Urgent need for protection of New Zealand’s coastal landscape

Alarm bells for protection of coastal landscape should be well and truly ringing! This is exemplified by the great rush toward “life-style block” subdivision of large coastal tracts (simply glance at the “NZ Herald” Real Estate section), and recent cases such as the University of Auckland’s hedonistic attempt to sell prime coastal land on the scenic Coromandel coastline for development. Coastal landscape protection is already embedded in the Resource Management Act, and most explicitly stated under S6 (“Matters of National Importance”). S6a refers to “preservation of the natural character of the coastal environment” – which implicitly includes landscape - and S6b “the protection of outstanding natural features and landscapes from inappropriate subdivision….”. Unfortunately landscape protection is rarely considered seriously as a major impediment to new sub-divisional developments along areas of largely undeveloped coast. There are compelling reasons for protection of coastal landscape. These include (i) reduction in long term economic return from tourism from ribbon development along the coast, (ii) huge increases in the cost of supplying infrastructure (roading, electricity, water supply, sewage disposal) to remote coastal wild and scenic locations – which the entire community contributes major cost for rather than the select few beneficiaries at the end of the line; and (iii) the improved infrastructure amenities, facilities and economic benefits possible from concentration of capital development into nucleated coastal settlements. But the major problem is the creeping ribbon development along the coast – leading to significant irreversible impact on the “vistas of nature” – especially along the scenic coasts of Northland, the Coromandel Peninsula, the central North Island and the Marlborough Sounds

Sold Downstream: Free Speech, Fair Use, and Anti-Circumvention Law

[Excerpt] “Here’s a hypo. Living in Asia, I purchased a shameful amount of music and movies, all legit purchases through reputable stores, HMV and Tower Records, but little of which will get reissued. I wanted to preserve my collection but software in the discs prevented me from ripping backup copies to my computer. Lacking the technological savvy to get around this software myself, I purchased and used a product to help me circumvent these controls. Discuss. Courts agree that copying the music and movies here is infringement but that fair use may provide a defense. However, courts do not agree as to whether or not fair use provides a defense when determining the liability of selling products that enable me to access and copy my CDs to my computer. This article examines a line of cases in the Ninth Circuit that hold that fair use or lawfulness of copying is irrelevant in calculating liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and another line of cases in the Federal Circuit which hold that fair use should be relevant. In particular, this article argues that calculating fair use into the analysis is crucial in maintaining the balance between the First Amendment’s protection of free speech rights and copyright’s regulation of speech. Part I will outline the relationship between free speech rights and copyrights, noting the important role that fair use plays in keeping this relationship harmonious. Part II will outline the anti-circumvention provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and argue that these broad brush provisions chill speech. Part III will discuss two streams in the current law: first, the Ninth Circuit’s decisions 321 Studios v. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Inc.1 and Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. v. Divineo; 2 and, second, the Federal Circuit’s decisions in The Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies, Inc.3 and Storage Technology Corporation v. Custom Hardware Engineering & Consulting, Inc.4 Part IV will argue that the Federal Circuit’s approach to fair use is favored. However, an alternate analysis toward their conclusion would have more constitutional integrity. Namely, the DMCA, as applied to software, should be seen as a content-based restriction on speech and should not be read to prohibit circumvention of access controls where the circumvention would not constitute a copyright violation.

DeBruijn Strings, Double Helices, and the Ehrenfeucht-Mycielski Mechanism

We revisit the pseudo-random sequence introduced by Ehrenfeucht and Mycielski and its connections with DeBruijn strings

The Kepler Problem: Orbit Cones and Cylinders

Planetary orbits, being conic sections, may be obtained as the locus of intersection of planes and cones. The planes involved are familiar to anyone who has studied the classical Kepler problem. We focus here on the cones

Visual observations over oceans

Important factors in locating, identifying, describing, and photographing ocean features from space are presented. On the basis of crew comments and other findings, the following recommendations can be made for Earth observations on Space Shuttle missions: (1) flyover exercises must include observations and photography of both temperate and tropical/subtropical waters; (2) sunglint must be included during some observations of ocean features; (3) imaging remote sensors should be used together with conventional photographic systems to document visual observations; (4) greater consideration must be given to scheduling earth observation targets likely to be obscured by clouds; and (5) an annotated photographic compilation of ocean features can be used as a training aid before the mission and as a reference book during space flight

Is a Semantic Web Agent a Knowledge-Savvy Agent?

The issue of knowledge sharing has permeated the field of distributed AI and in particular, its successor, multiagent systems. Through the years, many research and engineering efforts have tackled the problem of encoding and sharing knowledge without the need for a single, centralized knowledge base. However, the emergence of modern computing paradigms such as distributed, open systems have highlighted the importance of sharing distributed and heterogeneous knowledge at a larger scale—possibly at the scale of the Internet. The very characteristics that define the Semantic Web—that is, dynamic, distributed, incomplete, and uncertain knowledge—suggest the need for autonomy in distributed software systems. Semantic Web research promises more than mere management of ontologies and data through the definition of machine-understandable languages. The openness and decentralization introduced by multiagent systems and service-oriented architectures give rise to new knowledge management models, for which we can’t make a priori assumptions about the type of interaction an agent or a service may be engaged in, and likewise about the message protocols and vocabulary used. We therefore discuss the problem of knowledge management for open multi-agent systems, and highlight a number of challenges relating to the exchange and evolution of knowledge in open environments, which pertinent to both the Semantic Web and Multi Agent System communities alike

Sensitivity Analysis of Flexible Provisioning

This technical report contains a sensitivity analysis to extend our previous work. We show that our flexible service provisioning strategy is robust to inaccurate performance information (when the available information is within 10% of the true value), and that it degrades gracefully as the information becomes less accurate. We also identify and discuss one particular case where inaccurate information may lead to undesirable losses in highly unreliable environments

An Effective Strategy for the Flexible Provisioning of Service Workflows

Recent advances in service-oriented frameworks and semantic Web technologies have enabled software agents to discover and invoke resources over large distributed systems, in order to meet their high-level objectives. However, most work has failed to acknowledge that such systems are complex and dynamic multi-agent systems, where service providers act autonomously and follow their own decision-making procedures. Hence, the behaviour of these providers is inherently uncertain - services may fail or take uncertain amounts of time to complete. In this work, we address this uncertainty and take an agent-oriented approach to the problem of provisioning service providers for the constituent tasks of abstract workflows. Specifically, we describe an algorithm that uses redundancy to deal with unreliable providers, and we demonstrate that it achieves an 8-14% improvement in average utility over previous work, while performing up to 6 times as well as approaches that do not consider service uncertainty. We also show that our algorithm performs well in the presence of inaccurate service performance information

\u3ci\u3eAgonopterix Alstroemeriana\u3c/i\u3e (Oecophoridae) and Other Lepidopteran Associates of Poison Hemlock \u3ci\u3e(Conium Maculatum)\u3c/i\u3e in East Central Illinois

Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) (Apiaceae), a noxious Eurasian weed extensively naturalized throughout North America, is characteristically attacked by few insects. Over the past two decades, an introduced oecophorid caterpillar, Agonopterix alstroemeriana, has been reported infesting poison hemlock, its sole host in its area of indigeneity, in parts of the northeastern and western United States. We report for the first time evidence of established midwestern populations of this species. We also report poison hemlock as a host plant for the polyphagous lepidopterans Eupithecia miserulata, Trichoplusia ni, and Spilosoma virginica