A Family Plot

This essay begins with an account of the circumstances which led to my parents owning a Colin and Anne McCahon children’s painting. Then it expands upon certain biographical questions raised (or not raised) in my 2011 book Dark Night: Walking with McCahon. I describe the work I did in 2018 with Finn McCahon-Jones, Colin’s grandson, on the Visitor Narrative for the McCahon House Trust; and conclude with some thoughts upon the limitations of biography as a genre. Implicit in the discussion is a comparison, hopefully unforced, between my own family and that of the McCahons

Pareto Optimality and Strategy Proofness in Group Argument Evaluation (Extended Version)

An inconsistent knowledge base can be abstracted as a set of arguments and a defeat relation among them. There can be more than one consistent way to evaluate such an argumentation graph. Collective argument evaluation is the problem of aggregating the opinions of multiple agents on how a given set of arguments should be evaluated. It is crucial not only to ensure that the outcome is logically consistent, but also satisfies measures of social optimality and immunity to strategic manipulation. This is because agents have their individual preferences about what the outcome ought to be. In the current paper, we analyze three previously introduced argument-based aggregation operators with respect to Pareto optimality and strategy proofness under different general classes of agent preferences. We highlight fundamental trade-offs between strategic manipulability and social optimality on one hand, and classical logical criteria on the other. Our results motivate further investigation into the relationship between social choice and argumentation theory. The results are also relevant for choosing an appropriate aggregation operator given the criteria that are considered more important, as well as the nature of agents' preferences

On Tasman Shores - Guy & Joe Lynch in Australasia

The Tasman Sea, precisely defined by oceanographers, remains inchoate as a cultural area. It has, as it were, drifted in and out of consciousness over the two and a half centuries of European presence here; and remains an almost unknown quantity to prehistory. Its peak contact period was probably the sixty odd years between the discovery of gold in Victoria and the outbreak of the Great War; when the West Coasts of both New Zealand’s main islands, and the South East Coast of Australia, were twin shores of a land that shared an economy, a politics, a literature and a popular culture: much of which is reflected in the pages of The Bulletin from 1880s until 1914. There was, too, a kind of hangover of the pre-war era and of the ANZAC experience into the 1920s; but after that the notional country sank again beneath the waves. This paper attempts recovery of fragments of that lost zone from a prospective standpoint: beginning the restoration of a Weltanschauung which, while often occluded, has never really gone away. It will be undertaken by focussing upon the story of the Melbourne born Lynch brothers and their cohort: Guy and Joe Lynch, George Finey, Cecil ‘Unk’ White and Noel Cook, all of whom migrated from Auckland to Sydney after World War One and worked in the 1920s  as artists, caricaturists and cartoonists on various newspapers and magazines. Joe was sculpted twice in stone by elder brother Guy; as a soldier standing on a plinth in the war memorial at Devonport, Auckland; and, controversially, as a faun in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens. Joe Lynch fell, or jumped, from a ferry one night and drowned in Sydney harbour; and thereby became the inspiration for Kenneth Slessor’s great elegy, Five Bells

The Village

This essay explores some of the lesser-known points of connection between the art worlds of Australia and New Zealand from the early to the mid-twentieth century

A study of computer-based techniques for multi-dimensional evaluation in urban planning.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. Thesis. 1972. M.C.P.Bibliography: leaves 175-177.M.C.P

Ultra-high energy neutrino scattering

Estimates are made of the ultra-high energy neutrino cross sections based on an extrapolation to very small Bjorken x of the logarithmic Froissart dependence in x shown previously to provide an excellent fit to the measured proton structure function F_2^p(x,Q^2) over a broad range of the virtuality Q^2. Expressions are obtained for both the neutral current and the charged current cross sections. Comparison with an extrapolation based on perturbative QCD shows good agreement for energies where both fit data, but our rates are as much as a factor of 10 smaller for neutrino energies above 10^9 GeV, with important implications for experiments searching for extra-galactic neutrinos.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, 1 table; Title, abstract and text changed, conclusions unchanged. Version accepted for publication in Physical Review

Tele-expertise assessment of chronic wounds by advanced practice dermatology nurses

BackgroundThe prevalence of chronic wounds continues to increase with the lengthening of life expectancy. The decreasing medical demography exacerbates a delay in care.ObjectiveThis study investigated the feasibility of evaluating chronic wounds through tele-expertise (TLE) by an advanced nurse practitioner (ANP) in dermatology.Methods We conducted a single-centre, observational study from November 2020 to May 2021. The main objective was to assess the ability of an Advanced Nurse Practitioner (ANP) to manage the orientation of care (medical or nursing) for requests for specialised advice on the treatment of chronic wounds through tele-expertise (TLE). The relevance of the advice provided by the ANP was evaluated by a dermatologist (D1). Simultaneously, a second dermatologist (D2) blindly determined what would have been the most appropriate care for the situation. His decisions were compared to those of the ANP using a Chi-2 test.ResultsOut of the 55 requests for teleconsultation to treat chronic wounds, the ANP considered that 43 (78.1%) cases required medical advice, while 12 (21.8%) could be managed within the scope of their expertise. D1 confirmed 72% of the ANP's decisions regarding cases deemed medical and 75% of cases deemed nursing by the ANP. Compared to the ANP's recommendations, D2 considered that 14 (25.5%) cases could be handled solely by the ANP, and 41 (74.5%) cases required a physician's intervention.ConclusionIn teleconsultations for chronic wounds, a dermatologist confirms the orientation and care decisions made by a specialised ANP in approximately 75% of cases. This high level of agreement positions the ANP as a reliable partner in the wound care pathway in dermatology.<br/

Experimental Assessment of Aggregation Principles in Argumentation-Enabled Collective Intelligence

On the Web, there is always a need to aggregate opinions from the crowd (as in posts, social networks, forums, etc.). Different mechanisms have been implemented to capture these opinions such as Like in Facebook, Favorite in Twitter, thumbs-up/-down, flagging, and so on. However, in more contested domains (e.g., Wikipedia, political discussion, and climate change discussion), these mechanisms are not sufficient, since they only deal with each issue independently without considering the relationships between different claims. We can view a set of conflicting arguments as a graph in which the nodes represent arguments and the arcs between these nodes represent the defeat relation. A group of people can then collectively evaluate such graphs. To do this, the group must use a rule to aggregate their individual opinions about the entire argument graph. Here we present the first experimental evaluation of different principles commonly employed by aggregation rules presented in the literature. We use randomized controlled experiments to investigate which principles people consider better at aggregating opinions under different conditions. Our analysis reveals a number of factors, not captured by traditional formal models, that play an important role in determining the efficacy of aggregation. These results help bring formal models of argumentation closer to real-world application