Rural land subdivision and suburbanisation in the peri-urban area, Kairanga County (1970-1980) : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Geography at Massey University

After briefly outlining the patterns and processes of rural land subdivision and suburbanisation in other parts of New Zealand, the thesis examines the rural land subdivision regulations and policies throughout the country. The development of a number of small size farmlets in the peri-urban areas has been an indicator of urban expansion in parts of the country. This study is based upon the Kairanga County, a rural area surrounding the city of Palmerston North. In the introduction the county is described as it relates to the rural land subdivision situation. The study of size of holding refers to those farmlets with an area of 20 hectares or less. It was found that most dwellings in the study area which had been built in the 1970s were concentrated upon 'subdivision' land. These farmlets or holdings also illustrated the patterns of change in land use and land holdings. There has been an increase in the number of dwellings in the rural area of the county, especially in 'subdivision' areas, with an average of more than sixteen houses per year. A small percentage of rural 'subdivision' landowners work full-time on their holdings but most of them are employed in non-farming occupations and only carry on part-time farming activities on their lands. There are 61 percent of all those employed in the county engaged in the non-farming occupations. It was found that there are more 'potential' subdivisions than 'actual' subdivisions both in terms of total area and of total numbers of holdings. Most small holdings tend to be located closer to the Palmerston North Urban Area. The total number of holdings has increased because larger holdings have been subdivided into smaller-sized holdings. The area of 'subdivision' land in holdings of 20 hectares or less represents 23 percent of the total occupied land in the county. The land use patterns of 'subdivision' land have changed with a greater variety of land uses and farming types. There was an average of at least two separate types of land use or farming on each holding. Some 5,003 hectares of land in the county has been legally subdivided for smaller farmlets each with an area of 20 hectares or less. When these farmlets become 'actual' subdivisions most of them would be in part for residential use and eventually add to the peri-urban area around Palmerston North City. Finally it was concluded that the pattern and process of suburbanisation of Kairanga County will continue as long as 'potential' subdivision land is available for settlement

Classifiers With a Reject Option for Early Time-Series Classification

Early classification of time-series data in a dynamic environment is a challenging problem of great importance in signal processing. This paper proposes a classifier architecture with a reject option capable of online decision making without the need to wait for the entire time series signal to be present. The main idea is to classify an odor/gas signal with an acceptable accuracy as early as possible. Instead of using posterior probability of a classifier, the proposed method uses the "agreement" of an ensemble to decide whether to accept or reject the candidate label. The introduced algorithm is applied to the bio-chemistry problem of odor classification to build a novel Electronic-Nose called Forefront-Nose. Experimental results on wind tunnel test-bed facility confirms the robustness of the forefront-nose compared to the standard classifiers from both earliness and recognition perspectives

A Route Confidence Evaluation Method for Reliable Hierarchical Text Categorization

Hierarchical Text Categorization (HTC) is becoming increasingly important with the rapidly growing amount of text data available in the World Wide Web. Among the different strategies proposed to cope with HTC, the Local Classifier per Node (LCN) approach attains good performance by mirroring the underlying class hierarchy while enforcing a top-down strategy in the testing step. However, the problem of embedding hierarchical information (parent-child relationship) to improve the performance of HTC systems still remains open. A confidence evaluation method for a selected route in the hierarchy is proposed to evaluate the reliability of the final candidate labels in an HTC system. In order to take into account the information embedded in the hierarchy, weight factors are used to take into account the importance of each level. An acceptance/rejection strategy in the top-down decision making process is proposed, which improves the overall categorization accuracy by rejecting a few percentage of samples, i.e., those with low reliability score. Experimental results on the Reuters benchmark dataset (RCV1- v2) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared to other state-of-the art HTC methods

Post-crisis Situation of German Economy under Analysis

In 2010, both the EU and euro zone registered economic growth, mainly due to Germany's performance. Seen as a whole, the German economy grew stronger last year than in the last two decades, so that, for most sectors, 2010 brought gains despite experts’ negative forecasts. This positive development was, however, due to measures taken by the government in Berlin since the end of 2008, after the global financial crisis started. For 2011 the German authorities still expect a GDP growth in real terms of 2.3% and economic experts speak even of 2.8%, which would be an evolution over the euro zone states average economies.crisis response, economic crisis, Germany, SMEs, term package.