title: Celebrating the joy of teaching

authors: Tulloch, Bridget

subjects: teaching

abstract: I am excited to be writing this article on celebrating teaching, because all too often it feels like research is celebrated more than teaching at the university. This is perhaps because research has obvious measurable rewards such as being granted research funding or producing a paper. Teaching produces its own rewards but these are far less obvious and can be different for every teacher. When I wrote my teaching portfolio I opened with the quote of “we teach to change the world” (Brookfield, 1995), and while this seems cliched, it is so very true. The rewards in teaching for me are the interactions with students and seeing that moment when there is a spark as ideas click and make sense. It is the connections with students I want to focus on in this piece because for me that is why I teach.

text: Celebrating the joy of teaching I am excited to be writing this article on celebrating teaching, because all too often it feels like research is celebrated more than teaching at the university. This is perhaps because research has obvious measurable rewards such as being granted research funding or producing a paper. Teaching produces its own rewards but these are far less obvious and can be different for every teacher. When I wrote my teaching portfolio I opened with the quote of “we teach to change the world” (Brookfield, 1995), and while this seems cliched, it is so very true. The rewards in teaching for me are the interactions with students and seeing that moment when there is a spark as ideas click and make sense. It is the connections with students I want to focus on in this piece because for me that is why I teach.

year: 2012

title: The potential of New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) for testing the synchronicity of abrupt climate change during the Last Glacial Interval (60,000–11,700 years ago)

authors: Turney, Chris S.M.

subjects: Last Glacial Interval

abstract: The latter part of the Last Glacial Interval (LGI; 60,000 to 11,700 years ago) experienced a range of climatic and environment extremes. To elucidate the mechanisms of these changes requires records of past variability that are precisely dated and correlated on the same absolute timescale. However, despite decades of research, it is still not possible to align most marine and terrestrial records of past change with ice-core records, largely because of ongoing uncertainties over the conversion of pre-Holocene ¹⁴C ages on to a calendar timescale and uncertainties with in ice-core chronologies. As a result, it is equivocal whether climate changes in both hemispheres during the LGI led, lagged or were synchronous with one another. A decadally-resolved radiocarbon calibration is urgently required to test these models of the Earth system. Here we report radiocarbon measurements obtained from subfossil New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) spanning a collective 3500 years dated between 25,000 and 45,000 years ago. The results are compared to the recently published international calibration curve IntCal09 and to the marine Cariaco Basin datasets. We show that kauri have considerable potential for development of a Southern Hemisphere component of a unified global calibration curve suite, and that tree-ring sequences can be superposed on other radiocarbon records to constrain atmospheric–marine offsets and precisely test the synchronicity of abrupt climate change.

text: The potential of New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) for testing the synchronicity of abrupt climate change during the Last Glacial Interval (60,000–11,700 years ago) The latter part of the Last Glacial Interval (LGI; 60,000 to 11,700 years ago) experienced a range of climatic and environment extremes. To elucidate the mechanisms of these changes requires records of past variability that are precisely dated and correlated on the same absolute timescale. However, despite decades of research, it is still not possible to align most marine and terrestrial records of past change with ice-core records, largely because of ongoing uncertainties over the conversion of pre-Holocene ¹⁴C ages on to a calendar timescale and uncertainties with in ice-core chronologies. As a result, it is equivocal whether climate changes in both hemispheres during the LGI led, lagged or were synchronous with one another. A decadally-resolved radiocarbon calibration is urgently required to test these models of the Earth system. Here we report radiocarbon measurements obtained from subfossil New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) spanning a collective 3500 years dated between 25,000 and 45,000 years ago. The results are compared to the recently published international calibration curve IntCal09 and to the marine Cariaco Basin datasets. We show that kauri have considerable potential for development of a Southern Hemisphere component of a unified global calibration curve suite, and that tree-ring sequences can be superposed on other radiocarbon records to constrain atmospheric–marine offsets and precisely test the synchronicity of abrupt climate change.

year: 2010

title: What a difference a default setting makes

authors: Keegan, Te Taka Adrian Gregory

subjects: computer science

abstract: This paper examines the effect of the default interface language on the usage of a bilingual digital library. In 2005 the default interface language of a bilingual digital library was alternated on a monthly basis between Māori and English. A comprehensive transaction log analysis over this period reveals that not only did usage in a particular language increase when the default interface language was set to that language but that the way the interface was used, in both languages, was quite different depending on the default language.

text: What a difference a default setting makes This paper examines the effect of the default interface language on the usage of a bilingual digital library. In 2005 the default interface language of a bilingual digital library was alternated on a monthly basis between Māori and English. A comprehensive transaction log analysis over this period reveals that not only did usage in a particular language increase when the default interface language was set to that language but that the way the interface was used, in both languages, was quite different depending on the default language.

year: 2008