Fashioning liminal space : the meaning of things and women's experience in the practice of domestic shrine making in Aotearoa/New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at Massey University

This paper aims to bring together two lines of analysis that converge upon the specific spaces that are women's domestic shrines. One line examines the material culture of the spaces and objects on the shrines of ten different women and seeks to reveal the "agency" of these things in themselves. The other line is a phenomenological one and responds to the shrine as a site in which issues of practice, embodiment and intentionality in the daily life of the subjects is explored. The material culture of the shrine is investigated as part of the intersubjective experience of its creator and scrutinized as a fruitful place in which to develop an ethnographic understanding of the truth of life-as-lived. This study strives to give voice to ordinary New Zealand women and their precious things within their own homes. Key Words: Domestic Shrines/Altars, Feminist Ethnography, Material Culture, Objects, Spaccs, Phenomenology, Practice, Intersubjectivity, Embodiment, Agency, Women's Experience, Liminality

Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond

Creative Works Winner Most of us know Nevada beyond the Strip. It’s a place of houses, of shopping plazas, of movie theaters, and grocery stores. A place of hotels that are also places of work. A place of basins, ranges, vistas, and nature. A place of personal history. For Intimate Nevada: Artists Respond, curators Lauren Paljusaj (ENG BA ‘20) and Anne Savage (CFA BA ‘22), draw on photographs found in UNLV Special Collections to uncover the intimate visuality of a Nevada of past centuries. The exhibition focuses on how the imaged built landscape of early 20th century Southern Nevada (Paljusaj) and candids and personal snapshots of 1910s Las Vegas (Savage) allow us to interpret the past in light of who we are today. It also shows how artists utilize research archives and the bottomless fascination of material memory to respond to historical artifacts

Automatic Classification and Speaker Identification of African Elephant (\u3cem\u3eLoxodonta africana\u3c/em\u3e) Vocalizations

A hidden Markov model (HMM) system is presented for automatically classifying African elephant vocalizations. The development of the system is motivated by successful models from human speech analysis and recognition. Classification features include frequency-shifted Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and log energy, spectrally motivated features which are commonly used in human speech processing. Experiments, including vocalization type classification and speaker identification, are performed on vocalizations collected from captive elephants in a naturalistic environment. The system classified vocalizations with accuracies of 94.3% and 82.5% for type classification and speaker identification classification experiments, respectively. Classification accuracy, statistical significance tests on the model parameters, and qualitative analysis support the effectiveness and robustness of this approach for vocalization analysis in nonhuman species

Editorial

Editorial for 21(1

Initial teacher education - a sabre tooth tiger curriculum? The evolving role of the teacher in Children’s Centres: implications for changes in initial teacher education

The aim is to inspire educators to instigate change in initial teacher education for students working with children from birth to eight. Initial teacher education needs to reflect the developing role of Early Years teachers and prepare them for the complexities of leading pedagogy in multi-agency teams within Children’s Centres. This paper will include a critical review of recent developments concerning the role of the teacher in Children’s Centres, based on knowledge and experience of working with children’s centre practitioners across the north west of England. We will encourage reflection on the key issues related to leading pedagogy in the context of Children’s Centres. We will consider the implications for teacher educators in preparing their own students to: lead pedagogy with children aged birth to eight; work with families; influence, manage and support a range of practitioners involved in curriculum delivery and extended services; and work effectively in a multi-agency team. Finally, we will touch upon how to prepare students for the emotional issues they may face, such as isolation and retention of their professional identity

Editorial

Editoria

A comparison of penetration and damage caused by different types of arrowheads on loose and tight fit clothing

Bows and arrows are used more for recreation, sport and hunting in the Western world and tend not to be as popular a weapon as firearms or knives. Yet there are still injuries and fatalities caused by these low-velocity weapons due to their availability to the public and that a licence is not required to own them. This study aimed to highlight the penetration capabilities of aluminium arrows into soft tissue and bones in the presence of clothing. Further from that, how the type and fit of clothing as well as arrowhead type contribute to penetration capacity. In this study ballistic gelatine blocks (non-clothed and loose fit or tight fit clothed) were shot using a 24 lb weight draw recurve bow and aluminium arrows accompanied by four different arrowheads (bullet, judo, blunt and broadhead).The penetration capability of aluminium arrows was examined, and the depth of penetration was found to be dependent on the type of arrowhead used as well as by the type and fit or lack thereof of the clothing covering the block. Loose fit clothing reduced penetration with half of the samples, reducing penetration capacity by percentages between 0% and 98.33%, at a range of 10 m. While the remaining half of the samples covered with tight clothing led to reductions in penetration of between 14.06% and 94.12%.The damage to the clothing and the gelatine (puncturing, cutting and tearing) was affected by the shape of the arrowhead, with the least damaged caused by the blunt arrowheads and the most by the broadhead arrows. Clothing fibres were also at times found within the projectile tract within the gelatine showing potential for subsequent infection of an individual with an arrow wound.Ribs, femur bones and spinal columns encased in some of the gelatine blocks all showed varying levels of damage, with the most and obvious damage being exhibited by the ribs and spinal column.The information gleaned from the damage to clothing, gelatine blocks and bones could potentially be useful for forensic investigators, for example, when a body has been discovered with no weapons or gunshot residue present

Exploring the Delivery of Swimming and Water Safety Teacher Training to Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Communities

The dearth of information on the delivery of specific culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) programs presents a major limitation in the effort to prevent drowning, particularly when drowning rates of people from countries other than Australia are increasing. This study describes programs delivered by the aquatic industry for CALD communities in New South Wales (NSW), explores what CALD communities believe their water safety education needs are, and evaluates AUSTSWIM’s current training methods to ascertain which is most effective when training candidates from CALD communities. We found an absence of specialized aquatic programs being run at aquatic facilities for CALD communities. Barriers to participation included a lack of understanding of the cultural perceptions toward water safety and the different emphasis on the need for swimming skills and water safety education. The likelihood of AUSTSWIM Teacher of Swimming and Water Safety candidates’ having successful aquatic training outcomes increases with a combined learning approach that pairs meaningful practical applications with ongoing mentor support. Engagement of CALD communities’ using these kind of water safety programs will be essential if Australia wants to reduce the drowning burden

Stress and Emotion Classification Using Jitter and Shimmer Features

In this paper, we evaluate the use of appended jitter and shimmer speech features for the classification of human speaking styles and of animal vocalization arousal levels. Jitter and shimmer features are extracted from the fundamental frequency contour and added to baseline spectral features, specifically Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) for human speech and Greenwood function cepstral coefficients (GFCCs) for animal vocalizations. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) with Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) state distributions are used for classification. The appended jitter and shimmer features result in an increase in classification accuracy for several illustrative datasets, including the SUSAS dataset for human speaking styles as well as vocalizations labeled by arousal level for African elephant and Rhesus monkey species