Activision: Bobby Kotick

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The Liberal Government's purchase and settlement of the Langdale Estate, Wairarapa (1900-1921) : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History at Massey University

Langdale Station is a 40-minute drive east from Masterton. This Wairarapa sheep, beef and grain farm is the remnant of a large estate owned by an English family until 1901. It was a four-hour coach trip from Masterton in those days. 1 The Langdale Settlement, Wellington, New Zealand, Wellington: T.Y. Duncan, Minister of Lands, 1901, p. 7 Modern travellers can journey down the picturesque Mangapakeha valley oblivious of the infamous swamp, and the role it played in the Liberal Government's purchase and settlement of Langdale. It seems incongruous in a colony founded on British principles of individual property rights that a government should embark on a programme of land redistribution. The Liberal Government purchased, by compulsion if necessary, large estates, and leased the subdivided land to settlers without right of freehold. Although the tenure strictures were relaxed, land-for-settlements remained in the New Zealand ethos and was later used to settle returned servicemen. Subsequent governments spent taxpayers' money settling 'productive people' on farms. 2 Economic Management: Land Use Issues, Wellington, Minister of Finance, 1984, pp. 60,67-68. Ironically, the 1980s' neo-liberal revolt ended government involvement in land settlement. [From Introduction

How Do We Control Dangerous Bodies?

Bodies that challenge social norms have been labeled “deviant”—think obesity, tattoos and piercings, etc. What makes a body not just different but dangerous? How does a society seek to control, modify, or even eliminate those dangerous bodies

A review of the science and logic associated with approach used in the universal soil loss equation family of models

Soil erosion caused by rain is a major factor in degrading agricultural land, and agricultural practices that conserve soil should be used to maintain the long-term sustainability of agricultural land. The Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) was developed in the 1960s and 1970s to predict the long-term average annual soil loss from sheet and rill erosion on field-sized areas as an aid to making management decisions to conserve soil. The USLE uses six factors to take account of the effects of climate, soil, topography, crops, and crop management, and specific actions designed to conserve soil. Although initially developed as an empirical model based on data from more than 10,000 plot years of data collected in plot experiments in the USA, the selection of the independent factors used in the model was made taking account of scientific understanding of the drivers involved in rainfall erosion. In addition, assumptions and approximations were needed to make an operational model that met the needs of the decision makers at that time. Those needs have changed over time, leading to the development of the Revised USLE (RUSLE) and a second version of that, the Revised USLE, Version 2 (RUSLE2). While the original USLE model was not designed to predict short-term variations in erosion well, these developments have involved more use of conceptualization in order to deal with the time-variant impacts of the drivers involved in rainfall erosion. The USLE family of models is based on the concept that the “unit” plot, a bare fallow area 22.1 m long on a 9% slope gradient with cultivation up and down the slope, provides a physical situation where the effect of climate and soil on rainfall erosion can be determined without the need to consider the impact of the four other factors. The science and logic associated with this approach is reviewed. The manner by which the soil erodibility factor is determined from plot data ensures that the long-term average annual soil loss for the unit plot is predicted well, even when the assumption that event soil loss is directly related to the product of event rainfall energy, and the maximum 30-min intensity is not wholly appropriate. RUSLE2 has a capacity to use CLIGEN, the weather generator used in WEPP, and so can predict soil losses based on individual storms in a similar way to WEPP. Including a direct consideration of runoff in determining event erosivity enhances the ability to predict event soil losses when runoff is known or predicted well, but similar to more process-based models, this ability is offset by the difficulty in predicting runoff well

Expert and Lay Mental Models of Ecosystems: Inferences for Risk Communication

The authors evaluate a mental modeling approach to studying differences between lay and expert comprehension of ecosystems

Advances in Silicon Resonant Pressure Transducers

AbstractThis paper presents a MEMS Resonant Pressure Transducers (RPT) that is produced using a flexible fabrication route to allow pressure ranges from 1bar to 700bar in fully oil isolated hermetic packages without compromising sensor performance. The fabrication method makes use of silicon fusion bonding (SFB) and deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) to build up a three-layer die, with the middle layer consisting of a strain sensitive resonator. The key aspects of the fabrication process and sensor design that make this possible are presented, along with data showing long-term stability of better than 100ppm drift per year