Taking creative license: It's not an easy thing meeting your maker

Creators do not just 'create' or 'act' -- they are privileged agents, points of origin, sources of innovation and transformation. Within religious systems, creators can exist in an extra-discursive real beyond nature and culture, functioning as the origin of the word and being. They can be supernatural, existing outside nature to influence earthly events via strange powers. They can also be 'supra' natural -- above nature -- capable of acts that both break and establish laws to which the created are subject. Yet, these types of creators only seem to exist through the cultural economies which allow their representation. Their roles and personas can differ with the production, combination and utilisation of selected characterisations: in other words, creators are created

Reprints, international markets and local literary taste: New empiricism and Australian literature

Taking a cue from Franco Moretti's research, my article applies statistical methods to probe the history of publishing Australian novels both locally and internationally. By temporarily suspending our discipline's preoccupation with close readings and canonical judgements, I aim to demonstrate how the computational analysis of large-scale publication data about Australian novels can also provoke alternative kinds of, and responses to, Australian literary history

Stochastic Volatility Filtering with Intractable Likelihoods

This paper is concerned with particle filtering for $\alpha$-stable stochastic volatility models. The $\alpha$-stable distribution provides a flexible framework for modeling asymmetry and heavy tails, which is useful when modeling financial returns. An issue with this distributional assumption is the lack of a closed form for the probability density function. To estimate the volatility of financial returns in this setting, we develop a novel auxiliary particle filter. The algorithm we develop can be easily applied to any hidden Markov model for which the likelihood function is intractable or computationally expensive. The approximate target distribution of our auxiliary filter is based on the idea of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). ABC methods allow for inference on posterior quantities in situations when the likelihood of the underlying model is not available in closed form, but simulating samples from it is possible. The ABC auxiliary particle filter (ABC-APF) that we propose provides not only a good alternative to state estimation in stochastic volatility models, but it also improves on the existing ABC literature. It allows for more flexibility in state estimation while improving on the accuracy through better proposal distributions in cases when the optimal importance density of the filter is unavailable in closed form. We assess the performance of the ABC-APF on a simulated dataset from the $\alpha$-stable stochastic volatility model and compare it to other currently existing ABC filters

A study of the use of vibration and stress wave sensing for the detection of bearing failure

Results from an experimental study of vibrations and stress waves emitted from ball bearings are presented. Fatique tests were run with both high quality bearings and man faulted bearings, all of one size. Tests were instrumented with different sensors to detect the noises from 10 Hz to 1 MHz. Frequency spectrum plots are presented. The modulation characteristics of the ultrasonic noises were analyzed, and acoustic emission type measurements were conducted. Results are presented which show that there are usable acoustic signal levels even beyond 500 KHz. These signal levels are modulated by a low frequency carrier which is a function of the stress loading and acoustic transmissibility. The results were correlated to fault size in the bearings. The correlation shows that the sensor used for signals from 100 KHz to 1 MHz gave the best sensitivity and detected the generation of very small spalls or pits

Exploratory Research into the Resilience of Farming Systems during Periods of Hardship

This paper investigates the management strategies and responses used by New Zealand sheep and beef farmers to ensure resilience during periods of hardship. Using two, farm level surveys conducted in 1986 and 2010, some aspects of resilient farming systems were identified. Despite apparent hardship current farmers seemed more willing to take risks, with many more borrowing to invest in on farm developments than those in 1986. The main similarity between time periods was the greatest response to economic changes being the adoption of a low input policy. This result was quite significant, as conventional farmers are generally believed to resort to other strategies or responses.Resilience, New Zealand, indicators, sustainable agriculture, strategies, Agribusiness, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Production Economics,

Skilled delivery care in Indonesia

id21 is hosted by IDS and is supported by the Department for International development

GPU-based Image Analysis on Mobile Devices

With the rapid advances in mobile technology many mobile devices are capable of capturing high quality images and video with their embedded camera. This paper investigates techniques for real-time processing of the resulting images, particularly on-device utilizing a graphical processing unit. Issues and limitations of image processing on mobile devices are discussed, and the performance of graphical processing units on a range of devices measured through a programmable shader implementation of Canny edge detection.Comment: Proceedings of Image and Vision Computing New Zealand 201

What can art teachers do to promote the benefits of studying art and design?

The aim of this research was to discover what teachers could do to promote the benefits of studying Art and Design (A&D) at GCSE, as the EBacc's (English Baccalaureate) recent introduction has narrowed down GCSE options. Research was carried out with the hypothesis that students would neglect A&Dat GCSE due to a limited understanding of the career prospects or transferable skills that A&D education promotes. Research included the stigmatisation of A&D education, the attitudes of students towards the subject and how the EBacc might potentially impact the number of students opting for creative GCSEs. A poster that communicated these benefits was produced in response to data. The poster, which could be displayed in A&D classrooms, was trialled with a focus group and a class of Year 9 students. The Year 9 students were asked to write what they felt were the benefits of studying A&D both before and after viewing the poster. The poster was found to have an 83.33% success rate

Adaptation and Resilience in Vanuatu

The report documents findings from fieldwork in Vanuatu undertaken during November 2014. The intention is to contextualise the resilience building work of the Vanuatu NGO Climate Change Adaptation Program within themes that have emerged within the academic literature on climate change adaptation and resilience, and on community-based adaptation in particular. These themes challenge those concerned with adaptation to think more critically about the nature of communities, and to explore how power and politics at different scales (from the local to the global) influence the opportunities for and constraints on adaptation for different members of a community. The resilience perspective pushes understanding of adaptation further, inviting systematic consideration of how programming can address not only climate change impacts, but also how agency and structure can be addressed to empower vulnerable groups in the face of climate change. The findings draw attention to how vulnerability is defined by multiple interconnected issues that have different significance in the lives of different community members, each of whom have their own perceptions of risk and access to opportunities. While relationships defined by power and cultural norms shape how local risks are understood, prioritised and managed in adaptation decision making processes, a focus on equitable decision making can support the emergence of adaptive capacity that is the basis for future adaptive actions that benefit the whole community. Adaptive capacity also demands opportunities for local people to build their technical and decision making capacities and relationships with external actors. While this is increasingly understood by the agencies working within the Vanuatu NGO Climate Change Adaptation Program at the level of rhetoric, it remains for a deeper change in perspective to develop. It will take a significant investment of time if NGOs are to step back and restrict themselves to facilitating community access to information and knowledge as a precursor to informing their own processes of decision making. For the most part, structural issues, which fundamentally limit adaptation and development choices, remain in the background to the projects studied during the fieldwork. The baseline assessments that underpin community-based adaptation must take account of structural issues at multiple scales, and establish whether support for more equitable social, cultural or political change is a necessary part of action on adaptation. Taken together, this analysis supports the intention of the program to shift community-based adaptation away from its comfort zone. However, agencies will need to work hard to push beyond the familiar focus on climate change impacts and capacity building that supports individual agency, and towards actions that link agency and structure through support for broad-based coalitions for change. In support of this goal, rights-based strategies are proposed to address structural constraints on adaptive capacity. By exploring the mechanisms that underpin marginalisation and exclusion, rights-based approaches enable development actors to support vulnerable communities in seeking reform via social and political processes or through appeal to legal or administrative systems