William Shakespeare as a Purveyor of Re-Productions: Understanding Shakespeare’s Plays as Profitable Products

This project, “Recasting William Shakespeare in The Business of Playwriting,” works to reinvigorate the value gained by reading Shakespeare by: Beginning with espousing the importance of reading Shakespeare as a practical businessman first, instead of the mythological literary genius that men decades and now centuries after Shakespeare marketed and herald him as. Although this is not the primary focus of this paper, it is an important framework that begins to enable us to shift our presumptions of the canonical text, Romeo and Juliet . The next section sets the backdrop, i.e. the environment, in which Shakespeare used an emerging profession to recreate literature and runs through the “ancestry” of the star-crossed lovers archetype. Finally, the main section of this project identifies and explicates particular loci where Shakespeare transformed the original text in order to target and appeal to the audience of the times; in particular to Romeo & Juliet , this includes that of the creation of suspense, tragedy in relation to comedy, and an interrogation of love at first sight. This project concludes with a quick review of other proof of audience recognition within Shakespeare’s corpus that can lead to further investigations and close readings of other texts, Shakespearean or not, for financial motivations. All of which will help readers of Shakespeare come away with a greater business appreciation of his work and possibly force readers to think about the economic constraints and incentives shaping literature

Optimal Finite-Length and Asymptotic Index Codes for Five or Fewer Receivers

Index coding models broadcast networks in which a sender sends different messages to different receivers simultaneously, where each receiver may know some of the messages a priori. The aim is to find the minimum (normalised) index codelength that the sender sends. This paper considers unicast index coding, where each receiver requests exactly one message, and each message is requested by exactly one receiver. Each unicast index-coding instances can be fully described by a directed graph and vice versa, where each vertex corresponds to one receiver. For any directed graph representing a unicast index-coding instance, we show that if a maximum acyclic induced subgraph (MAIS) is obtained by removing two or fewer vertices from the graph, then the minimum index codelength equals the number of vertices in the MAIS, and linear codes are optimal for the corresponding index-coding instance. Using this result, we solved all unicast index-coding instances with up to five receivers, which correspond to all graphs with up to five vertices. For 9819 non-isomorphic graphs among all graphs up to five vertices, we obtained the minimum index codelength for all message alphabet sizes; for the remaining 28 graphs, we obtained the minimum index codelength if the message alphabet size is $k^2$ for any positive integer $k$. This work complements the result by Arbabjolfaei et al. (ISIT 2013), who solved all unicast index-coding instances with up to five receivers in the asymptotic regime, where the message alphabet size tends to infinity.Comment: Author final manuscrip

Acaricide resistance and genetic affinities of some selected populations of Tetranychus urticae Koch in New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science (Horticultural) in Entomology at Massey University

A study of resistance to acaricides in a number of populations of the two-spotted spider mite, Tetranychus urticae, in New Zealand had been carried out. Natural genetic and cytoplasmic incompatibilities between populations were also investigated with a view to possible biological control of the pest. Facets of acaricide resistance that were studied included multi-resistance, cross-resistance, negatively correlated resistance and the inheritance of resistance. Chemicals used included an organophosphate representative (parathion-methyl), a carbamate (formetanate), an ungrouped compound (tricyclohexyltin hydroxide) and an organochlorine (dicofol). Cross-resistance was demonstrated between parathion-methyl and formetanate in five populations obtained from widely separate areas of New Zealand. The resistance to parathion of three strains was found to be inherited as a single dominant character and transmissible by both sexes. Cytoplasmic factors (or nucleo-cytoplasmic interactions) and minor genes were found to contribute slightly to the expression of total resistance. No resistance to tricyclohexyltin hydroxide (Plictran) and dicofol (Kelthane) was detected. High degrees of incompatibility (haploid egg lethality) were observed in the hybrids of crosses between the various populations. Chromosomal rearrangements in balanced, heterozygous conditions, in conjunction with the cytoplasm, were considered to be important factors determining the interpopulational sterilities. The interpopulational incompatibility phenomenon was found to be multi-factorial and not associated with the resistance factor. The egg mortalities of some backcross series which remained constantly high in spite of several crossings, implicated that the introduction of normal males to a resistant mite population in an enclosed area (e.g. in a glasshouse) might be a worthwhile proposition in the integrated control of spider mites. Backcross hybrids, on allowing to multiply randomly, were capable of forming new gene combinations, leading consequently to the formation of new strains which were genetically different from the original parents used in the backcross series

