The computer comprehension of systematic metaphor

Digitisation of this thesis was sponsored by Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

Science, biodiversity and Australian management of marine ecosystems

The United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) (United Nations 1982) came into effect in 1994. Signatory nations have substantial management obligations for conservation of marine natural resource and ecosystems. In this paper we discuss the challenges of defining and monitoring biodiversity at scales required for management of marine ecosystems. Australia\u27s area of immediate responsibility under UNCLOS covers an area of 11 million sq km with further linked responsibilities for an estimated area of 5.1 million sq km of continental shelf. This presents substantial data challenges for development and implementation of management. Acoustic seabed mapping is providing substantial information on seabed surface geology and topography and provides a surrogate basis for describing benthic habitat and seabed communities that have critical roles in marine food chains. The development of the Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia (IMCRA 4.0, 2006) has provided a basis for planning marine biodiversity and resource management but the biological habitat interpretation of geological data is based very largely on demersal fish data. It is recognised in IMCRA 4.0 (2006) that revision and refinement of regionalisation requires further work in the areas of data coverage, ecosystem understanding and ecosystem surrogates and conceptual classification models. In this paper we discuss Australian experience highlighting problems and issues of relevance for scientifically based management of marine natural resource and ecosystems elsewhere in the world

In the Name of Profit: Canada’s Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Reserve as Economic Development and Colonial Placemaking

Taking a critical heritage approach to late modern naming and placemaking, we discuss how the power to name reflects the power to control people, their land, their past, and ultimately their future. Our case study is the Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Reserve (MABR), a recently invented place on Vancouver Island, located in southwestern British Columbia, Canada. Through analysis of representations and landscape, we explore MABR as state-sanctioned branding, where a dehumanized nature is packaged for and marketed to wealthy ecotourists. Greenwashed by a feel-good “sustainability” discourse, MABR constitutes colonial placemaking and economic development, representing no break with past practices

Symplectic embeddings of ellipsoids in dimension greater than four

We study symplectic embeddings of ellipsoids into balls. In the main construction, we show that a given embedding of 2m-dimensional ellipsoids can be suspended to embeddings of ellipsoids in any higher dimension. In dimension 6,s if the ratio of the areas of any two axes is sufficiently large then the ellipsoid is flexible in the sense that it fully fills a ball. We also show that the same property holds in all dimensions for sufficiently thin ellipsoids E(1,..., a). A consequence of our study is that in arbitrary dimension a ball can be fully filled by any sufficiently large number of identical smaller balls, thus generalizing a result of Biran valid in dimension 4.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

Community water plus: results from an investigation into community managed rural water supply in India

This paper reports on the outcomes from the ‘Community Water Plus’ (2013-2016) project that was designed to give donors, IFIs and low-income country governments the evidence base to determine and justify the ongoing resources needed to support community rural water services. The research demonstrated that significant recurrent financing from government and other sources subsidised the costs of services in successful community management programmes in India. The Gram Panchayat, the local-self government institution, also provided on-going support and carried out everyday operation, maintenance and administrative functions. The implications of the Indian experience are that successful rural water service delivery requires such significant on-going support, including funding and the delivery of key functions, that it is better to conceive of it as a form of coproduction between state and citizens, rather than community management, and governments should allocate resources accordingly

A systematic review of success factors in the community management of rural water supplies over the past 30 years

Community management is the accepted management model for rural water supplies in many low and middleincome countries. However, endemic problems in the sustainability and scalability of this model are leading many to conclude we have reached the limits of an approach that is too reliant on voluntarism and informality. Accepting this criticism but recognising that many cases of success have been reported over the past 30 years, this study systematically reviews and analyses the development pattern of 174 successful community management case studies. The synthesis confirms the premise that for community management to be sustained at scale, community institutions need a ‘plus’ that includes long-term external support, with the majority of high performing cases involving financial support, technical advice and managerial advice. Internal community characteristics were also found to be influential in terms of success, including collective initiative, strong leadership and institutional transparency. Through a meta-analysis of success in different regions, the paper also indicates an important finding on the direct relationship between success and the prevailing socio-economic wealth in a society. This holds implications for policy and programme design with a need to consider how broad structural conditions may dictate the relative success of different forms of community management

Displacing big data: How criminals cheat the system

Abstract: Many technical approaches for detecting and preventing cy-bercrime utilise big data and machine learning, drawing upon knowledgeabout the behaviour of legitimate customers and indicators of cyber-crime. These include fraud detection systems, behavioural analysis, spamdetection, intrusion detection systems, anti-virus software, and denial ofservice attack protection. However, criminals have adapted their meth-ods in response to big data systems. We present case studies for a numberof different cybercrime types to highlight the methods used for cheatingsuch systems. We argue that big data solutions are not a silver bulletapproach to disrupting cybercrime, but rather represent a Red Queen'srace, requiring constant running to stay in one spot

On Sylvia Bowerbank, Green Literary Scholar

To accompany the posthumous publication of Sylvia Bowerbank’s personal essay “Sitting in the Bush, Or Deliberate Idleness,” eight scholars introduce her ecocritical thought and practice to a new generation of ecocritics by reflecting on the ways Sylvia herself or her writing or teaching influenced them. Their tributes to this trailblazing ecocritic emphasize her passionate commitment to radical green change within the world, within the university, and within the self