Weir management : challenges, analysis and decision support.

If humanity is to make the best of this planet then it is crucial that we develop the capacity to implement the most effective environmental management practices. Essential is a holistic approach to management, as is advocated by integrated catchment management (ICM), which proposes that catchment management issues will be best dealt with when interventions are planned together at the catchment scale and all stakeholder interests are given consideration during decision making. The issue of weir modification is a good example of a problem that would benefit from these principles. Many stakeholder interests are affected by weir modification, and if effective and fair weir modification decisions are to be made, all must be used to evaluate alternative weir modification options. So that decision makers can make the most of the synergies and avoid the conflicts that can occur between interventions, they need to know how multiple weir modifications interact. To do this decision makers must be able to manage and utilise a large amount of information and use it to help them make effective decisions. The objective of the research presented in this thesis is to develop an approach to the management of weirs in the Don Catchment that is holistic both a spatial sense and in terms of the assessment of alternative management options. An evaluatory framework for weir modifications is formulated by adapting published typologies of river ecosystem services (ESs). The prediction of how catchment interventions affect sociocultural ESs is recognized as a particularly challenging to the application of this framework because their qualitative and subjective nature makes them hard to predict. Bayesian Networks (BNs) are identified as a potential solution as they use probabilities to describe the relationships between variables. A BN was built to predict how weir modification affected weir danger and weir fun for canoeists by utilising the knowledge of canoeing groups. It is concluded that despite a number of caveats, BNs offer a potentially important method for allowing sociocultural ESs to be predicted in decision making processes. The consideration ofthe complex interdependencies multiple weir modifications can have is recognised as another of the challenges facing weir management decision making. A spatially explicit modelling approach is developed that can account for the interactive effect multiple weir modifications have on river connectivity for several river species in the Don Catchment. Expert judgement and hydrological modelling are used to discriminate between different levels of habitat quality for European eel (Anguilla anguilla) and Atlantic salmon (Safrna safar). Several strategies to increase connectivity in the Don Catchment were explored. It was found that each had its own set of winners and losers, indicating trade-offs between species need to be considered when planning connectivity enhancements. The modelling approach shows the interdependent effects of weir modifications are vet: important in determining habitat accessibility, particularly the cumulative effect of multiple fish passes. A decision support system (DSS) dubbed the Weir Tool was constructed through the integration of the canoeing BN and the river connectivity models. As it is generally assumed that if DSS are employed, improved decision making will result, this assumption was tested in a controlled experiment. In contrast to expectations, users of the Weir Tool learnt less about the environmental issue of weir modification compared to the control group, and did not make more effective decisions

End-user documentation

The first and most basic problem with documentation is that the consumer of software applications does not want to use the documentation included with a software product for one or more reasons. Studies, and papers, have been done on the effect that documentation has on a user's satisfaction with a software application; its ease of use, how quickly a user can learn to use the application, and on how documentation should be standardized. The premise of this thesis is that an improvement to the software maintenance processes can be achieved by limiting maintenance requests to "actual” problems with software, versus "perceived" problems caused by inadequate end-user documentation. After analyzing the literature within the computer science communities on the software maintenance process, and the literature within the educational and psychological communities on learning, retention, and the effect of software documentation on the end-user, a modification to the Foster Model was conceived. This model incorporates the concept of an Interactive Documentation Program (IDP), which allows for the end-user to utilize end-user directed and task-based documentation to improve their skills with the operation of commercially available off-the-shelf "office application" software as well as in-house developed software of a similar nature. To ascertain the viability of this concept, a world-wide survey of end-users is concerning their needs, desires, expectations, and complaints concerning end-user documentation was conducted. Combining the statistical results of the analysis of this survey with the concept of the IDP resulted in a new visuaUy-based and task oriented documentation paradigm called hypervideo

All together and at once the practice: towards a pedagogy of implication for Australian industrial design

