The social construction of obesity in New Zealand prime time television media : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

Obesity is an issue that has always been associated with morality, however in more recent times it has become defined as a health problem (or disease) of epidemic proportions. The construction of obesity as a problem is partly associated with the eternal quest for thinness. Media representations play a role in the construction of obesity and may be increasingly influential as media is becoming more and more prevalent in Western society. Furthermore, media have been shown to have considerable influence in affecting health behaviours and body image. Previous research has shown that media representations of obesity have been predominately negative and obese people are underrepresented in most types of television programming. The goal of this research was to discover how obesity is socially constructed in New Zealand prime time television. Data was collected over the period of a month, forming a synthetic week of recorded television programming that covered the prime viewing period between 6.00pm to 10.30pm. A discourse analytical approach was used to identify three main themes, morality medicalisation, and factual versus fictional. The moral theme involved discourses in which moral judgements were made about obese individuals, on both their character and actions, generally positioning the obese person as morally lacking. The medicalisation theme contained discourses around obesity as a health issue that constructed health issues as the fault of the individual which could be solved only one way- by losing weight. This functioned to position obese people as sick or unhealthy. The third theme, factual versus fiction presents the differences found between depictions of fictional obese characters and real people on television. Overall, obesity was found to be constructed negatively in television media. On television, the obese person is one which is either invisible, or is the object of moral judgements about the obese individuals worth as a person and their perceived poor health. Television representations of obesity, in some part, lead to the marginalisation of obese people. However the loathing for excess weight has been around for centuries and is so deeply ingrained in public discourse that to make a difference in how obese people are seen and treated, there would have to be a change in how society thinks about obesity, not just in how the media portrays obese people

Gene flow across geographical barriers - scaling limits of random walks with obstacles

In this paper, we study the scaling limit of a class of random walks which behave like simple random walks outside of a bounded region around the origin and which are subject to a partial reflection near the origin. If the probability of crossing the barrier scales as $1/\sqrt{n}$ as we rescale space by $\sqrt{n}$ and time by $n$, we obtain a non trivial scaling limit which behaves like reflected Brownian motion until its local time at the origin reaches an independent exponential variable. It then follows reflected Brownian motion on the other side of the origin until its local time at the origin reaches another exponential level, and so on. We give a martingale problem characterisation of this process as well as another construction and an explicit formula for its transition density. This result has applications in the field of population genetics where such a random walk is used to trace the position of one's ancestor in the past in the presence of a barrier to gene flow.Comment: Stochastic Processes and Their Applications, in pres

Holographic probabilities in eternal inflation

In the global description of eternal inflation, probabilities for vacua are notoriously ambiguous. The local point of view is preferred by holography and naturally picks out a simple probability measure. It is insensitive to large expansion factors or lifetimes, and so resolves a recently noted paradox. Any cosmological measure must be complemented with the probability for observers to emerge in a given vacuum. In lieu of anthropic criteria, I propose to estimate this by the entropy that can be produced in a local patch. This allows for prior-free predictions.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. v4: published version, misprints corrected (mu -> eta

On higher rank instantons & the monopole cobordism program

Witten's conjecture suggests that the polynomial invariants of Donaldson are expressible in terms of the Seiberg-Witten invariants if the underlying four-manifold is of simple type. A higher rank version of the Donaldson invariants was introduced by Kronheimer. Before even having been defined, the physicists Mari\~no and Moore had already suggested that there should be a generalisation of Witten's conjecture to this type of invariants. We study a generalisation of the classical cobordism program to the higher rank situation and obtain vanishing results which gives evidence that the generalisation of Witten's conjecture should hold.Comment: This manuscript fusions the two previous manuscripts "What to expect from U(n) monopoles" and "PU(N) monopoles, higher rank instantons, and the monopole invariants". Furthermore, one of the vanishing arguments is made more precise. 29 page