Community owned trading enterprises : their uniqueness and performance : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Studies at Massey University

Community ownership of trading enterprises has not been so favoured as a concept during the latter part of the 20th century as successive New Zealand Governments pursued market forces policies. The face of the New Zealand public ownership business scene radically changed from the mid 1980's as telecommunications, railways, the ports, Coal Corp, energy ... were all restructured in pursuit of the market model. Why was the public or community ownership model apparently not supported? The empirical evidence did not unequivocally uphold privatisation and the market model as being inherently more efficient as a structure. Notably also, community ownership was much enjoyed as a concept. This research, therefore, looks at the concept of community ownership and seeks to define its uniqueness and identify its performance in operating trading enterprises. The electricity companies in New Zealand were the area selected. The results moderately support the view that social/community goals are of more importance to community owned trading enterprises than their private ownership equivalents. Notably community ownership outperformed private enterprise as measured by ROE and ROA. Thus the contention that community ownership as a concept had much to offer, and was not inherently less efficient, was not disproved by this research. Further research in other fields is worthy of pursuit

A Compression-Based Toolkit for Modelling and Processing Natural Language Text

A novel compression-based toolkit for modelling and processing natural language text is described. The design of the toolkit adopts an encoding perspective—applications are considered to be problems in searching for the best encoding of different transformations of the source text into the target text. This paper describes a two phase ‘noiseless channel model’ architecture that underpins the toolkit which models the text processing as a lossless communication down a noise-free channel. The transformation and encoding that is performed in the first phase must be both lossless and reversible. The role of the verification and decoding second phase is to verify the correctness of the communication of the target text that is produced by the application. This paper argues that this encoding approach has several advantages over the decoding approach of the standard noisy channel model. The concepts abstracted by the toolkit’s design are explained together with details of the library calls. The pseudo-code for a number of algorithms is also described for the applications that the toolkit implements including encoding, decoding, classification, training (model building), parallel sentence alignment, word segmentation and language segmentation. Some experimental results, implementation details, memory usage and execution speeds are also discussed for these applications

Licensing Trusts in New Zealand

Licensing trusts in New Zealand are a statutory form of community enterprise now existing for over 70 years. Thirty were established between 1944 and 1975. Over the years since they have generated wealth of $250 million through their business units, benefited their areas in many ways, and through their community support donations programmes distributed significant profit back to enhance their community’s quality of life. Today, 18 continue to operate (mainly hospitality) businesses, and provide support to their communities

The use of frames in knowledge-based systems : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University

The general aim of this study was to investigate the use of frames as a means of representing knowledge in computer knowledge-based systems. This thesis examines the application of frames to two particular situations, the playing of an opening bid in Bridge, and the recognition of birds from field observations. The Frame Representation Language FRL was used in the implementation of the two different systems. Three aspects of frames are investigated the problems of matching two different frames; the problems of structuring frame systems for searching; and the problem of improving the interface between the frame system and the user of the knowldege base. A comparison is also made of frames with other methods of knowledge representation such as production systems and semantic networks. Finally, further areas of research into the use of frames are suggested such as the extension of frame matching, research into the aspects of knowledge representation and application of frames to specific problems

Food production, distribution and culture: public views, interests and concerns

A basic right of both a consumer and a citizen is the right to be heard, and their voiced concerns have to be taken into account when developing policies and obtaining trust for government actions. Therefore this study focuses on consumers’ interests, opinions and expectations which are identified and categorised according to subject area, degree of involvement and political agenda of a consumer. The paper draws on the responses of individual members of the public in the National Food Policy discussion initiated by the Scottish Government in 2008. Altogether 246 responses were subjected to quantitative analysis of texts, supported by text mining. A variety of interests and opinions underpinning the political agendas of individuals responding to the National Food Policy discussion document were identified and discussed in the paper in the context of political consumerism and influence citizens-consumers are likely to have on policy development and its subsequent implementation. In the broad perspective of the Scottish food supply chain, the three pillars of sustainability: economy, environment and society, are defining the nature of public concerns and expectations. Findings could be applied across many different policy areas including food production and distribution, heath education and promotion, support of small local businesses, environment protection, travel, waste management/recycling and others.Food Policy, Scotland, Text analysis, Consumer research, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

IMPROVING MARKET ORIENTATION IN THE SCOTTISH BEEF SUPPLY CHAIN THROUGH PERFORMANCE-RELATED COMMUNICATIONS: THE CASE OF THE MCINTOSH DONALD BEEF PRODUCER CLUB AND QBOXANALYSIS

The reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2003 and particularly the introduction of the Single Payment Scheme (SPS) is intended to make farmers more market orientated and competitive. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to discuss whether performance-related communication strategies present the possibility of improving farmers’ market orientation. This is studied through the case of McIntosh Donald, a beef processor located in the North East of Scotland and a major red meat supplier for Tesco, and Qboxanalysis, a performance-related communication system, introduced by the processor to its beef Producer Club members in March 2005. Results indicate that the enhanced communication strategy has the potential to increase farmers’ performance and market orientation, not only through the use of the Qboxanalysis system but also through the Producers’ Club activities. However, additional efforts are required to engage producers that are less proactiveFood Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing,