"Plays thus at being Prosper" : Caliban and the colonised savage in mid-nineteenth-century Britain : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University

Representations of Caliban in Victorian Britain took the form of plays, performances, reviews, poems, paintings, cartoons, sketches, and commentaries. These representations predominantly involved an ambivalence between portrayals of Caliban as human, and as non-human. A similar ambivalence is apparent in Victorian representations of the savage. Taking Robert Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" as an initial example, this thesis applies Homi Bhabha's model of colonial mimicry to these representations of Caliban in order to show that the ambivalence in them is continuous with the ambivalent aim of the colonial mission, which is both to suppress and to enlighten. This ambivalent colonial mission leads Caliban to be constructed within Victorian colonial discourse in an ambivalent fashion, and he is hence both contained within and subversive against that discourse. Caliban acts as a conceptual site at which colonial ideology can be both defended, by those interpretations of Caliban which are continuous with stereotypical Victorian representations of the savage, and challenged, by those representations which are subversive to the colonial ideology which is the basis of this stereotype. The challenges to colonial ideology come from interpretations of Caliban as an evolutionary figure and as a satirical figure. It is in the process of defending the colonial interpretation that the ambivalence inherent in the colonial model is made clear. Thus Caliban can be seen to be, in these interpretations, a representation of this stereotype of the colonial savage, functioning to justify the ambivalent colonial mission

Three Steps Towards More Effective Development Assistance

There are three steps New Zealand can take to make its bilateral development assistance more effective in reducing poverty. These steps are ‘easy’ because they are unilateral: they improve the effectiveness of development assistance without requiring changes in the politics or policies of developing countries. By far the most important of these three steps is to focus New Zealand’s bilateral aid on those poor countries that are democracies pursing policies of market-led growth. One of the major findings of recent research is that development aid only reinforces what is already there. New Zealand should accept the developing countries as it finds them and pick and choose so that it helps those already helping themselves.aid effectiveness, autocracy, democracy, development, New Zealand

A model personal energy meter

Every day each of us consumes a significant amount of energy, both directly through transport, heating and use of appliances, and indirectly from our needs for the production of food, manufacture of goods and provision of services. This dissertation investigates a personal energy meter which can record and apportion an individual's energy usage in order to supply baseline information and incentives for reducing our environmental impact. If the energy costs of large shared resources are split evenly without regard for individual consumption each person minimises his own losses by taking advantage of others. Context awareness offers the potential to change this balance and apportion energy costs to those who cause them to be incurred. This dissertation explores how sensor systems installed in many buildings today can be used to apportion energy consumption between users, including an evaluation of a range of strategies in a case study and elaboration of the overriding principles that are generally applicable. It also shows how second-order estimators combined with location data can provide a proxy for fine-grained sensing. A key ingredient for apportionment mechanisms is data on energy usage. This may come from metering devices or buildings directly, or from profiling devices and using secondary indicators to infer their power state. A mechanism for profiling devices to determine the energy costs of specific activities, particularly applicable to shared programmable devices is presented which can make this process simpler and more accurate. By combining crowdsourced building-inventory information and a simple building energy model it is possible to estimate an individual's energy use disaggregated by device class with very little direct sensing. Contextual information provides crucial cues for apportioning the use and energy costs of resources, and one of the most valuable sources from which to infer context is location. A key ingredient for a personal energy meter is a low cost, low infrastructure location system that can be deployed on a truly global scale. This dissertation presents a description and evaluation of the new concept of inquiry-free Bluetooth tracking that has the potential to offer indoor location information with significantly less infrastructure and calibration than other systems. Finally, a suitable architecture for a personal energy meter on a global scale is demonstrated using a mobile phone application to aggregate energy feeds based on the case studies and technologies developed

The overlapping burden of the three leading causes of disability and death in sub-Saharan African children

Despite substantial declines since 2000, lower respiratory infections (LRIs), diarrhoeal diseases, and malaria remain among the leading causes of nonfatal and fatal disease burden for children under 5 years of age (under 5), primarily in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The spatial burden of each of these diseases has been estimated subnationally across SSA, yet no prior analyses have examined the pattern of their combined burden. Here we synthesise subnational estimates of the burden of LRIs, diarrhoea, and malaria in children under-5 from 2000 to 2017 for 43 sub-Saharan countries. Some units faced a relatively equal burden from each of the three diseases, while others had one or two dominant sources of unit-level burden, with no consistent pattern geographically across the entire subcontinent. Using a subnational counterfactual analysis, we show that nearly 300 million DALYs could have been averted since 2000 by raising all units to their national average. Our findings are directly relevant for decision-makers in determining which and targeting where the most appropriate interventions are for increasing child survival

The Malaria Atlas Project: Developing Global Maps of Malaria Risk

The primary goal of the recently launched Malaria Atlas Project is to develop the science of malaria cartography

Quantifying Aggregated Uncertainty in Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Prevalence and Populations at Risk via Efficient Space-Time Geostatistical Joint Simulation

Risk maps estimating the spatial distribution of infectious diseases are required to guide public health policy from local to global scales. The advent of model-based geostatistics (MBG) has allowed these maps to be generated in a formal statistical framework, providing robust metrics of map uncertainty that enhances their utility for decision-makers. In many settings, decision-makers require spatially aggregated measures over large regions such as the mean prevalence within a country or administrative region, or national populations living under different levels of risk. Existing MBG mapping approaches provide suitable metrics of local uncertainty—the fidelity of predictions at each mapped pixel—but have not been adapted for measuring uncertainty over large areas, due largely to a series of fundamental computational constraints. Here the authors present a new efficient approximating algorithm that can generate for the first time the necessary joint simulation of prevalence values across the very large prediction spaces needed for global scale mapping. This new approach is implemented in conjunction with an established model for P. falciparum allowing robust estimates of mean prevalence at any specified level of spatial aggregation. The model is used to provide estimates of national populations at risk under three policy-relevant prevalence thresholds, along with accompanying model-based measures of uncertainty. By overcoming previously unchallenged computational barriers, this study illustrates how MBG approaches, already at the forefront of infectious disease mapping, can be extended to provide large-scale aggregate measures appropriate for decision-makers

Big Data Opportunities for Global Infectious Disease Surveillance

Simon Hay and colleagues discuss the potential and challenges of producing continually updated infectious disease risk maps using diverse and large volume data sources such as social media