Concerning modes of pedagogy, this research investigates the incidence of complex design studio projects that manifest a ‘program’ that contains Sociotranseunt Practice, a theory towards a “pedagogy of implication”. A theorising through, and for the teaching of industrial design, it provides an account of how concerns for a changing disciplinary condition can be approached pedagogically: where design and education are all together and at once the practice. Industrial design in the contemporary Australian context confronts major change. Changing sociotechnical practices produce complex problems in the ways people live with designed things and systems. Issues of sustainability, and the agency of design in a de-industrializing local economy, are transfiguring normative meanings and modes of practice. The capacity for industrial design practice to mediate the implications of delivering change to social and technical practices is necessarily a problem of pedagogy. Undertaken in my capacity as a practitioner researcher, the research provides an account of industrial design educational practice in the contemporary Australian context. The research forms as a narrative of changing disciplinary and educational drivers and ideals as experienced in teaching, and explicated through reflections on practice. It confronts the collision of current disciplinary concerns with historical disciplinary tendencies to articulate a process of (and for) pedagogy: to activate in teaching, to problematize, and reflect on a hybridised practice of designing as education, and education for and within design. The research explores how pedagogic practices might be theorised in order to activate opportunities for the construction of new meanings of design practice to operate in within changing disciplinary conditions. Abstractions of the researchers pedagogic approaches, in the form of diagrammatic models and tools, constitute the key element of the research; acts of design that move from the mind, out through practice and to the proposition of Sociotranseunt Practice. It builds a theoretical proposition for industrial design practice-pedagogy, and new strategies to enable through design: the mediation of social and technical practices towards sustainability and critical citizenry; and, the transformation of industrial design towards a critical practice that attends to the implications of its own practices. A pedagogic and design practice theory, Sociotranseunt Practice repositions the industrial designer to operate through a socially activated and transitive practice, where the designer is a critical mediatory agent within socially defined contexts of concern, and the design of new things and systems cross into and transform the manifested implications of sociotechnical practices. Redrawing the contexts of work for industrial design, Sociotranseunt Practice alters the very doing of design. Problem solving gets recast as an activity of implication mediation, and design activity is rendered a transformative and interloping actor, thereby elevating, in a context of application, new responsibilities for design. The act of designing becomes a ‘thing-ing’ and a ‘system-ing’, and the designer is visibly, and inextricably implicated in the mediation of socio-technical practices

Human security assemblages in global politics: the materiality and instability of biopolitical governmentality in Thailand and Vietnam

This thesis investigates the implications of human security on global politics. While it adopts a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality and biopolitics, the thesis differs from biopolitical accounts of human security. These accounts tend to reduce human security to a coherent, totalizing, and inadvertently successful mode of governance, deemphasizing its situatedness and instability. In contrast, by complementing the Foucauldian approach to the study of human security with a Deleuzian lens of machinic assemblage in which materiality is particularly emphasized, the thesis argues that the governmental logic of human security gives rise to a multiplicity of open-ended vernacular assemblages and associated orders of governance. Though these assemblages are particular, messy, contingent systems which vacillate, undermine themselves, clash and hybridize with surrounding assemblages, this does not render them ineffective. When the object of analysis is the global, a focus on the materiality of events helps to explore how the global is localized. A focus on materiality opens up the opportunity to explore how the local materializes. This interplay between localizations and materializations disrupts the logics that underlie governmental processes. In this way, the thesis demonstrates how the intransigence of life constantly escapes and readjusts the biopolitical imperative. Empirically, the thesis traces the way human security materializes as a situated governmental strategy in emerging assemblages for managing pathogenic and illicit circulations relating to global migrant communities in Thailand and Vietnam. It shows the way the intricate and productive as well as destructive interplay of human and nonhuman elements inherent to the assemblages helped to constitute two vernacular orders of human security and associated political subjectivities

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp

Alegría rebelde and performance (c)art: A comparative (auto)ethnography of contemporary absurd performance practice amongst activists and socially committed artists in Buenos Aires and New York City

