cultural exchange and complexities of life and death.
The final portion of my thesis takes the form of a creative practice component. It consists of a verse biography titled Keepsake, centred on the lives of my paternal grandparents, Kevin Buxton O’Connor and Mary Helen O’Connor (née Fryer). It engages explicitly with the issues raised in the analytical component of my thesis. Keepsake is a collection shaped indelibly by the sudden death of my grandmother midway through my thesis, and my experience of weathering the seasons of grief with my grandfather, and our shared attempts to find the words to hold tight to her life. Like many of the other verse biographies in Aotearoa New Zealand, it operates as a poetic and historiographic record of my research process and the time in which the thesis was written. It has allowed me to deepen my understanding of the ways in which verse biography allows for a simultaneous autobiographical exploration, examining the role of the verse biographer as researcher and intermediary between the past and the present. The process has especially strengthened my appreciation for verse biography as a form which takes us into the beyond and affords a space where we might speak to the dead and hold space for an answer, where we might make a home of language, ripe for haunting.

text: Poetic lives: Verse biography in Aotearoa New Zealand Bringing together a selection of Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographies, and drawing on perspectives deriving from decolonizing methodologies, and from historical and feminist revision and reclamation, as well as my own experience as a creative practitioner, this thesis explores verse biography in Aotearoa New Zealand, with special reference to common thematic and personal preoccupations, and the settings in which these play out.  I am led in this research by a few key questions. What techniques are available to the verse biographer, and what opportunities for innovation and intervention do these techniques afford? What limitations remain? What key settings shape and are shaped by the lives of those who live here? What can we learn by exploring the relationship between the individual life story and the cultural stories which take shape in what Philip Fisher has called the ‘privileged settings’ of any national literature? I focus in particular on a selection of longer verse biographies: Allen Curnow’s ‘An Abominable Temper’ (1973), Ian Wedde’s ‘A Ballad for Worser Heberley’ (1993), Robert Sullivan’s Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002), Airini Beautrais’s Dear Neil Roberts (2014), Chris Tse’s How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014), Gregory Kan’s This Paper Boat (2016), Karen Zelas’s The Trials of Minnie Dean: A Verse Biography (2017), and Nina Powles’s collection of chapbooks collectively titled Luminescent (2017). I have chosen longer works because of the scope they offer to trace the broader sense of the life story and pick up on imagery and voices which repeat and echo within the texts. I am also interested in the way that Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographers often extend their subject’s life story beyond the barrier of death and imagine their subjects’ afterlives in sensory poetic terms. While this selection is diverse, and showcases a wide range of subject matter, poetic approach and voices, each of these verse biographies dramatizes the subject position of the poet, and partakes in a poetics of intersectional revision and reclamation. 
 My exegesis identifies and explores the fundamental role of setting in the canon and analyses the energizing concerns that verse biographers unpack in these settings. I am interested in the ways that Aotearoa New Zealand verse biographers maintain attention to key local settings throughout their works, and critically engage with the cultural stories which persist in and around them. I am especially interested in the way these poetic explorations afford space for decolonial and feminist approaches. Four major settings appear often. The beach is a space of encounter in which ongoing processes of colonisation and crossing unfold. The home is marked by instability and hidden harm, in which domestic disorder is unearthed. The police station is exposed as a space of class and gender power imbalance which informs law making and enforcement. The beyond constitutes a liminal space of exchange and unrest, as the poets grapple with cultural exchange and complexities of life and death.
The final portion of my thesis takes the form of a creative practice component. It consists of a verse biography titled Keepsake, centred on the lives of my paternal grandparents, Kevin Buxton O’Connor and Mary Helen O’Connor (née Fryer). It engages explicitly with the issues raised in the analytical component of my thesis. Keepsake is a collection shaped indelibly by the sudden death of my grandmother midway through my thesis, and my experience of weathering the seasons of grief with my grandfather, and our shared attempts to find the words to hold tight to her life. Like many of the other verse biographies in Aotearoa New Zealand, it operates as a poetic and historiographic record of my research process and the time in which the thesis was written. It has allowed me to deepen my understanding of the ways in which verse biography allows for a simultaneous autobiographical exploration, examining the role of the verse biographer as researcher and intermediary between the past and the present. The process has especially strengthened my appreciation for verse biography as a form which takes us into the beyond and affords a space where we might speak to the dead and hold space for an answer, where we might make a home of language, ripe for haunting.

year: 2022