title: Assessing the food preference of the brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecular) using fixed-ratio schedules

authors: Jenkins, Ayla Nicky Te Rau O Riwa

subjects: Food preference

abstract: The quality of different foods has been found in previous studies to effect an animal’s performance on fixed-ratio schedules. Foods that are of a higher quality should maintain behaviour to larger fixed-ratio values than foods of a lower quality. The present study examined the performance maintained by increasing fixed-ratio schedules by four different foods (Rolled Oats, Cocoa Puffs™ and flaked barley, All Bran™ and Soy Protein) with six brushtail possum (Trischosurus vulpecula). Overall response rates and running response rates both generally showed a bitonic function, and post-reinforcement pauses showed a modest increase with increases in the fixed-ratio. The equations of two quantitative models; Behavioural economics and mathematical principles of reinforcement (MPR) were fitted to the data to see how different food types affected the two models ability to predict behaviour. This was measured through two parameter estimates, alpha (α) and specific activation (αs). Both demand equations and the MPR equation described the data fairly well. The parameter estimates for specific activation (αs) showed a significant difference in value across the foods, but there was no significant difference across foods for parameter estimates of alpha (α). There was a weak correlation between parameter estimates of α and αs (r =-0.245, p =0.0926) . The four foods used in this study were also tested in a paired-stimulus preference assessment. The foods that were assessed as being of more value in the behavioural economic equations and the MPR model, for some possums were identified as being more preferred, but this was not consistent for all possums.

text: Assessing the food preference of the brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecular) using fixed-ratio schedules The quality of different foods has been found in previous studies to effect an animal’s performance on fixed-ratio schedules. Foods that are of a higher quality should maintain behaviour to larger fixed-ratio values than foods of a lower quality. The present study examined the performance maintained by increasing fixed-ratio schedules by four different foods (Rolled Oats, Cocoa Puffs™ and flaked barley, All Bran™ and Soy Protein) with six brushtail possum (Trischosurus vulpecula). Overall response rates and running response rates both generally showed a bitonic function, and post-reinforcement pauses showed a modest increase with increases in the fixed-ratio. The equations of two quantitative models; Behavioural economics and mathematical principles of reinforcement (MPR) were fitted to the data to see how different food types affected the two models ability to predict behaviour. This was measured through two parameter estimates, alpha (α) and specific activation (αs). Both demand equations and the MPR equation described the data fairly well. The parameter estimates for specific activation (αs) showed a significant difference in value across the foods, but there was no significant difference across foods for parameter estimates of alpha (α). There was a weak correlation between parameter estimates of α and αs (r =-0.245, p =0.0926) . The four foods used in this study were also tested in a paired-stimulus preference assessment. The foods that were assessed as being of more value in the behavioural economic equations and the MPR model, for some possums were identified as being more preferred, but this was not consistent for all possums.

year: 2014

title: Architecture of a ubiquitous smart energy management system for residential homes

authors: Kugler, Michael

subjects: computer science

abstract: A range of technology for monitoring electricity consumption at residential homes is gradually becoming available to users. Almost all of these systems, however, only aim to assist users with reducing their total power consumption, without being concerned too much about how those savings are actually made. Our research, aims to provide a basis for design of systems that give users control over management of power usage, so that savings in energy consumption can be made more intelligently. This paper describes the requirements of such a system, and proposes an architecture for these types of ubiquitous systems for residential homes.

text: Architecture of a ubiquitous smart energy management system for residential homes A range of technology for monitoring electricity consumption at residential homes is gradually becoming available to users. Almost all of these systems, however, only aim to assist users with reducing their total power consumption, without being concerned too much about how those savings are actually made. Our research, aims to provide a basis for design of systems that give users control over management of power usage, so that savings in energy consumption can be made more intelligently. This paper describes the requirements of such a system, and proposes an architecture for these types of ubiquitous systems for residential homes.

