title: Company formation in the Te Aroha mining district in the 1930s

authors: Hart, Philip

abstract: During the early years of the Depression, a few investors sought to form companies to rework almost every portion of the Te Aroha Mining District. Some flotations failed, and even when companies were formed very little work was done. A wide variety of people were promoters and investors, very few of whom had any mining knowledge or access to capital. Competition for ground and low commercial morality led to conflicts and exaggerated claims (notably that Te Aroha’s lodes were linked to Karangahake and Waihi). The Mines Department, anxious to prevent misinformation about these ventures being used to extract money from the gullible and also anxious to defend the industry from harm, was concerned about fraudulent assays and misleading reports from self-proclaimed ‘experts’. All these under-capitalized ventures quickly failed, for what little development took place quickly revealed the poverty of the ore.
These syndicates and companies are dealt with chronologically.

text: Company formation in the Te Aroha mining district in the 1930s During the early years of the Depression, a few investors sought to form companies to rework almost every portion of the Te Aroha Mining District. Some flotations failed, and even when companies were formed very little work was done. A wide variety of people were promoters and investors, very few of whom had any mining knowledge or access to capital. Competition for ground and low commercial morality led to conflicts and exaggerated claims (notably that Te Aroha’s lodes were linked to Karangahake and Waihi). The Mines Department, anxious to prevent misinformation about these ventures being used to extract money from the gullible and also anxious to defend the industry from harm, was concerned about fraudulent assays and misleading reports from self-proclaimed ‘experts’. All these under-capitalized ventures quickly failed, for what little development took place quickly revealed the poverty of the ore.
These syndicates and companies are dealt with chronologically.

year: 2016

title: Nonblocking and safe control of discrete-event systems modeled as extended finite automata

authors: Ouedraogo, L.

subjects: discrete event-systems

abstract: Extended Finite Automata (EFA), i.e., finite automata extended with variables, are a suitable modeling framework for discrete event systems owing to their compactness, resulting from the use of variables. In this paper, we propose a symbolic algorithm that efficiently synthesizes a supervisor for a plant modeled by an EFA and a specification defined by another EFA. The principle of the algorithm is to iteratively strengthen the guards of the plant EFA so that forbidden or blocking states become unreachable in the controlled plant. As a consequence of the algorithm, the controlled behavior is modeled by an EFA having the same structure as the plant EFA, having stronger guards and is shown to be maximally permissive. We illustrate our algorithm via a simple manufacturing example.

text: Nonblocking and safe control of discrete-event systems modeled as extended finite automata Extended Finite Automata (EFA), i.e., finite automata extended with variables, are a suitable modeling framework for discrete event systems owing to their compactness, resulting from the use of variables. In this paper, we propose a symbolic algorithm that efficiently synthesizes a supervisor for a plant modeled by an EFA and a specification defined by another EFA. The principle of the algorithm is to iteratively strengthen the guards of the plant EFA so that forbidden or blocking states become unreachable in the controlled plant. As a consequence of the algorithm, the controlled behavior is modeled by an EFA having the same structure as the plant EFA, having stronger guards and is shown to be maximally permissive. We illustrate our algorithm via a simple manufacturing example.

year: 2011

title: An ashy septingentenarian: the Kaharoa tephra turns 700 (with notes on its volcanological, archaeological, and historical importance)

authors: Lowe, David J.

abstract: Most of us are aware of the basaltic Tarawera eruption on 10th June 1886: the high toll on life (~120 people), landscape devastation, and loss of the Pink and White Terraces. But this was not the first time that Mt Tarawera produced an eruption of importance both to volcanology and human history. This edition of the GSNZ Newsletter marks the 700th anniversary of the Kaharoa eruption – its septingentenary to be precise – which occurred at Mt Tarawera in the winter of 1314 AD (± 12 years) (Hogg et al. 2003) (Fig. 1). The importance of the Kaharoa eruption is at least threefold. (1) It is the most recent rhyolite eruption in New Zealand, and the largest New Zealand eruption volumetrically of the last millennium. (2) The Kaharoa tephra is an important marker horizon in late Holocene stratigraphy and geoarchaeology (Lowe et al. 1998, 2000), and in particular helps to constrain the timing of settlement of early Polynesians in North Island (Newnham et al. 1998; Hogg et al. 2003; Lowe 2011). (3) There is a link between the soils that developed on the Kaharoa tephra, the animal ‘wasting’ disease known as ‘bush sickness’, and the birth of a government soil survey group as an independent organisation (Tonkin 2012).

text: An ashy septingentenarian: the Kaharoa tephra turns 700 (with notes on its volcanological, archaeological, and historical importance) Most of us are aware of the basaltic Tarawera eruption on 10th June 1886: the high toll on life (~120 people), landscape devastation, and loss of the Pink and White Terraces. But this was not the first time that Mt Tarawera produced an eruption of importance both to volcanology and human history. This edition of the GSNZ Newsletter marks the 700th anniversary of the Kaharoa eruption – its septingentenary to be precise – which occurred at Mt Tarawera in the winter of 1314 AD (± 12 years) (Hogg et al. 2003) (Fig. 1). The importance of the Kaharoa eruption is at least threefold. (1) It is the most recent rhyolite eruption in New Zealand, and the largest New Zealand eruption volumetrically of the last millennium. (2) The Kaharoa tephra is an important marker horizon in late Holocene stratigraphy and geoarchaeology (Lowe et al. 1998, 2000), and in particular helps to constrain the timing of settlement of early Polynesians in North Island (Newnham et al. 1998; Hogg et al. 2003; Lowe 2011). (3) There is a link between the soils that developed on the Kaharoa tephra, the animal ‘wasting’ disease known as ‘bush sickness’, and the birth of a government soil survey group as an independent organisation (Tonkin 2012).

year: 2014