Whāriki : beyond simple : an exhibition report presented as partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Māori Visual Arts, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

This thesis/exhibition report is an explication of the significance and relationship of Kai rāranga, rāranga whāriki and their relationship with whānau, hapū and iwi. It explores the impetus behind and relationships important in, and to the production of whāriki. Through the exploration of these relationships the necessity for whāriki wānanga throughout Aotearoa and having wānanga as the preferred medium of imparting knowledge pertaining to rāranga whāriki and for continuity in the production of whāriki is emphasised. It touches on the Māori convention of tono that facilitates interaction between the Kai rārangaresearcher and the Kai tono-researched negating the sometimes invasive convention of ethics approval and formalised contractual obligations. It follows the pathway of author and Kai rāranga, Te Hemo Ata Henare’s, coming to be of her mahi whāriki practice. It is an intimate account that extends from function and technique to foundational connectivity to the wider roopu whāriki and those who have preceded us with templates of excellence that recognise the importance of the whakapapa of Māori whakaaro, our epochs and eons of transcendent time and the interconnectedness of all things in and through these patterned processes (Jackson, 2013; Marsden, 2003; Tamanui, 2013). As Karani Sonny Pāpuni said; “…you take this whāriki home with you and then a piece of us will always be with your whānau” (Mate ki Tātahi [Sonny] Pāpuni, personal communication, May 17 1991). A clear objective emerging out of this research exercise was to produce a body of work in the form of an exhibition of whāriki and to produce a pictorial and written explication of the process and praxis of whāriki wānanga. However, through the research process, I was returned; i hoki atu ki te timatatanga ō oku mahi, so I could come to know and be. The theme that emerges through rāranga whāriki is the inseparability and the multiplicity of whakapapa and/or whanaungatanga that the Kai rāranga embodies essential for the continuation of the praxis of rāranga whāriki that can only be described as extraordinarily ‘Beyond Simple’

Dynamic simulation of task constrained of a rigid-flexible manipulator

A rigid-flexible manipulator may be assigned tasks in a moving environment where the winds or vibrations affect the position and/or orientation of surface of operation. Consequently, losses of the contact and perhaps degradation of the performance may occur as references are changed. When the environment is moving, knowledge of the angle α between the contact surface and the horizontal is required at every instant. In this paper, different profiles for the time varying angle α are proposed to investigate the effect of this change into the contact force and the joint torques of a rigid-flexible manipulator. The coefficients of the equation of the proposed rotating surface are changing with time to determine the new X and Y coordinates of the moving surface as the surface rotates

Random projections as regularizers: learning a linear discriminant from fewer observations than dimensions

We prove theoretical guarantees for an averaging-ensemble of randomly projected Fisher linear discriminant classifiers, focusing on the casewhen there are fewer training observations than data dimensions. The specific form and simplicity of this ensemble permits a direct and much more detailed analysis than existing generic tools in previous works. In particular, we are able to derive the exact form of the generalization error of our ensemble, conditional on the training set, and based on this we give theoretical guarantees which directly link the performance of the ensemble to that of the corresponding linear discriminant learned in the full data space. To the best of our knowledge these are the first theoretical results to prove such an explicit link for any classifier and classifier ensemble pair. Furthermore we show that the randomly projected ensemble is equivalent to implementing a sophisticated regularization scheme to the linear discriminant learned in the original data space and this prevents overfitting in conditions of small sample size where pseudo-inverse FLD learned in the data space is provably poor. Our ensemble is learned from a set of randomly projected representations of the original high dimensional data and therefore for this approach data can be collected, stored and processed in such a compressed form. We confirm our theoretical findings with experiments, and demonstrate the utility of our approach on several datasets from the bioinformatics domain and one very high dimensional dataset from the drug discovery domain, both settings in which fewer observations than dimensions are the norm

A Catalog of Star Cluster Candidates in M33

We present a new catalog of star cluster candidates in the nearby spiral galaxy M33. It is based on eight existing catalogs wherein we have cross-referenced identifications and endeavored to resolve inconsistencies between them. Our catalog contains 451 candidates of which 255 are confirmed clusters based on HST and high resolution ground-based imaging. The catalog contains precise cluster positions (RA and Dec), magnitudes and colors in the UBVRIJHKs filters, metallicities, radial velocities, masses and ages, where available, and galactocentric distances for each cluster. The color distribution of the M33 clusters appears to be similar to those in the Large Magellanic Cloud with major peaks at (B-V)o~0.15, and (B-V)o~0.65. The intrinsic colors are correlated with cluster ages, which range from 10^{7.5} to 10^{10.3} years. The age distribution of the star clusters supports the notion of rapid cluster disruption with a slope of alpha=-1.09 +/- 0.07 in the dN_{cluster}/dt ~ t^{alpha} relation. In addition, comparison to theoretical single stellar population models suggests the presence of an age-metallicity relation among these clusters with younger clusters being more metal-rich. Analysis of the radial distribution of the clusters yields some evidence that younger clusters (age <~ 1 Gyr) may be more concentrated toward the center of M33 than older ones. A similar comparison with the radial profile of the M33 field stars shows the clusters to be more centrally concentrated at the greater than 99.9% confidence level. Possible reasons for this are presented and discussed; however, the overwhelming conclusion seems to be that a more complete and thorough cluster search is needed covering at least 4 square degrees centered on M33.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journa