title: John Squirrell: a farmer and storekeeper who mined (briefly) at Te Aroha

authors: Hart, Philip

abstract: An English merchant’s clerk, some years after his wife’s death John Squirrell brought his sister and daughters to New Zealand to settle in the new Shaftesbury settlement, upriver from Te Aroha. His letters to English relatives provided details of their experiments with growing a variety of produce, which they sold locally or sent to the Auckland. He also took over a store, running it with the assistance of one of his daughters and struggling to obtain payment from customers before refusing to sell on credit. A leading member of the small Shaftesbury community, he did his best to assist its development.
In 1888 a blacksmith and sometime miner, James Munro, convinced him to prospect ground in the Tui portion of the goldfield. Again, his letters provided details of their amateur and short-term, unprofitable efforts; lacking capital to open up their ground, it was soon abandoned. His investments in Waiorongomai mines were equally unprofitable.
In 1892 Squirrell acquired land at another settlement, at Gordon, further upriver. He struggled to develop this farm, and was involved in conflicts with other members of the settlement, especially after he became secretary of the association. He continued to farm elsewhere, and became involved in early dairy companies, again becoming caught up in controversy.
A man holding strong opinions on a variety of topics, and very willing to express them, he regarded himself as a radical but opposed the Liberal Government. In his personal life he had to cope with two daughters suffering from mental problems, one of them being admitted to the asylum. He spent all his life attempting to provide for his family, only attaining a modest standard of living.

text: John Squirrell: a farmer and storekeeper who mined (briefly) at Te Aroha An English merchant’s clerk, some years after his wife’s death John Squirrell brought his sister and daughters to New Zealand to settle in the new Shaftesbury settlement, upriver from Te Aroha. His letters to English relatives provided details of their experiments with growing a variety of produce, which they sold locally or sent to the Auckland. He also took over a store, running it with the assistance of one of his daughters and struggling to obtain payment from customers before refusing to sell on credit. A leading member of the small Shaftesbury community, he did his best to assist its development.
In 1888 a blacksmith and sometime miner, James Munro, convinced him to prospect ground in the Tui portion of the goldfield. Again, his letters provided details of their amateur and short-term, unprofitable efforts; lacking capital to open up their ground, it was soon abandoned. His investments in Waiorongomai mines were equally unprofitable.
In 1892 Squirrell acquired land at another settlement, at Gordon, further upriver. He struggled to develop this farm, and was involved in conflicts with other members of the settlement, especially after he became secretary of the association. He continued to farm elsewhere, and became involved in early dairy companies, again becoming caught up in controversy.
A man holding strong opinions on a variety of topics, and very willing to express them, he regarded himself as a radical but opposed the Liberal Government. In his personal life he had to cope with two daughters suffering from mental problems, one of them being admitted to the asylum. He spent all his life attempting to provide for his family, only attaining a modest standard of living.

year: 2016

title: “All you can eat” ontology-building: Feeding Wikipedia to Cyc

authors: Sarjant, Samuel

subjects: ontologies

abstract: In order to achieve genuine web intelligence, building some kind of large general machine-readable conceptual scheme (i.e. ontology) seems inescapable. Yet the past 20 years have shown that manual ontology-building is not practicable. The recent explosion of free user-supplied knowledge on the Web has led to great strides in automatic ontology building,
but quality-control is still a major issue. Ideally one should automatically build onto an already intelligent base. We suggest that the long-running Cyc project is able to assist here. We describe methods used to add 35K new concepts mined from Wikipedia to collections in ResearchCyc entirely automatically. Evaluation with 22 human subjects shows high precision both for the new concepts’ categorization, and their assignment as individuals or collections. Most importantly we show how Cyc itself can be leveraged for ontological quality control by ‘feeding’ it assertions one by one, enabling it to reject those that contradict its other knowledge.

text: “All you can eat” ontology-building: Feeding Wikipedia to Cyc In order to achieve genuine web intelligence, building some kind of large general machine-readable conceptual scheme (i.e. ontology) seems inescapable. Yet the past 20 years have shown that manual ontology-building is not practicable. The recent explosion of free user-supplied knowledge on the Web has led to great strides in automatic ontology building,
but quality-control is still a major issue. Ideally one should automatically build onto an already intelligent base. We suggest that the long-running Cyc project is able to assist here. We describe methods used to add 35K new concepts mined from Wikipedia to collections in ResearchCyc entirely automatically. Evaluation with 22 human subjects shows high precision both for the new concepts’ categorization, and their assignment as individuals or collections. Most importantly we show how Cyc itself can be leveraged for ontological quality control by ‘feeding’ it assertions one by one, enabling it to reject those that contradict its other knowledge.

year: 2009

title: Call and response: Taika Waititi’s ‘Boy’

authors: Perrott, Lisa

subjects: Waititi's film

abstract: Lisa Perrott examines how the construction of Waititi's latest film might engender complex, nuanced responses from audiences.

text: Call and response: Taika Waititi’s ‘Boy’ Lisa Perrott examines how the construction of Waititi's latest film might engender complex, nuanced responses from audiences.

year: 2010