year: 2011

title: Ghost Town

authors: Wrigley, David

abstract: Abstract

A hometown is a thing full of horrors.
Ghosts line the footpaths like spectators at an ANZAC Day parade. They leap from thickets and pounce from suburban ranch sliders like tom cats. 
These ghosts have been waiting for you. There are things they need you to remember. 
When David Wrigley returns to Cambridge, a town he thought he’d left behind him forever, he finds the ghosts are out in force. He stumbles on a note in his mother’s garage, tightly folded and hot to the touch, that sets him off in pursuit of the memory of Jacob Avonlea, a friend from the past who he has never been able to leave behind.
But the currents of memory are unpredictable, and the waters and riverbanks are crowded with the dead. David and Jacob’s friendship, which crackled with a boyish intensity and a surfeit of secrets, was just the first of many stories tussling for attention.
 There is a family history – a fifty year old cataclysm that destroyed his brother. 
The grotesque origins of the school that nurtured David and murdered Jacob. The eccentric founder who brought with him from the mill towns of Manchester a fear of women and a predilection for young boys. 
And then there is the land – the meanders of the Waikato and the eruptions that diverted it from one coast to another, leaving forgotten oxbows in its wake. The roaming forests of kahikateas that followed the river and the wetlands, and once dominated these landscapes but have now all but disappeared. The rich farmland that has usurped the forests and slowly leaks poison into the soil and the waterways.
Ghost Town is a psychogeographer’s novel. A novel in which the landscape and the people that live and act upon it are inseparable, the ghosts of one haunting the present of the other.  It is a story of colonial men, locked into cycles of violence and destruction. The story of the silence they have inflicted upon themselves and on their children, and ultimately on the landscape itself, as the forests retreat, the birdsong hushed.
As we drift downstream, at every bend of the river we can see through the ever-widening gaps in the trees, glimpses of lost futures– that different species of ghost. 
A free and autonomous Māori Waikato. 
A spring-fed lake full of eels and koura. 
Five hundred year old kahikateas growing arrow-straight into the distant blueness.
An egalitarian, socialist Aotearoa. 
A family man gathering his sons into his arms.
A man of forty six raising his eyes towards the swaying tree-tops and starting to sing.

text: Ghost Town Abstract

A hometown is a thing full of horrors.
Ghosts line the footpaths like spectators at an ANZAC Day parade. They leap from thickets and pounce from suburban ranch sliders like tom cats. 
These ghosts have been waiting for you. There are things they need you to remember. 
When David Wrigley returns to Cambridge, a town he thought he’d left behind him forever, he finds the ghosts are out in force. He stumbles on a note in his mother’s garage, tightly folded and hot to the touch, that sets him off in pursuit of the memory of Jacob Avonlea, a friend from the past who he has never been able to leave behind.
But the currents of memory are unpredictable, and the waters and riverbanks are crowded with the dead. David and Jacob’s friendship, which crackled with a boyish intensity and a surfeit of secrets, was just the first of many stories tussling for attention.
 There is a family history – a fifty year old cataclysm that destroyed his brother. 
The grotesque origins of the school that nurtured David and murdered Jacob. The eccentric founder who brought with him from the mill towns of Manchester a fear of women and a predilection for young boys. 
And then there is the land – the meanders of the Waikato and the eruptions that diverted it from one coast to another, leaving forgotten oxbows in its wake. The roaming forests of kahikateas that followed the river and the wetlands, and once dominated these landscapes but have now all but disappeared. The rich farmland that has usurped the forests and slowly leaks poison into the soil and the waterways.
Ghost Town is a psychogeographer’s novel. A novel in which the landscape and the people that live and act upon it are inseparable, the ghosts of one haunting the present of the other.  It is a story of colonial men, locked into cycles of violence and destruction. The story of the silence they have inflicted upon themselves and on their children, and ultimately on the landscape itself, as the forests retreat, the birdsong hushed.
As we drift downstream, at every bend of the river we can see through the ever-widening gaps in the trees, glimpses of lost futures– that different species of ghost. 
A free and autonomous Māori Waikato. 
A spring-fed lake full of eels and koura. 
Five hundred year old kahikateas growing arrow-straight into the distant blueness.
An egalitarian, socialist Aotearoa. 
A family man gathering his sons into his arms.
A man of forty six raising his eyes towards the swaying tree-tops and starting to sing.

year: 2023