The 'Spirit of the Hills': Mountaineering in Northwest Otago, New Zealand, 1882-1940.

A defined geographical region and time period is used to examine the growing popularity of mountaineering in relation to its social and cultural context. The study draws on oral histories, diaries, autobiographies, articles and archival material from mountaineers, and blends them with insights from geography, sociology, art history, literary criticism and cultural history. The findings of the study demonstrate that early mountaineering in New Zealand reflected the legacy of Victorian values in relation to the landscape, in combination with a 'pioneering' spirit and a growing sense of a distinctive colonial character. The First World War marked a watershed, followed by an inter-war 'boom' in mountaineering. This growing enthusiasm can be interpreted as a reaction against the dislocation and devastation of the war and the growing rationalization of modern society. It was also part of the development of a sense of belonging to the landscape, and an exploration of what it meant to be a New Zealander. The study concludes that mountaineering is expressive of a relationship between people and landscapes, and that within this context, its historical development reflects wider social and cultural forces

Qualitative Research and Making Meaning of Adventure: a Case Study of Boys' Experiences of Outdoor Education at School

This article details the process and analysis of a case study, conducted over a six-week period, involving an outdoor education class in an all-boys Catholic, New Zealand secondary school. The questions explored by the case study were the subjective meanings of adventure experiences in outdoor education and the benefits of qualitative research for assessing the value of outdoor education. The methodological techniques used were observation, involving some researcher participation, and in-depth interviewing. Subsequent data analysis was based upon theories of experiential education and adventure education, and concepts of leisure and human agency. The results of the study suggest that the meanings participants make of their experiences, and the value they derive from them, exceed those that may conventionally be sought and measured as an improvement in self-concept. These findings suggest that learning through adventure is potentially valuable as a holistic and life-long form of activity that enhances the capacity to enjoy and engage in living. This is an important extension beyond its often limited and compartmentalised applications, which are rationalised by specific outcome based objectives. A qualitative methodology was indispensable to an inquiry of this kind and warrants further attention in the process of understanding the meanings of adventure and learning

Seeing differently

Mountains are central to how New Zealanders see themselves as a nation and the image that they project to the world. At the same time, Māori have been engaged in a long-running campaign seeking acknowledgement of the mana of their maunga, the return of their tūpuna names and new partnership models for conservation management. This article explores elements of the past that have made this struggle necessary, in particular the role of mountain imagery created by Pākehā during the nineteenth century, when Aotearoa’s mountains were used to construct a vision of a ‘new’ country in the minds of those ‘at home’. Colonists represented the mountains as untrodden and uninhabited, and set about renaming and mapping them. By the 1870s, the appropriation of mountains as a cultural landscape for tourism saw a proliferation of images that promoted European ways of seeing mountains, while Māori relationships to their maunga were often framed as quaint or romantic myths and legends. Tracing this history helps to better understand the  present need for cultural resress and highlights the need for public history that better acknowledges and communicates colonial constructions of mountains and their legacy. &nbsp

Oil: Its Time Allocation and Project Independence

macroeconomics, oil

Supersymmetry and Localization in the Quantum Hall Effect

We study the localization transition in the integer quantum Hall effect as described by the network model of quantum percolation. Starting from a path integral representation of transport Green's functions for the network model, which employs both complex (bosonic) and Grassman (fermionic) fields, we map the problem of localization to the problem of diagonalizing a one-dimensional non-Hermitian Hamiltonian of interacting bosons and fermions. An exact solution is obtained in a restricted subspace of the Hilbert space which preserves boson-fermion supersymmetry. The physically relevant regime is investigated using the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method, and critical behavior is found at the plateau transition.Comment: 14 RevTex pages, 3 eps figures; This revised version contains an extended disussion of supersymmetry and improved numerical result

Efficient computation of matched solutions of the Kapchinskij-Vladimirskij envelope equations for periodic focusing lattices

A new iterative method is developed to numerically calculate the periodic, matched beam envelope solution of the coupled Kapchinskij-Vladimirskij (KV) equations describing the transverse evolution of a beam in a periodic, linear focusing lattice of arbitrary complexity. Implementation of the method is straightforward. It is highly convergent and can be applied to all usual parameterizations of the matched envelope solutions. The method is applicable to all classes of linear focusing lattices without skew couplings, and also applies to all physically achievable system parameters -- including where the matched beam envelope is strongly unstable. Example applications are presented for periodic solenoidal and quadrupole focusing lattices. Convergence properties are summarized over a wide range of system parameters.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, Mathematica source code provide

Search for New Physics in the Semileptonic D_{l4} Decays, D->K \pi l \nu

New physics effects through the direct CP violation and the decay rate change are investigated in the semileptonic $D_{l4}$ decays, $D^\pm\to K\pi l^\pm \nu$, by including a scalar-exchange interaction with a complex coupling. In the decay process, we included various excited states as intermediate states decaying to the final hadrons, $K+\pi$, and found that among the intermediate states only the lowest state ($K^*$) is dominant and the other higher excited states are negligible, contrary to the $B_{l4}$ decays. We also obtained constraints on the new complex coupling within the multi-Higgs doublet model and the scalar leptoquark models.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages, including 3 figure

Auger electron intensity variations in oxygen-exposed large grain polycrystalline silver

Auger electron spectroscopic studies of the grains in oxygen-charged polycrystal-line silver show significant intensity variations as a function of crystallographic orientation. These intensity variations were observed by studies of the Auger images and line scans of the different grains (randomly selected) for each silver transition energy. The results can be attributed to the diffraction of the ejected Auger electrons and interpreted by corresponding changes in the electron mean-free path for inelastic scattering and by oxygen atom accumulation in the subsurface. The subsurface (second layer) octahedral sites increased in size because of surface relaxation and serve as a stable reservoir for the dissolved oxygen

Charge and CP symmetry breaking in two Higgs doublet models

We show that, for the most generic model with two Higgs doublets possessing a minimum that preserves the $U(1)_{em}$ symmetry, charge breaking (CB) cannot occur. If CB does not occur, the potential could have two different minima, and there is in principle no general argument to show which one is the deepest. The depth of the potential at a stationary point that breaks CB or CP, relative to the $U(1)_{em}$ preserving minimum, is proportional to the squared mass of the charged or pseudoscalar Higgs, respectively