Innovation and failure in mechatronics design education

Innovative engineering design always has associated with it the risk of failure, and it is the role of the design engineer to mitigate the possibilities of failure in the final system. Education should however provide a safe space for students to both innovate and to learn about and from failures. However, pressures on course designers and students can result in their adopting a conservative, and risk averse, approach to problem solving. The paper therefore considers the nature of both innovation and failure, and looks at how these might be effectively combined within mechatronics design education

Governing the regulators – applying experience

Emphsizing more effective law rather than more law, this paper provides a perpective from within government that argues for a better appreciation of what is required to ensure that regulation is effective in a New Zealand context. Using building controls, financial markets regulation and occupational health and safety as examples, this paper presents an analysis of the changes to the regulatory landscape, and in particular the role of regulators as a particular facet of regulatory design. • Gaye Searancke, Peter Mumford, Karl Simpson and Mark Steel are all members of the Labour and Commercial Environment Group in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment

Representations of the fundamental group of a surface in PU(p,q) and holomorphic triples

We count the connected components in the moduli space of PU(p,q)-representations of the fundamental group for a closed oriented surface. The components are labelled by pairs of integers which arise as topological invariants of the flat bundles associated to the representations. Our results show that for each allowed value of these invariants, which are bounded by a Milnor-Wood type inequality, there is a unique non-empty connected component. Interpreting the moduli space of representations as a moduli space of Higgs bundles, we take a Morse theoretic approach using a certain smooth proper function on the Higgs moduli space. A key step is the identification of the function's local minima as moduli spaces of holomorphic triples. We prove that these moduli spaces of triples are non-empty and irreducible.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Ser. I Mat

Station to Station: Colin McCahon's Veronica Paintings, 1949-1979

The stations of the cross were a recurrent motif in Colin McCahon’s art. This article focuses on the one station that he singled out for particular emphasis: Station 6, Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. The paper argues that for McCahon the stations were a kind of matrix, grid or armature, a structure within which he could explore various religious and aesthetic ideas. The appeal of Veronica derives from the possibilities inherent in the image of Christ’s face on her veil or handkerchief as a symbol both of religious truth and aesthetic exploration; in McCahon’s work she becomes a kind of patron saint of painters

Travelling wave solutions in a negative nonlinear diffusion-reaction model

We use a geometric approach to prove the existence of smooth travelling wave solutions of a nonlinear diffusion-reaction equation with logistic kinetics and a convex nonlinear diffusivity function which changes sign twice in our domain of interest. We determine the minimum wave speed, c*, and investigate its relation to the spectral stability of the travelling wave solutions.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figure

Relative wage variation and industry location

Relative wages vary considerably across regions of the United Kingdom, with skill-abundant regions exhibiting lower skill premia than skill-scarce regions. This paper shows that the location of economic activity is correlated with the variation in relative wages. U.K. regions with low skill premia produce different sets of manufacturing industries than regions with high skill premia. Relative wages are also linked to subsequent economic development: over time, increases in the employment share of skill-intensive industries are greater in regions with lower initial skill premia. Both results suggest firms adjust production across and within regions in response to relative wage differences.Deindustrialization, Relative Factor Prices, Diversification Cones

Factor price equalisation in the UK

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region-industry factor quality differences and variation in production technology across industries. We test relative factor price equalization across regions of the UK. Although the UK is small and densely-populated, we find evidence of statistically significant and economically important departures from relative factor price equalization. Our estimates suggest three distinct relative factor price areas with a clear spatial structure. We explore explanations for these findings, including multiple cones of diversification, region-industry technology differences, agglomeration and increasing returns to scale.