title: An investigation into travellers repatriating to New Zealand, having completed their OE.

authors: Walter, Naomi Jane

subjects: OE

abstract: The overseas experience (OE) is an extended journey undertaken by young adults who travel and work abroad.  It provides personal development in terms of independence, initiative, cultural awareness and other competencies identified as fundamental to the global careers of the 21st century.  However, scholars suggest that re-entry is often harder than leaving.  They have examined the phases of transition back to the home country and generated theories like the W-curve of repatriation.  Yet the broad issues of OE repatriation, specifically, have not been addressed.  This research, therefore, investigates the experiences of OE travellers returning home to New Zealand.  The OE has become an important part of New Zealand's culture, and while diaspora initiatives connect valuable expatriate resources, they fail to consider the wider implications of repatriation.  For that reason, this research explores the personal experiences of OE returnees through in-depth conversational style interviews, specifically pertaining to relationships with friends and family, employment opportunities, and personal development.

The results of the research show that repatriation is an individual and subjective experience; a period of transition occurs, sometimes involving depression, distress, or difficult periods of adjustment, that vary in intensity based on factors like personality, readiness for return, and coping style.  This transition comprises first impressions and a comparison of home and overseas, followed by the thought of 'what's next?'  Eventually, returnees who remain at home readjust to the culture and adapt their priorities and behaviours until the OE is  like a dream .  As such, this thesis posits that the return home from travel, and the personal life event experiences of returnees, are fundamental dimensions of the tourism experience that are yet to be fully understood in tourism research.  In essence, this thesis examines travel from a holistic perspective, as part of the wider life course of individuals, and argues that researchers should consider the realities of the tourism experience, and adjust their data collection methods accordingly.

text: An investigation into travellers repatriating to New Zealand, having completed their OE. The overseas experience (OE) is an extended journey undertaken by young adults who travel and work abroad.  It provides personal development in terms of independence, initiative, cultural awareness and other competencies identified as fundamental to the global careers of the 21st century.  However, scholars suggest that re-entry is often harder than leaving.  They have examined the phases of transition back to the home country and generated theories like the W-curve of repatriation.  Yet the broad issues of OE repatriation, specifically, have not been addressed.  This research, therefore, investigates the experiences of OE travellers returning home to New Zealand.  The OE has become an important part of New Zealand's culture, and while diaspora initiatives connect valuable expatriate resources, they fail to consider the wider implications of repatriation.  For that reason, this research explores the personal experiences of OE returnees through in-depth conversational style interviews, specifically pertaining to relationships with friends and family, employment opportunities, and personal development.

The results of the research show that repatriation is an individual and subjective experience; a period of transition occurs, sometimes involving depression, distress, or difficult periods of adjustment, that vary in intensity based on factors like personality, readiness for return, and coping style.  This transition comprises first impressions and a comparison of home and overseas, followed by the thought of 'what's next?'  Eventually, returnees who remain at home readjust to the culture and adapt their priorities and behaviours until the OE is  like a dream .  As such, this thesis posits that the return home from travel, and the personal life event experiences of returnees, are fundamental dimensions of the tourism experience that are yet to be fully understood in tourism research.  In essence, this thesis examines travel from a holistic perspective, as part of the wider life course of individuals, and argues that researchers should consider the realities of the tourism experience, and adjust their data collection methods accordingly.

year: 2006

title: Efficiency enhancement to a linear AC voltage regulator: Multi-winding versus multi-transformer design

authors: Wijesooriya, Priyanwada Nimesha

abstract: Electricity distribution companies are required to supply electric power, which conforms to accepted standards, that place limits on voltage fluctuations beyond nominal values. However, it is common for these fluctuations to exceed the specified standards. One solution to this problem is to install stand-alone RMS voltage regulators at the consumer site. Commonly available AC regulators typically have limitations such as slow response time, flattened sine wave output, low efficiency, and limited operating range. The linear AC voltage regulator is a relatively new type of solid-state, single-phase AC regulator for consumer-end, which addresses most of the above issues. It is based on a series transistor-array coupled with a line-frequency transformer that works seamlessly from boost-to-buck mode in the range of 0.8−1.1 per-unit values of line voltage, without a need of any transformer configuration changes. However, previous prototypes exhibited reduced efficiency when the line voltage exceeded the nominal value. This paper presents two alternative designs that achieve efficiencies of 90−95%, usually required in commercial implementation. Analytical and experimental results of a multi-winding versus multi-transformer based prototypes of 300VA output capacity are presented.

text: Efficiency enhancement to a linear AC voltage regulator: Multi-winding versus multi-transformer design Electricity distribution companies are required to supply electric power, which conforms to accepted standards, that place limits on voltage fluctuations beyond nominal values. However, it is common for these fluctuations to exceed the specified standards. One solution to this problem is to install stand-alone RMS voltage regulators at the consumer site. Commonly available AC regulators typically have limitations such as slow response time, flattened sine wave output, low efficiency, and limited operating range. The linear AC voltage regulator is a relatively new type of solid-state, single-phase AC regulator for consumer-end, which addresses most of the above issues. It is based on a series transistor-array coupled with a line-frequency transformer that works seamlessly from boost-to-buck mode in the range of 0.8−1.1 per-unit values of line voltage, without a need of any transformer configuration changes. However, previous prototypes exhibited reduced efficiency when the line voltage exceeded the nominal value. This paper presents two alternative designs that achieve efficiencies of 90−95%, usually required in commercial implementation. Analytical and experimental results of a multi-winding versus multi-transformer based prototypes of 300VA output capacity are presented.

year: 2020-06-18

title: A hybrid architecture for labelling bilingual Māori-English tweets

authors: Trye, David

subjects: borrowing

abstract: Most large-scale language detection tools perform poorly at identifying Māori text. Moreover, rule-based and machine learning-based techniques devised specifically for the Māori-English language pair struggle with interlingual homographs. We develop a hybrid architecture that couples Māori-language orthography with machine learning models in order to annotate mixed Māori-English text. This architecture is used to label a new bilingual Twitter corpus at both the token (word) and tweet (sentence) levels. We use the collected tweets to show that the hybrid approach outperforms existing systems with respect to language detection of interlingual homographs and overall accuracy. We also evaluate its performance on out-of-domain data. Two interactive visualisations are provided for exploring the Twitter corpus and comparing errors across the new and existing techniques. The architecture code and visualisations are available online, and the corpus is available on request.

text: A hybrid architecture for labelling bilingual Māori-English tweets Most large-scale language detection tools perform poorly at identifying Māori text. Moreover, rule-based and machine learning-based techniques devised specifically for the Māori-English language pair struggle with interlingual homographs. We develop a hybrid architecture that couples Māori-language orthography with machine learning models in order to annotate mixed Māori-English text. This architecture is used to label a new bilingual Twitter corpus at both the token (word) and tweet (sentence) levels. We use the collected tweets to show that the hybrid approach outperforms existing systems with respect to language detection of interlingual homographs and overall accuracy. We also evaluate its performance on out-of-domain data. Two interactive visualisations are provided for exploring the Twitter corpus and comparing errors across the new and existing techniques. The architecture code and visualisations are available online, and the corpus is available on request.

year: 2022