Organisational learning and food safety crises : a critical case study of the Sanlu and Fonterra crises : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Massey University, New Zealand

This study explores crisis-induced organisational learning in the Chinese and the New Zealand food safety authorities, or CFSA and NZFSA. While many crisis management scholars have sought to examine food safety crises, including the 2008 Sanlu melamine infant formula scandal and the 2013 Fonterra botulism scare, from the perspective of business organisations, food safety government agencies’ role in handling such crises, especially crisis-induced learning in the food safety authorities to prevent or better prepare for future crises, has been neglected. This thesis seeks to address this research gap by examining the two food safety crises under the lens of crisis-induced organisational learning to investigate changes in CFSA and NZFSA triggered by the biggest-ever food safety crises happened in China and New Zealand. Qualitative content analysis approach is employed to analyse the data corpus consisting of news articles and government documents recording the dairy food safety incidents and their socio-economic and political contexts and ensuing policy changes. A comparison between the two cases offers a deep understanding of the dairy food safety landscapes in the two countries and approaches employed by the government agencies in handling the dairy food safety crises. It also provides insights into dynamics of internal and external factors facilitating or inhibiting crisis-induced organisational learning in the two dairy food safety authorities. Though the two crises in this research have different socio-economic and political roots, they both caused unprecedented reputational damage not only to the dairy industries but to the whole food sectors in China and New Zealand. This research identifies multiple loopholes and underlying problems in the two dairy food safety regulatory systems leading to the incidents in question. It also finds systemic changes in the food safety authorities and the dairy food safety regulatory systems to address the loopholes. Political pressure and social emotion provoked by the dairy product crises are found to be the main factors facilitating learning in the public organisations. Conflict of interest incorporated into the dairy food safety system is seen as a key factor inhibiting deep learning in the two food safety authorities. This study therefore argues double-loop learning needs to happen in CFSA and NZFSA to uproot the underlying problem that led to lax regulation and other dairy food safety regulatory problems

Recognition of Man-made Objects from Range Data

The subject of this thesis is object recognition from range data. Being developed for applications of machine vision in engineering tasks, the discussion of this subject is restricted to the class of man-made objects where object surfaces can be modelled with quadric primitives. The study aims at developing optimal representation and recognition of the objects from range data

New compounds of natural resources in 2008

Natural products have been the most productive source of new compounds. Hundreds of new compounds are in development. Some of them have pharmaceutical activities, particularly as anticancer and anti-infective agents. Until October, there are 1913 new compounds separated from natural sources in 2008. The compounds have covered a wide range of species, including alkaloids, flavones, terpenoids and so on. It is hoped that more efficient and effective compounds of natural resources wil

Verification for Different Contrail Parameterizations Based on Integrated Satellite Observation and ECMWF Reanalysis Data

Aviation induced cloud termed contrail plays a more and more important role in the climate change, which makes a significant contribution to anthropogenic climate forcing through impacting the coverage of cirrus in the intersection of troposphere and stratosphere. In this paper, we propose one novel automatic contrail detecting method based on Himawari-8 stationary satellite imagery and two kinds of potential contrail coverage (PCC1 and PCC2) from contrail parameterization in ECHAM4 and HadGEM2. In addition, we propose one new climatological index called contrail occurrence and persistence (COP). According to the algorithm identification (AI) and artificial visual inspection (AVI), COP measured from Himawari-8 stationary satellite imagery is related to upper tropospheric relative humidity over ice (RHI) computed with the ECMWF reanalysis data by simple linear regression. Similarly, we compared the linear correlation between COP and PCCs fractions and found that PCC1 has better correspondence with COP than PCC2

Observation of Ultrahigh Mobility Surface States in a Topological Crystalline Insulator by Infrared Spectroscopy

Topological crystalline insulators (TCIs) possess metallic surface states protected by crystalline symmetry, which are a versatile platform for exploring topological phenomena and potential applications. However, progress in this field has been hindered by the challenge to probe optical and transport properties of the surface states owing to the presence of bulk carriers. Here we report infrared (IR) reflectance measurements of a TCI, (001) oriented $Pb_{1-x}Sn_{x}Se$ in zero and high magnetic fields. We demonstrate that the far-IR conductivity is unexpectedly dominated by the surface states as a result of their unique band structure and the consequent small IR penetration depth. Moreover, our experiments yield a surface mobility of 40000 $cm^{2}/(Vs)$, which is one of the highest reported values in topological materials, suggesting the viability of surface-dominated conduction in thin TCI crystals. These findings pave the way for exploring many exotic transport and optical phenomena and applications predicted for TCIs