This is an interdisciplinary study of contemporary absurd performance practice amongst activists and socially committed artists in Buenos Aires and New York City primarily informed by sixteen months of comparative ethnographic fieldwork. It centrally seeks to identify the motivations that drive different absurd performance practices amongst activists and socially committed artists across different socio-political contexts. Following a brief, signposting introduction and outline of the key collectives worked with during fieldwork, this thesis begins with a consideration of how to define ‘the absurd’ and ‘absurd performance’. The new theoretical framework of pragmatic absurdo-anarchism is proposed via combined contemplation of absurdist metaphysical philosophy and anarchist political philosophy in continual conversation with both my personal autoethnographic performance experimentation and reflection upon my ethnographic observations of others in Buenos Aires and New York City. From here, a new definition of absurd performance is outlined centering upon exaggerated counter-normative transgression. Elaborating upon the insights of growing literature concerning direct ‘tactical performance’ (Bogad, 2016a; Shepard, 2011; Duncombe, 2016) in relation to my ethnographic data, the counterpoint of more oblique supra-tactical performance is conceptualized, as is a spectrum of (supra)tactical absurd performance possibilities between these two ideal types. An account of my comparative ethnographic methodology and how it contributes fresh insight to the study of this topic and to Performance Studies more broadly is followed by a distillation of the key cultural and political characteristics of Buenos Aires and New York City that were observed to be influential upon absurd performance practices. Reporting and analysis of ethnographic data is then split into two primary sections. The first substantiates earlier theoretical claims by exploring the ideological underpinnings of different (supra)tactical orientations of absurd performance between those defining as activists and those defining as artists in each fieldsite. The second illustrates how the particular socio-political histories and actualities of Buenos Aires and New York City differently restrict and enable different forms of absurd performance. Here the need is outlined for further cross-cultural research on this topic in order to continue to fill the gaps in knowledge left behind by the ethnocentric over-concentration on Western activist case studies within the currently dominant academic literature

Common metrics for cellular automata models of complex systems

The creation and use of models is critical not only to the scientific process, but also to life in general. Selected features of a system are abstracted into a model that can then be used to gain knowledge of the workings of the observed system and even anticipate its future behaviour. A key feature of the modelling process is the identification of commonality. This allows previous experience of one model to be used in a new or unfamiliar situation. This recognition of commonality between models allows standards to be formed, especially in areas such as measurement. How everyday physical objects are measured is built on an ingrained acceptance of their underlying commonality. Complex systems, often with their layers of interwoven interactions, are harder to model and, therefore, to measure and predict. Indeed, the inability to compute and model a complex system, except at a localised and temporal level, can be seen as one of its defining attributes. The establishing of commonality between complex systems provides the opportunity to find common metrics. This work looks at two dimensional cellular automata, which are widely used as a simple modelling tool for a variety of systems. This has led to a very diverse range of systems using a common modelling environment based on a lattice of cells. This provides a possible common link between systems using cellular automata that could be exploited to find a common metric that provided information on a diverse range of systems. An enhancement of a categorisation of cellular automata model types used for biological studies is proposed and expanded to include other disciplines. The thesis outlines a new metric, the C-Value, created by the author. This metric, based on the connectedness of the active elements on the cellular automata grid, is then tested with three models built to represent three of the four categories of cellular automata model types. The results show that the new C-Value provides a good indicator of the gathering of active cells on a grid into a single, compact cluster and of indicating, when correlated with the mean density of active cells on the lattice, that their distribution is random. This provides a range to define the disordered and ordered state of a grid. The use of the C-Value in a localised context shows potential for identifying patterns of clusters on the grid

Orthographies in Early Modern Europe

This volume provides, for the first time, a pan-European view of the development of written languages at a key time in their history: that of the 16th century. The major cultural and intellectual upheavals that affected Europe at the time - Humanism, the Reformation and the emergence of modern nation-states - were not isolated phenomena, and the evolution of the orthographical systems of European languages shows a large number of convergences, due to the mobility of scholars, ideas and technological innovations throughout the period