Seismic performance analysis of Kuala Lumpur air traffic control tower by friction damper

In structural earthquake engineering, different kinds of energy absorption devices were invented during last 30 years (Guan et al, 2004). And more than one-decade research has shown that, on account of the virtue of no power requirement, rapid response and coulomb friction principle of friction damper is one of best of them. It is used as plating friction for energy dissipation systems to reduce earthquake effect on structures. With laminated steel plates and bolt, the friction damper can provide high diagonal stiffness and flexibility in horizontal direction to ensure the mounting forces can be supported by the stresses induced on the structure and prevent excessive sideways from any horizontal loading especially when earthquake occur. This research is to study the performance of Air Traffic Control Tower of Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA Control Tower) under low intensity earthquake effect of induced earthquake acceleration of 0.19g. The finite element modelling technique is used in this study to learn the behaviour of friction damper and vulnerability of loading from vertical and horizontal directions with the proposed application. Performances of the friction damper were examined based on their percentile capacity passing and inter-storey drift displacement, consisting of Beam Models and Shell Models with and without friction damper. Friction damper is designed within the lift-core and it is found that the usage of designed retrofitted friction damper increases the overall performance of the KLIA Control Tower. In general, this study indicates that the seismic risks should be considered in designing the tower for Malaysia construction and the application of the seismic retrofitting to this existing building is much needed to safeguard structure from external peak ground acceleration intensity. Therefore, it is discovered from the final analysis the friction damper is able to stiffen the structure from seismic loading in term of deformation and axial force from the intensity of 019g, 0.29g and 0.39g

A modified flower pollination algorithm and carnivorous plant algorithm for solving engineering optimization problem

Optimization in an essential element in mechanical engineering and has never been an easy task. Hence, using an effective optimiser to solve these problems with high complexity is important. In this study, two metaheuristic algorithms, namely, modified flower pollination algorithm (MFPA) and carnivorous plant algorithm (CPA), were proposed. Flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is a biomimicry optimisation algorithm inspired by natural pollination. Although FPA has shown better convergence than particle swarm optimisation and genetic algorithm in the pioneering study, improving the convergence characteristic of FPA still needs more work. To speed up the convergence, modifications of: (i) employing chaos theory in the initialisation of initial population to enhance the diversity of the initial population in the search space, (ii) replacing FPA’s local search strategy with frog leaping algorithm to improve intensification, and (iii) integrating inertia weight into FPA’s global search strategy to adjust the searching ability of the global strategy, were presented. CPA, on the other hand, was developed based on the inspiration from how carnivorous plants adapt to survive in harsh environments. Both MFPA and CPA were first evaluated using twenty-five well-known benchmark functions with different characteristics and seven Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2017 test functions. Their convergence characteristic and computational efficiency were analysed and compared with eight widely used metaheuristic algorithms, with the superiority validated using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The applicability of MFPA and CPA were further examined on eighteen mechanical engineering design problems and two challenging real-world applications of controlling the orientation of a five-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm and moving-object tracking in a complicated environment. For the optimisation of classical benchmark functions, CPA was ranked first. It also obtained the first rank in CEC04 and CEC07 modern test functions. Both CPA and MFPA showed promising results on the mechanical engineering design problems. CPA improved over the particle swarm optimisation algorithm in terms of the best fitness value by 69.40-95.99% in the optimisation of the robotic arm. Meanwhile, MFPA demonstrated a better tracking performance in the considered case studies by at least 52.99% better fitness function evaluation and fewer number of function evaluations as compared with the competitors