title: Mangroves and seagrass: Indicators of estuarine health?

authors: de Lange, Willem P.

abstract: Mangrove and seagrass occupy different environments within an estuary, and both potentially respond to environmental stressors such as, nutrient loading, sedimentation, turbidity and climate change. Therefore, they could be useful indicators of the health of the estuary. However, there are common misunderstandings about the function of flowering plants such as mangrove and seagrass in the marine environment that can lead to contradictory and possibly inappropriate actions by the public. For example, pressure to protect mangroves and remove seagrass. This talk will discuss the interactions between physical processes within estuaries and mangrove and seagrass, consider the changes that have occurred in the distribution of these plants over the recent past, and suggest possible causes for these changes.

text: Mangroves and seagrass: Indicators of estuarine health? Mangrove and seagrass occupy different environments within an estuary, and both potentially respond to environmental stressors such as, nutrient loading, sedimentation, turbidity and climate change. Therefore, they could be useful indicators of the health of the estuary. However, there are common misunderstandings about the function of flowering plants such as mangrove and seagrass in the marine environment that can lead to contradictory and possibly inappropriate actions by the public. For example, pressure to protect mangroves and remove seagrass. This talk will discuss the interactions between physical processes within estuaries and mangrove and seagrass, consider the changes that have occurred in the distribution of these plants over the recent past, and suggest possible causes for these changes.

year: 2016-06-01

title: Impact Investing: Can impact be achieved in public markets?

authors: Pearson, Stuart

subjects: Additionality

abstract: Risk-adjusted returns are no longer the sole metric investors consider. A growing number of investors are now wanting to know that their capital is having a positive impact for society and the planet, as well as risk-adjusted returns. The existing options tend to focus on being ‘less bad’ and have mixed efficacy in delivering comparable risk-adjusted returns. In addition, they are unlikely to create any additional positive impact than otherwise would have been achieved without the investor’s capital, so why invest in them at all? This research examines an emerging investment strategy that has the potential to deliver additional positive impact as well as excess financial returns by repurposing a mechanism stigmatized by corporate raiders and private equity firms historically, that mechanism being shareholder activism. Our dataset of companies, who have been targets of such a strategy, exhibit materially positive excess stock returns over the shorter-term event window. Results suggest that this strategy is more effective when the target companies are smaller or when the investor acquires a larger shareholding. Importantly, the target companies across all subsamples experience a material uplift in environmental, social, and governance scores in the year after the activism event, suggesting success in creating additionality of impact.

text: Impact Investing: Can impact be achieved in public markets? Risk-adjusted returns are no longer the sole metric investors consider. A growing number of investors are now wanting to know that their capital is having a positive impact for society and the planet, as well as risk-adjusted returns. The existing options tend to focus on being ‘less bad’ and have mixed efficacy in delivering comparable risk-adjusted returns. In addition, they are unlikely to create any additional positive impact than otherwise would have been achieved without the investor’s capital, so why invest in them at all? This research examines an emerging investment strategy that has the potential to deliver additional positive impact as well as excess financial returns by repurposing a mechanism stigmatized by corporate raiders and private equity firms historically, that mechanism being shareholder activism. Our dataset of companies, who have been targets of such a strategy, exhibit materially positive excess stock returns over the shorter-term event window. Results suggest that this strategy is more effective when the target companies are smaller or when the investor acquires a larger shareholding. Importantly, the target companies across all subsamples experience a material uplift in environmental, social, and governance scores in the year after the activism event, suggesting success in creating additionality of impact.

year: 2023

title: Diacritic Restoration and the Development of a Part-of-Speech Tagset for the Māori Language

authors: Cocks, John

subjects: Māori

abstract: This thesis investigates two fundamental problems in natural language processing: diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging. Over the past three decades, statistical approaches to diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging have grown in interest as a consequence of the increasing availability of manually annotated training data in major languages such as English and French. However, these approaches are not practical for most minority languages, where appropriate training data is either non-existent or not publically available. Furthermore, before developing a part-of-speech tagging system, a suitable tagset is required for that language. In this thesis, we make the following contributions to bridge this gap:

Firstly, we propose a method for diacritic restoration based on naive Bayes classifiers that act at word-level. Classifications are based on a rich set of features, extracted automatically from training data in the form of diacritically marked text. This method requires no additional resources, which makes it language independent. The algorithm was evaluated on one language, namely Māori, and an accuracy exceeding 99% was observed.

Secondly, we present our work on creating one of the necessary resources for the development of a part-of-speech tagging system in Māori, that of a suitable tagset. The tagset described was developed in accordance with the EAGLES guidelines for morphosyntactic annotation of corpora, and was the result of in-depth analysis of the Māori grammar.

text: Diacritic Restoration and the Development of a Part-of-Speech Tagset for the Māori Language This thesis investigates two fundamental problems in natural language processing: diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging. Over the past three decades, statistical approaches to diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging have grown in interest as a consequence of the increasing availability of manually annotated training data in major languages such as English and French. However, these approaches are not practical for most minority languages, where appropriate training data is either non-existent or not publically available. Furthermore, before developing a part-of-speech tagging system, a suitable tagset is required for that language. In this thesis, we make the following contributions to bridge this gap:

Firstly, we propose a method for diacritic restoration based on naive Bayes classifiers that act at word-level. Classifications are based on a rich set of features, extracted automatically from training data in the form of diacritically marked text. This method requires no additional resources, which makes it language independent. The algorithm was evaluated on one language, namely Māori, and an accuracy exceeding 99% was observed.

Secondly, we present our work on creating one of the necessary resources for the development of a part-of-speech tagging system in Māori, that of a suitable tagset. The tagset described was developed in accordance with the EAGLES guidelines for morphosyntactic annotation of corpora, and was the result of in-depth analysis of the Māori grammar.

year: 2012