A short note on Simulation and Abstraction

This short note is written in celebration of David Schmidt's sixtieth birthday. He has now been active in the program analysis research community for over thirty years and we have enjoyed many interactions with him. His work on characterising simulations between Kripke structures using Galois connections was particularly influential in our own work on using probabilistic abstract interpretation to study Larsen and Skou's notion of probabilistic bisimulation. We briefly review this work and discuss some recent applications of these ideas in a variety of different application areas.Comment: In Proceedings Festschrift for Dave Schmidt, arXiv:1309.455

"I shall not want another home on this planet", a study of the tradition of elegiac poetry in the work of three New Zealand female poets, Ursula Bethell, Robin Hyde and Katherine Mansfield : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

This thesis is a discussion of the elegiac poetry tradition as it exists in English literature and how it impacts on the New Zealand literary tradition. The discussion centres around three New Zealand female poets; Mary Ursula Bethell, Robin Hyde and Katherine Mansfield and their participation in the elegiac tradition. The time period which encompasses these three poets reaches from 1915-1945, a period of intense growth and discovery in the literature of New Zealand, as it dissociated itself from the English model and redirected itself in a Pacific direction. Each of the three poets was influenced by the literary beliefs which were cultivated in New Zealand and exhibited this knowledge through their work. Mary Ursula Bethell and Katherine Mansfield composed personal elegies on the loss of companion and brother respectively, yet Robin Hyde composed a more formal elegy on Mansfield's death, though she had not personally known her. One theme runs through the work of Bethell, Hyde and Mansfield, the theme of exile. Bethell was the typical Englishwoman exiled in New Zealand by geography, but also by her education and her upbringing. Mansfield chose the life of an expatriate, yet this was no more than a self-delusion, when after the death of her brother she realised that the New Zealand of her childhood was no more. Hyde also fled to England, like Mansfield, yet her impetus was no more than a schoolgirl memory. She too, as in the case of Mansfield, produced her finest compositions when the idea of exile became reality. In some way, all three poets experienced the intensity of exile, from the known landscape whether of New Zealand or England, and transferred that yearning into their elegiac verse, as they became exiled from all that their loved one represented. For Mansfield, her brother's death ensured she could never go 'home' and yet provided the impetus for her New Zealand stories within which she challenged short story convention and wrote lasting memorials to both her country and her self. For Hyde, her elegy on Mansfield was an elegy to New Zealand and her reality without it. Bethell, after the death of her companion Effie Pollen, became exiled from her physical home in the Cashmere Hills, and, more poignantly, her garden. All three of the poets were faced with a universe which had been altered irreversibly by exile and in elegy attempted to describe and mourn that loss. These three women, though participating in a genre and a tradition which was undeniably male-oriented, expressed themselves as women within a tradition which through its very versatility accommodated both them and their grief

Electric power generation using geothermal brine resources for a proof of concept facility

An exploratory systems study of a geothermal proof-of-concept facility is being conducted. This study is the initial phase (Phase 0) of a project to establish the technical and economic feasibility of using hot brine resources for electric power production and other industrial applications. Phase 0 includes the conceptual design of an experimental test-bed facility and a 10-MWe power generating facility

Fast Multi-Scale Community Detection based on Local Criteria within a Multi-Threaded Algorithm

Many systems can be described using graphs, or networks. Detecting communities in these networks can provide information about the underlying structure and functioning of the original systems. Yet this detection is a complex task and a large amount of work was dedicated to it in the past decade. One important feature is that communities can be found at several scales, or levels of resolution, indicating several levels of organisations. Therefore solutions to the community structure may not be unique. Also networks tend to be large and hence require efficient processing. In this work, we present a new algorithm for the fast detection of communities across scales using a local criterion. We exploit the local aspect of the criterion to enable parallel computation and improve the algorithm's efficiency further. The algorithm is tested against large generated multi-scale networks and experiments demonstrate its efficiency and accuracy.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1204.100

Introducing elliptic, an R Package for Elliptic and Modular Functions

This paper introduces the elliptic package of R routines, for numerical calculation of elliptic and related functions. Elliptic functions furnish interesting and instructive examples of many ideas of complex analysis, and the package illustrates these numerically and visually. A statistical application in fluid mechanics is presented.

Introducing untb, an R Package For Simulating Ecological Drift Under the Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity

The distribution of abundance amongst species with similar ways of life is a classical problem in ecology. The unified neutral theory of biodiversity, due to Hubbell, states that observed population dynamics may be explained on the assumption of per capita equivalence amongst individuals. One can thus dispense with differences between species, and differences between abundant and rare species: all individuals behave alike in respect of their probabilities of reproducing and death. It is a striking fact that such a parsimonious theory results in a non-trivial dominancediversity curve (that is, the simultaneous existence of both abundant and rare species) and even more striking that the theory predicts abundance curves that match observations across a wide range of ecologies. This paper introduces the untb package of R routines, for numerical simulation of ecological drift under the unified neutral theory. A range of visualization, analytical, and simulation tools are provided in the package and these are presented with examples in the paper.