Optimising visual solutions for complex strategic scenarios : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

Attempts to pre-emptively improve post-disaster outcomes need to reflect an improved understanding of cognitive adaptations made by collaborating researchers and practitioners. This research explored the use of visual logic models to enhance the quality of decisions being made by these professionals. The research looked at the way visual representations serve to enhance these decisions, as part of cognitive adaptations to considering the complexity of relevant pre-disaster conditions constituting community resilience. It was proposed that a visual logic model display, using boxes and arrows to display linkages between activities and downstream objectives, could support effective, efficient and responsive approaches to relevant community resilience interventions being carried out in a pre-disaster context. The first of three phases comprising this thesis used Q-methodology to identify patterns of opinions concerning building a shared framework of pre-disaster, community resilience indicators for this purpose. Three patterns identified helped to assess the needs for applied research undertaken in phase two. The second phase of this thesis entailed building an action-focused logic model to enhance associated collaborations between emergency management practitioners and researchers. An analysis of participant interviews determined that the process used to build this logic model served as a catalyst for research which could help improve community resilience interventions. The third phase used an experimental approach to different display formats produced during phase two to test whether a visual logic model display stimulated a higher quality of decisions, compared with a more conventional, text-based chart of key performance indicators. Results supported the use of similar methods for much larger scale research to assess how information displays support emergency management decisions with wide-ranging, longer-term implications. Overall, results from these three phases indicate that certain logic model formats can help foster collaborative efforts to improve characteristics of community resilience against disasters. This appears to occur when a logic model forms an integrated component of efficient cognitive dynamics across a network of decision making agents. This understanding of logic model function highlights clear opportunities for further research. It also represents a novel contribution to knowledge about using logic models to support emergency management decisions with complex, long term implications

Native advertising : attitudes, value and purchase intention

textNative-form advertising in the digital space can most easily be defined as promotional content constructed to mimic the form and structure of the website that it is embedded on. With the rise of user generated content and social media, digital native advertising is fast becoming a popular promotional tactic for brands looking to engage with an online audience. This study examines whether this form of advertising significantly impacts consumer attitudes towards the ad, value of the ad and purchase intention of the promoted product across three product categories. Although not significant, results suggest that native advertising positively impacts entertainment- and lifestyle-based products, while information-based service industries, including cyber security, saw a negative reaction from respondents. That said, product category did influence attitude toward the ad and ad value regardless of the ad type. Moreover, a strong positive correlation between product involvement and purchase intention was found, indicating the need to target specific audiences with online native advertising.Advertisin

Does the brain listen to the gut?

Transplanting gut bacteria from one mouse strain to another can override genetics and change behavior

QR Factorization of Tall and Skinny Matrices in a Grid Computing Environment

Previous studies have reported that common dense linear algebra operations do not achieve speed up by using multiple geographical sites of a computational grid. Because such operations are the building blocks of most scientific applications, conventional supercomputers are still strongly predominant in high-performance computing and the use of grids for speeding up large-scale scientific problems is limited to applications exhibiting parallelism at a higher level. We have identified two performance bottlenecks in the distributed memory algorithms implemented in ScaLAPACK, a state-of-the-art dense linear algebra library. First, because ScaLAPACK assumes a homogeneous communication network, the implementations of ScaLAPACK algorithms lack locality in their communication pattern. Second, the number of messages sent in the ScaLAPACK algorithms is significantly greater than other algorithms that trade flops for communication. In this paper, we present a new approach for computing a QR factorization -- one of the main dense linear algebra kernels -- of tall and skinny matrices in a grid computing environment that overcomes these two bottlenecks. Our contribution is to articulate a recently proposed algorithm (Communication Avoiding QR) with a topology-aware middleware (QCG-OMPI) in order to confine intensive communications (ScaLAPACK calls) within the different geographical sites. An experimental study conducted on the Grid'5000 platform shows that the resulting performance increases linearly with the number of geographical sites on large-scale problems (and is in particular consistently higher than ScaLAPACK's).Comment: Accepted at IPDPS10. (IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium 2010 in Atlanta, GA, USA.

Electric Dipole Moment Results from lattice QCD

We utilize the gradient flow to define and calculate electric dipole moments induced by the strong QCD $\theta$-term and the dimension-6 Weinberg operator. The gradient flow is a promising tool to simplify the renormalization pattern of local operators. The results of the nucleon electric dipole moments are calculated on PACS-CS gauge fields (available from the ILDG) using $N_{f}=2+1$, of discrete size $32^{3}\times 64$ and spacing $a \simeq 0.09$ fm. These gauge fields use a renormalization-group improved gauge action and a non-perturbatively $O(a)$ improved clover quark action at $\beta = 1.90$, with $c_{SW} = 1.715$. The calculation is performed at pion masses of $m_{\pi} \simeq 411,701$ MeV.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figures, presented at the 35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2017

Down and Out in Boston

Jack Thomas is a reporter for the Boston Globe, in which this article first appeared, on February 12, 1992. Reprinted with permission

Quantum critical behavior of the superfluid-Mott glass transition

We investigate the zero-temperature superfluid to insulator transitions in a diluted two-dimensional quantum rotor model with particle-hole symmetry. We map the Hamiltonian onto a classical $(2+1)$-dimensional XY model with columnar disorder which we analyze by means of large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. For dilutions below the lattice percolation threshold, the system undergoes a generic superfluid-Mott glass transition. In contrast to other quantum phase transitions in disordered systems, its critical behavior is of conventional power-law type with universal (dilution-independent) critical exponents $z=1.52(3)$, $\nu=1.16(5)$, $\beta/\nu= 0.48(2)$, $\gamma/\nu=2.52(4)$, and $\eta=-0.52(4)$. These values agree with and improve upon earlier Monte-Carlo results [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 015703 (2004)] while (partially) excluding other findings in the literature. As a further test of universality, we also consider a soft-spin version of the classical Hamiltonian. In addition, we study the percolation quantum phase transition across the lattice percolation threshold; its critical behavior is governed by the lattice percolation exponents in agreement with recent theoretical predictions. We relate our results to a general classification of phase transitions in disordered systems, and we briefly discuss experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, final version as publishe

C*-algebras associated to graphs of groups

To a large class of graphs of groups we associate a C*-algebra universal for generators and relations. We show that this C*-algebra is stably isomorphic to the crossed product induced from the action of the fundamental group of the graph of groups on the boundary of its Bass-Serre tree. We characterise when this action is minimal, and find a sufficient condition under which it is locally contractive. In the case of generalised Baumslag-Solitar graphs of groups (graphs of groups in which every group is infinite cyclic) we also characterise topological freeness of this action. We are then able to establish a dichotomy for simple C*-algebras associated to generalised Baumslag-Solitar graphs of groups: they are either a Kirchberg algebra, or a stable Bunce-Deddens algebra.Comment: 59 page