Denial and distancing in discourses of development: shadow of the 'Third World' in New Zealand

Anxieties about development in New Zealand show up in a deep-rooted fear of the 'Third World' in the country. We examine how the term 'Third World' is deployed in media discourses in economic, social and environmental contexts and how this deployment results in a 'discursive distancing' from anything associated with the 'Third World'. Such distancing demonstrates a fragile national identity that struggles with the contradictions between the nation's desire to be part of the 'First World' of global capitalism and the growing disparities in health and wealth within it. The shadow of the 'Third World' prevents New Zealand from confronting the realities of its own inequities, which in turn comes in the way of a sound development agenda

There are always two sides to a story: the use of social dramas as a mode of data analysis in information systems

With the continually evolving social nature of information systems research there is a need to identify different &ldquo;modes of analysis&rdquo; (Myers, 1997) to uncover our understanding of the complex, messy and often chaotic nature of human factors. One suggested mode of analysis is that of social dramas, a tool developed in the anthropological discipline by Victor Turner. The use of social dramas also utilises the work by Goffman (1959; 1997) and enables the researcher to investigate events from the front stage, reporting obvious issues in systems implementation, and from the back stage, identifying the hidden aspects of systems implementation and the underpinning discourses. A case study exploring the social dramas involved in systems selection and implementation has been provided to support the use of this methodological tool.<br /

Self unbound: ego dissolution in psychedelic experience

Users of psychedelic drugs often report that their sense of being a self or ‘I’ distinct from the rest of the world has diminished or altogether dissolved. Neuroscientific study of such ‘ego dissolution’ experiences offers a window onto the nature of self-awareness. We argue that ego dissolution is best explained by an account that explains self-awareness as resulting from the integrated functioning of hierarchical predictive models which posit the existence of a stable and unchanging entity to which representations are bound. Combining recent work on the ‘integrative self' and the phenomenon of self-binding with predictive processing principles yields an explanation of ego dissolution according to which self-representation is a useful Cartesian fiction: an ultimately false representation of a simple and enduring substance to which attributes are bound which serves to integrate and unify cognitive processing across levels and domains. The self-model is not a mere narrative posit, as some have suggested; it has a more robust and ubiquitous cognitive function than that. But this does not mean, as others have claimed, that the self-model has the right attributes to qualify as a self. It performs some of the right kinds of functions, but it is not the right kind of entity. Ego dissolution experiences reveal that the self-model plays an important binding function in cognitive processing, but the self does not exist

Environmental Degradation and the Legal Imperatives of Improvement: Forest Policy in Western Australia from European Settlement to 1918

The Australian forests have experienced deforestation since European settlement in 1788. According to Bradshaw, Australia has lost nearly 40% of its forests and the remaining forest is highly fragmented and degraded. In Western Australia (WA), Australia’s only biodiversity hotspot, forests cover approximately 16% or 21.0 million hectares. In the southwest and central parts of the state these forests are significantly cutover and degraded. In some instances, particularly in the wheatbelt, the local cutover has been complete. For example, in the Avon Botanical District (the central part of the wheatbelt) over 93% of the original vegetation and 97% of the woodlands were removed. William Wallace, an officer of the Forest Department, estimated that between 1829 and 1920, 1 million acres of forest was cut. The Forests Department Annual 1921 Report lamented: [S]eventy five years of practically uncontrolled cutting, and entirely uncontrolled burning have reduced this national asset to such a condition that only a negligible quantity of sound young trees is growing to the acre on the portion that has been cutover. Today the only significant forests that remain in Western Australia are the Jarrah, Karri and Wandoo forests. However, these forests have been significantly degraded and contain approximately 30% of their original forest cover

Screening Europe in Australasia

Through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century, this book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as having always dominated global film culture. Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history—and its implications for cross-cultural exchange—was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, bringing it all vividly to life. Making ground-breaking use of digitized Australian and New Zealand newspapers, the author reconstructs the distribution and exhibition of European silent films in the Antipodes, along the way incorporating compelling biographical sketches of the ambitious pioneers of the Australasian cinema industry. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions

Bounded Degree Spanners of the Hypercube

In this short note we study two questions about the existence of subgraphs of the hypercube $Q_n$ with certain properties. The first question, due to Erd\H{o}s--Hamburger--Pippert--Weakley, asks whether there exists a bounded degree subgraph of $Q_n$ which has diameter $n$. We answer this question by giving an explicit construction of such a subgraph with maximum degree at most 120. The second problem concerns properties of $k$-additive spanners of the hypercube, that is, subgraphs of $Q_n$ in which the distance between any two vertices is at most $k$ larger than in $Q_n$. Denoting by $\Delta_{k,\infty}(n)$ the minimum possible maximum degree of a $k$-additive spanner of $Q_n$, Arizumi--Hamburger--Kostochka showed that $$\frac{n}{\ln n}e^{-4k}\leq \Delta_{2k,\infty}(n)\leq 20\frac{n}{\ln n}\ln \ln n.$$ We improve their upper bound by showing that $$\Delta_{2k,\infty}(n)\leq 10^{4k} \frac{n}{\ln n}\ln^{(k+1)}n,$$where the last term denotes a $k+1$-fold iterated logarithm.Comment: 10 page

The working class and welfare : Francis G. Castles on the political development of the welfare state in Australia and New Zealand thirty years on

In his celebrated work of comparative policy, Francis Castles argued that a radical wage-earning model of welfare had evolved in Australia and New Zealand over the course of the 20th century. The Castles' thesis is shown to have two parts: first, the ‘fourth world of welfare’ argument that rests upon protection of workers; and, second, an emphasis on the path-dependent nature of social policy. It is perfectly possible to accept the second premise of the argument without the first, and indeed many do so. It is also possible to accept the importance of wage level protection concerns in Australasian social policy without accepting the complete fourth world thesis. This article explores the path of social democracy in Australia and New Zealand and the continuing importance of labour market regulation, as well as considering the extent to which that emphasis still makes Australasian social policy distinctive in the modern age. The argument focuses on the data and policies relating to labour market protection and wages, as well the systems of welfare and social protection, and the comparative information on poverty and inequality