Blood ties : the labyrinth of family membership in long term adoption reunion : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University

This thesis reports original research conducted with twenty adoptees, adopted under closed-stranger protocols, who have been experiencing regular post-reunion contact with their birth families for more than ten years. It examines the themes of the mothering role, family obligation and family membership to uncover how adoptees navigate their family membership within and between two families (adoptive and birth family). This study presents the thoughts, feelings and observations of the participants in their own words to convey a deeper understanding of their experiences. Drawing upon in-depth interviews, this study has sought to expand on earlier research focusing on the search and reunion and immediate post-reunion stages to examine the long-term experiences of adoptees in post-reunion. The principal finding is that reunited relationships have no predictable pathways and are approached with varying levels of ambivalence and emotional strain, and that there is no fixed pattern of family arrangements and relational boundaries. While closed-stranger adoptions and the subsequent reunions may eventually cease, this research may assist in understanding the issues surrounding the reunion between gamete (egg) and sperm donor's and their offspring in the future. KEYWORDS: Adoption Post-reunion, Adoptee, Birth Family, Family Membership, Family Relationships, Closed Adoption Reunion

The Manin conjecture in dimension 2

These lecture notes describe the current state of affairs for Manin's conjecture in the context of del Pezzo surfaces.Comment: 57 pages. These are a preliminary version of lecture notes for the "School and conference on analytic number theory", ICTP, Trieste, 23/04/07-11/05/0

A Reflection of Cultural Exchange

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Austin Browning describes his observations during his study abroad program at Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong, China

Reassessing Putin's project : reflections on IR theory and the West

Putin's aim was not to isolate Russia from international society but to challenge the West's claim to define its norms

Nation Branding and Policy transfer: Insights from Norden. EL-CSID Working Paper Issue 2018/22 • October 2018

Recent years have seen an interesting development in practices and policies of nation branding. Alongside an emphasis in which nation branding programmes seek to activate desires of conspicuous consumption in consumers, or to use branded messages to attract investment, there has also been a growing emphasis placed on policy transfer as a part of nation branding strategies. Thus, we see countries emphasising the possibility of exporting (amongst others) their educational, environmental, gender, criminological and even administrative policies, models and approaches. Instead of jealously guarding points of possible competitive advantage the message is instead apparently benevolent, a declaration that such countries may have something to offer that they are willing to share for the greater good. To date, this shift towards the incorporation of policy transfer within nation branding practices has received only limited analysis (e.g. Marsh and Fawcett 2011a; 2011b). Questions that arise, therefore, include: why are countries increasingly shifting their nation branding programmes in this direction? What do they seek to gain by engaging in such exports? And should we take the ostensibly beneficent nature of such practices at face value? The aim of this working paper is therefore to consider what the shift to policy transfer may tell us about the developing politics of nation branding, with particular focus placed on how policy transfer can be seen as a form of branded identity politics that arguably belies its apparently benevolent intentions by reaffirming hierarchical geopolitical imaginaries that remain premised on a politics of leveraging perceived competitive advantage. However, while the paper indicates why such a shift in nation branding strategies may be attractive, it also considers the potential pitfalls and limitations of such an approach. The working paper first discusses the shift towards nation branding through policy transfer at a general level, before ending with a discussion that draws on examples from Norden – the countries of which frequently populate the upper echelons of numerous nation branding and benchmarking indices, which have historically presented themselves as a model for export, and which, following an extended period of post-Cold War identity crisis and doubt, have more recently rediscovered a sense of self-confidence and self-identity, not least manifest in a resurrection of ideas of Nordic knowledge exports and policy transfer that re-instantiates more historical notions of Nordic exceptionalism

Density of integer solutions to diagonal quadratic forms

Let Q be a non-singular diagonal quadratic form in at least four variables. We provide upper bounds for the number of integer solutions to the equation Q=0, which lie in a box with sides of length 2B, as B tends to infinity. The estimates obtained are completely uniform in the coefficients of the form, and become sharper as they grow larger in modulus.Comment: 23 page

Anti-Miscegenation Laws in the United States

Still another thesis on Rubik’s cube? Is there still something new to write on that puzzle? In this document, we approach the cube with a rather unusual question: “how would you solve the cube if, instead of using the 6 classical rotations, you were restricted to a set of arbitrary moves?” To answer that question, we will dive into group theory. Inspired by some previous work on the factorization of the symmetric group, we have developed an algorithm that answers our initial question. However, being able to solve the cube with any set of moves has a trade-off: while some algorithms solve the cube in 20 moves, ours requires several thousands. One could go further than this thesis by: improving our algorithm, providing rigourous bounds on its complexity, or generalizing the algorithm to the n × n × n cube.

High-resolution Surface Analysis by Microarea Auger Spectroscopy: Computerization and Characterization

A custom scanning Auger electron microscope (SAM) capable of introducing a 3-5 keV electron beam of several nA into a 30 nm diameter sample area was fitted with a sample introduction system and was fully computerized to be used for materials science research. The method of multispectral Auger imaging was devised and implemented. The instrument was applied to various problems in materials science, including the study of the fiber/matrix interface in a SiC reinforced titanium alloy, the study of SiC whiskers in Al alloy 2124 (in cooperation with NASA-Langley), the study of NiCrAl superalloys (in collaboration with NASA-Lewis), the study of zircalloy specimens (in collaboration with Stanford University), and the microstructure of sintered SiC specimens (in collaboration with NASA-Lewis). The report contains a number of manuscripts submitted for publication on these subjects

Sieving rational points on varieties

A sieve for rational points on suitable varieties is developed, together with applications to counting rational points in thin sets, the number of varieties in a family which are everywhere locally soluble, and to the notion of friable rational points with respect to divisors. In the special case of quadrics, sharper estimates are obtained by developing a version of the Selberg sieve for rational points.Comment: 30 pages; minor edits (final version