title: Quality of life, quality of business, and destinations of recent graduates: fields of study matter

authors: Grimes, Arthur

subjects: Social Sciences

abstract: One of the main challenges facing non-metropolitan regions is the attraction and retention of highly-educated young people. A loss of the brightest can lead to reduced business creation, innovation, growth and community well-being in such regions. We use rich longitudinal microdata from New Zealand to analyse the determinants and geography of the choice of destination of recent university and polytechnic graduates 2 years and 4 years after graduation. Rather than considering a range of location-specific consumption and production amenities, we assume spatial equilibrium and calculate, following Chen and Rosenthal (J Urban Econ 64:519–537, 2008), ‘quality of life’ and ‘quality of business’ indicators for urban areas that encompass all amenities that are utility and/or productivity enhancing (or reducing, in the case of disamenities). Specifically, we test whether students locate in places that are regarded as good to live or good to do business; and how this differs by field of study. Our estimates are conditional on students’ prior school (home) location and the location of their higher education institution. We find that graduates are attracted to locate in urban places that have high quality production amenities. High quality consumption amenities have heterogeneous effects on the location choice of students. Creative arts and commerce graduates are relatively more likely to locate in places that are attractive to business, consistent with a symbiosis between bohemians and business. Decision makers can leverage their existing local strengths, in terms of production and/or consumption amenities, to act as drawcards for, or to retain, recent graduates in specific fields.

text: Quality of life, quality of business, and destinations of recent graduates: fields of study matter One of the main challenges facing non-metropolitan regions is the attraction and retention of highly-educated young people. A loss of the brightest can lead to reduced business creation, innovation, growth and community well-being in such regions. We use rich longitudinal microdata from New Zealand to analyse the determinants and geography of the choice of destination of recent university and polytechnic graduates 2 years and 4 years after graduation. Rather than considering a range of location-specific consumption and production amenities, we assume spatial equilibrium and calculate, following Chen and Rosenthal (J Urban Econ 64:519–537, 2008), ‘quality of life’ and ‘quality of business’ indicators for urban areas that encompass all amenities that are utility and/or productivity enhancing (or reducing, in the case of disamenities). Specifically, we test whether students locate in places that are regarded as good to live or good to do business; and how this differs by field of study. Our estimates are conditional on students’ prior school (home) location and the location of their higher education institution. We find that graduates are attracted to locate in urban places that have high quality production amenities. High quality consumption amenities have heterogeneous effects on the location choice of students. Creative arts and commerce graduates are relatively more likely to locate in places that are attractive to business, consistent with a symbiosis between bohemians and business. Decision makers can leverage their existing local strengths, in terms of production and/or consumption amenities, to act as drawcards for, or to retain, recent graduates in specific fields.

year: 2022

title: Musical image compression

authors: Bainbridge, David

subjects: computer science

abstract: Optical music recognition aims to convert the vast repositories of sheet music in the world into an on-line digital format [Bai97]. In the near future it will be possible to assimilate music into digital libraries and users will be able to perform searches based on a sung melody in addition to typical text-based searching [MSW+96]. An important requirement for such a system is the ability to reproduce the original score as accurately as possible. Due to the huge amount of sheet music available, the efficient storage of musical images is an important topic of study. 
This paper investigates whether the “knowledge” extracted from the optical music recognition (OMR) process can be exploited to gain higher compression than the JBIG international standard for bi-level image compression. We present a hybrid approach where the primitive shapes of music extracted by the optical music recognition process-note heads, note stems, staff lines and so forth-are fed into a graphical symbol based compression scheme originally designed for images containing mainly printed text. Using this hybrid approach the average compression rate for a single page is improved by 3.5% over JBIG. When multiple pages with similar typography are processed in sequence, the file size is decreased by 4-8%.
Section 2 presents the relevant background to both optical music recognition and textual image compression. Section 3 describes the experiments performed on 66 test images, outlining the combinations of parameters that were examined to give the best results. The initial results and refinements are presented in Section 4, and we conclude in the last section by summarizing the findings of this work.

text: Musical image compression Optical music recognition aims to convert the vast repositories of sheet music in the world into an on-line digital format [Bai97]. In the near future it will be possible to assimilate music into digital libraries and users will be able to perform searches based on a sung melody in addition to typical text-based searching [MSW+96]. An important requirement for such a system is the ability to reproduce the original score as accurately as possible. Due to the huge amount of sheet music available, the efficient storage of musical images is an important topic of study. 
This paper investigates whether the “knowledge” extracted from the optical music recognition (OMR) process can be exploited to gain higher compression than the JBIG international standard for bi-level image compression. We present a hybrid approach where the primitive shapes of music extracted by the optical music recognition process-note heads, note stems, staff lines and so forth-are fed into a graphical symbol based compression scheme originally designed for images containing mainly printed text. Using this hybrid approach the average compression rate for a single page is improved by 3.5% over JBIG. When multiple pages with similar typography are processed in sequence, the file size is decreased by 4-8%.
Section 2 presents the relevant background to both optical music recognition and textual image compression. Section 3 describes the experiments performed on 66 test images, outlining the combinations of parameters that were examined to give the best results. The initial results and refinements are presented in Section 4, and we conclude in the last section by summarizing the findings of this work.

year: 1997-11

title: Analysing A/O possession in Māori-language tweets

authors: Trye, David

subjects: A/O categories

abstract: This article contributes the first corpus-based study of possession in Māori, the indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand. Like most Polynesian languages, Māori has a dual possessive system involving a choice between the so-called A and O categories. While Māori grammars describe these categories in terms of the inherent semantic relationship between the possessum and possessor, there have been no large-scale corpus analyses demonstrating their use in natural contexts. Social media provide invaluable opportunities for such linguistic studies, capturing contemporary language use while alleviating the burden of gathering data through traditional means. We operationalise semantic distinctions to investigate possession in Māori-language tweets, focusing on the [possessum a/o possessor] construction (e.g., te tīmatanga o te wiki ‘the beginning of the week’). In our corpus comprising 2500 tweets produced by more than 200 individuals, we find that users leverage a wide array of noun types encompassing many different semantic relationships. We observe not only the expected predominance of the O category, but also a tendency for examples described by Māori grammars as A-marked to instead be O-marked (59%). Although the A category persists in the corpus, our findings suggest that language change could be underway. Our primary dataset can be explored interactively online.

text: Analysing A/O possession in Māori-language tweets This article contributes the first corpus-based study of possession in Māori, the indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand. Like most Polynesian languages, Māori has a dual possessive system involving a choice between the so-called A and O categories. While Māori grammars describe these categories in terms of the inherent semantic relationship between the possessum and possessor, there have been no large-scale corpus analyses demonstrating their use in natural contexts. Social media provide invaluable opportunities for such linguistic studies, capturing contemporary language use while alleviating the burden of gathering data through traditional means. We operationalise semantic distinctions to investigate possession in Māori-language tweets, focusing on the [possessum a/o possessor] construction (e.g., te tīmatanga o te wiki ‘the beginning of the week’). In our corpus comprising 2500 tweets produced by more than 200 individuals, we find that users leverage a wide array of noun types encompassing many different semantic relationships. We observe not only the expected predominance of the O category, but also a tendency for examples described by Māori grammars as A-marked to instead be O-marked (59%). Although the A category persists in the corpus, our findings suggest that language change could be underway. Our primary dataset can be explored interactively online.

year: 2024