How does widespread copyright violation, as facilitated by networked telecommunications, impact upon artistic practice and industry in New Zealand? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

The culture of artistic content creation is changing. Once upon a time cultural products, and the ability to dictate how they were used and consumed, could be easily controlled via virtue of the difficulty of working with analogue formats in regards to modification, mass duplication or sampling. The widespread adoption of digital technologies, and the Internet serving as a global vector of seemingly endless information exchange, has rendered these hindrances to content duplication, distribution, and manipulation irrelevant in the wake of a globally distributed network of techno-cosmopolitan media content consumers. With the widespread normalisation of illegal online file-sharing, consumers of entertainment can essentially source anything they desire at a non-existent cost, whilst simultaneously excluding themselves from traditional economic channels of distribution. This research, partially presented as a documentary, investigates the opinions of artists (photographers, filmmakers, and musicians) working and living in New Zealand regarding the prevalence and impact of online copyright infringement. How has this new digital ecosphere impacted their work/practice as an artist and the industry generally? Is the fact that content gains far greater proliferation via these networks an advantage to media creators? Or does the reduction in scarcity and/or effort to obtain said art remove much of the associated value and thus the need to pay? A consumer can steal art considerably more easily now, but an artist can also source material for inspiration or reappropriation in ways largely unavailable in the past. In what ways (and with how much success) have content creators adapted to this new paradigm? How do these viewpoints correlate with variables such as medium, time spend in the industry and level of professional/economic involvement? And, indeed, how should both the creators, and the consumers, of media content think about art in a new world where it can be digitised so easily

Goldstone solar system radar

Caltech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) radar astronomers made use of the Very Large Array (VLA) at Socorro, NM, during February 1990, to receive radio echoes from the planet Venus. The transmitter was the 70 meter antenna at the Goldstone complex northwest of Barstow, CA. These observations contain new information about the roughness of Venus at cm to decimeter scales and are complementary to information being obtained by the Magellan spacecraft. Asteroid observations are also discussed

Radar observations of the inner solar system

Concurrent objectives involve dynamical information: maintenance of Mars ephemeris accuracy, Mercury closure-point ranging for relativity theory testing, and refinement of spin-vector estimates for Venus and Mercury. This task has been renamed to reflect accurately the research it supports. The backlog of unprocessed Venus data has been sharply reduced; most images from the 1980 to 1982 conjunctions, and half of those from 1986, are essentially finished. Suitably formatted data have been distributed to (non-JPL) scientific collaborators for geologic analysis, and to the Magellan project

Goldstone solar system radar

This task provides for the planning, experiment design, and coordination of the data acquisition and engineering activities in support of all Goldstone planetary radar astronomy. Activities related to up-grades of the receiver systems, transmitter systems, and data processing support systems are currently intense. Also, the hardware and software maintenance of the data processing facility used by many of the Goldstone Solar System Radar investigators are covered

High temperature electronics applications in space exploration

The extension of the range of operating temperatures of electronic components and systems for planetary exploration is examined. In particular, missions which utilize balloon-borne instruments to study the Venusian and Jovian atmospheres are discussed. Semiconductor development and devices including power sources, ultrastable oscillators, transmitters, antennas, electromechanical devices, and deployment systems are addressed

Goldstone solar system radar signal processing

A performance analysis of the planetary radar data acquisition system is presented. These results extend previous computer simulation analysis and are facilitated by the development of a simple analytical model that predicts radar system performance over a wide range of operational parameters. The results of this study are useful to both the radar system designer and the science investigator in establishing operational radar data acquisition parameters which result in the best systems performance for a given set of input conditions

DSN observations of Titan

When using Deep Space Station (DSS)-14 in a monostatic configuration, radar observations of Titan show that Titan is a diffuse reflector with a relative radar cross section of 0.14 +/- 0.03. No hot spots were observed

Smart, Responsible, and Upper Caste Only: Measuring Caste Attitudes through Large-Scale Analysis of Matrimonial Profiles

Discriminatory caste attitudes currently stigmatize millions of Indians, subjecting individuals to prejudice in all aspects of life. Governmental incentives and societal movements have attempted to counter these attitudes, yet accurate measurements of public opinions on caste are not yet available for understanding whether progress is being made. Here, we introduce a novel approach to measure public attitudes of caste through an indicator variable: openness to intercaste marriage. Using a massive dataset of over 313K profiles from a major Indian matrimonial site, we precisely quantify public attitudes, along with differences between generations and between Indian residents and diaspora. We show that younger generations are more open to intercaste marriage, yet attitudes are based on a complex function of social status beyond their own caste. In examining the desired qualities in a spouse, we find that individuals open to intercaste marriage are more individualistic in the qualities they desire, rather than favoring family-related qualities, which mirrors larger societal trends away from collectivism. Finally, we show that attitudes in diaspora are significantly less open, suggesting a bi-cultural model of integration. Our research provides the first empirical evidence identifying how various intersections of identity shape attitudes toward intercaste marriage in India and among the Indian diaspora in the US.Comment: 12 pages; Accepted to be published at ICWSM'1

Geotagging One Hundred Million Twitter Accounts with Total Variation Minimization

Geographically annotated social media is extremely valuable for modern information retrieval. However, when researchers can only access publicly-visible data, one quickly finds that social media users rarely publish location information. In this work, we provide a method which can geolocate the overwhelming majority of active Twitter users, independent of their location sharing preferences, using only publicly-visible Twitter data. Our method infers an unknown user's location by examining their friend's locations. We frame the geotagging problem as an optimization over a social network with a total variation-based objective and provide a scalable and distributed algorithm for its solution. Furthermore, we show how a robust estimate of the geographic dispersion of each user's ego network can be used as a per-user accuracy measure which is effective at removing outlying errors. Leave-many-out evaluation shows that our method is able to infer location for 101,846,236 Twitter users at a median error of 6.38 km, allowing us to geotag over 80\% of public tweets.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, accepted to IEEE BigData 2014, Compton, Ryan, David Jurgens, and David Allen. "Geotagging one hundred million twitter accounts with total variation minimization." Big Data (Big Data), 2014 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 201

A proposed technique for the Venus balloon telemetry and Doppler frequency recovery

A technique is proposed to accurately estimate the Doppler frequency and demodulate the digitally encoded telemetry signal that contains the measurements from balloon instruments. Since the data are prerecorded, one can take advantage of noncausal estimators that are both simpler and more computationally efficient than the usual closed-loop or real-time estimators for signal detection and carrier tracking. Algorithms for carrier frequency estimation subcarrier demodulation, bit and frame synchronization are described. A Viterbi decoder algorithm using a branch indexing technique has been devised to decode constraint length 6, rate 1/2 convolutional code that is being used by the balloon transmitter. These algorithms are memory efficient and can be implemented on microcomputer systems