Who is coming from Vanuatu to New Zealand under the new Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) program?

New Zealand’s new Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) program allows workers from the Pacific Islands to come to New Zealand for up to seven months to work in the horticulture and viticulture industries. One of the explicit objectives of the program is to encourage economic development in the Pacific. In this paper we report on the results of a baseline survey taken in Vanuatu, which allows us to examine who wants to participate in the program, and who is selected amongst those interested. We find the main participants are males in their late 20s to early 40s, most of whom are married and have children. Most workers are subsistence farmers in Vanuatu and have not completed more than 10 years of schooling. Such workers would be unlikely to be accepted under existing migration channels. Nevertheless, we find RSE workers from Vanuatu to come from wealthier households, and have better English literacy and health than individuals not applying for the program. Lack of knowledge about the policy and the costs of applying appear to be the main barriers preventing poorer individuals applying

The stellar content of the Local Group dwarf galaxy Phoenix

We present new deep $VI$ ground-based photometry of the Local Group dwarf galaxy Phoenix. Our results confirm that this galaxy is mainly dominated by red stars, with some blue plume stars indicating recent (100 Myr old) star formation in the central part of the galaxy. We have performed an analysis of the structural parameters of Phoenix based on an ESO/SRC scanned plate, in order to search for differentiated component. The results were then used to obtain the color-magnitude diagrams for three different regions of Phoenix in order to study the variation of the properties of its stellar population. The young population located in the central component of Phoenix shows a clear asymmetry in its distribution, that could indicate a propagation of star formation across the central component. The HI cloud found at 6 arcmin Southwest by Young & Lo (1997) could have been involved in this process. We also find the presence of a substantial intermediate-age population in the central region of Phoenix that would be less abundant or absent in its outer regions. This result is also consistent with the gradient found in the number of horizontal branch stars, whose frequency relative to red giant branch stars increases towards the outer part of the galaxy. These results, together with those of our morphological study, suggest the existence of an old, metal-poor population with a spheroidal distribution surrounding the younger inner component of Phoenix. This two-component structure may resemble the halo-disk structure observed in spirals, although more data, in particular on kinematics, are necessary to confirm this.Comment: 46 pages, 21 figures, 9 Tables, to be published in AJ, August 9

Minkowski-type and Alexandrov-type theorems for polyhedral herissons

Classical H.Minkowski theorems on existence and uniqueness of convex polyhedra with prescribed directions and areas of faces as well as the well-known generalization of H.Minkowski uniqueness theorem due to A.D.Alexandrov are extended to a class of nonconvex polyhedra which are called polyhedral herissons and may be described as polyhedra with injective spherical image.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, LaTeX 2.0

Constraints on the braneworld from compact stars

According to the braneworld idea, ordinary matter is confined on a 3-dimensional space (brane) that is embedded in a higher-dimensional space-time where gravity propagates. In this work, after reviewing the limits coming from general relativity, finiteness of pressure and causality on the brane, we derive observational constraints on the braneworld parameters from the existence of stable compact stars. The analysis is carried out by solving numerically the brane-modified Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations, using different representative equations of state to describe matter in the star interior. The cases of normal dense matter, pure quark matter and hybrid matter are considered.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables; new EoS considered, references and comments adde

Cohomological Finiteness Conditions in Bredon Cohomology

We show that any soluble group $G$ of type Bredon-\FP_{\infty} with respect to the family of all virtually cyclic subgroups such that centralizers of infinite order elements are of type \FP_{\infty} must be virtually cyclic. To prove this, we first reduce the problem to the case of polycyclic groups and then we show that a polycyclic-by-finite group with finitely many conjugacy classes of maximal virtually cyclic subgroups is virtually cyclic. Finally we discuss refinements of this result: we only impose the property Bredon-\FP_n for some $n \leq 3$ and restrict to abelian-by-nilpotent, abelian-by-polycyclic or (nilpotent of class 2)-by-abelian groups.Comment: Corrected a mistake in Lemma 2.4 of the previous version, which had an effect on the results in Section 5 (the condition that all centralisers of infinite order elements are of type $FP_\infty$ was added