Expectations and Employment Dynamics in New Zealand Manufacturing

The characteristics of short-run employment dynamics in New Zealand manufacturing and the role of business expectations are examined for the period since the 1970s, including the post-1985 employment slump. Based on econometric estimation, using both business survey based estimates of expectations and cointegration methods applied to conventional manufacturing data, we conclude that labour hoarding is present in manufacturing firms, that the short-run dynamics can be modelled as an error-correction process, that manufacturers' output expectations have a crucial influence on these dynamics and appear more important than relative price expectations, and that understanding how manufacturers' output expectations evolve is crucial to understanding New Zealand's recent manufacturing employment history. These conclusions appear robust for measuring employment dynamics by total hours worked while for numbers employed there was evidence of structural change during the post-1985 period for reasons that warrant fun her investigation

Visual Novels and Comic-Strip Poetry: Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti, Martin Vaughn-James’s The Projector, and Avant-Garde Experimentation with Comics in the 1960s and 1970s

This thesis focuses on two novel-length graphic narratives: Poema a fumetti (1969) by the Italian novelist Dino Buzzati and The Projector (1971), created in Toronto by the British-born visual artist Martin Vaughn-James. Through an in-depth analysis of these two works and by comparing them to other “avant-garde” comics from the 1960s and early 1970s, I seek to identify the factors that might explain the appeal of visual narrative to writers and artists from that era who were working outside of the world of comics as it would have then been defined. The first chapter, dedicated to Poema a fumetti, begins with a discussion of Buzzati’s use of the “poetic” aspects of comics, which I relate to various experimentations with comics among certain avant-garde poets. I then examine the influence of 1960s Italian erotic and crime comics on Buzzati, and how the disreputable aura surrounding these and other comics rendered them a particularly effective means for artists to express certain repressed impulses and desires. The second chapter analyzes The Projector in terms of its subversion of: a) an alienating consumer-capitalist social order, b) a “normal” visual perception of reality, and c) conventional modes of ordering narrative. These three lines of analysis I relate to three contemporaneous cultural tendencies that I argue also influenced other avant-garde comics. These are, respectively: the détournement strategies employed by the Situationists, the “psychedelic” movement in the visual arts, and literary and media theories advocating for a radical break with the existing conventions of literary narrative

Essays in Banking Competition

Essay 1. Since the GFC, banking regulators are increasing regulations to lower the risk of banking crises occurring in the future. These have focused on liquidity, asset composition, and capital requirements. This paper focuses on the loan rate effects of raising bank capital requirements. Previous calculations of loan rate effects predominately use the WACC formula, which implicitly assumes perfect competition. Banking is an industry where firms have market power. This paper develops a tractable model of an imperfectly competitive banking market, where the implicit cost of capital is naturally included in the optimization problem of the bank. I find that the magnitude of loan rate changes depends on the market structure and provide estimates for a calibrated Australian market. %This provides some validation of studies that use a blended MM approach. Essay 2. Using a tractable two-loan type banking model I analyse recent changes in capital regulation in Australia and NZ. My modelling shows, IRB banks were significantly advantaged by Basel II in generating ROE, but that subsequent changes in capital settings have slowly moved towards competitive neutrality. In addition, I analyse the minimum average risk weight policy for IRB banks (2016) and find that IRB banks are motivated to hold a higher proportion of risky loans and undoing composition efficiency. Moving back to risk-sensitive risk weights is desirable, but using a scalar multiple or correlation adjustment, reinstates the large advantage IRB banks have in low-risk loans. Lastly, I analyse RBNZ's proposed large increase in capital requirements using a two-country banking model. Due to NZ's dependence on IRB Australian banks, I find the loan rate impact of these changes depends on APRA's approach, with the loan rate effect much smaller than documented by the RBNZ. Essay 3. In Australia, mortgage brokers (MB) are paid by banks an upfront commission and a trail commission, rewarding the length of time a borrower stays with a bank. Both Hayne (2019) and PC (2018) recommend banning the trail commission but differ regarding who should pay the upfront commission, banks or customers. This paper uses a 2-period IO model of a mortgage market to analyse different MB remuneration options. I find if aggregator/MB firms are efficient, borrowers will benefit from banks' paying an upfront commission, with aggregator/MB firms no worse off and bank profits lower. In contrast, customers paying an upfront commission can be better for borrowers but will be worse for both aggregator/MB and banks. If a proportion of borrowers balk at paying MBs the commission, borrower gains are diminished, aggregator/MB firms are worse off, and some bank profits recouped

Requirements for Sensor Integrating Machine Elements : A Review of Wear and Vibration Characteristics of Gears

For condition monitoring of machines sensor integrating standard machine elements provide advantage in acquiring high-quality, robust data from individual machine elements and reducing effort in signal processing. However, research covering small and inexpensive consumer-grade MEMS sensors with respect to integration and measurement requirements for wear detection is limited. In order to define such requirements, the state of the art of vibration-based condition monitoring of gears is reviewed and summarised. The focus is on the characteristics of progressive wear and how it might show in the vibration signal. The review finds that correlation between wear and vibration characteristics of gears exist, but the interpretation of the vibration signals is challenging and requires purpose-built signal processing methods. The review also concludes that integrated MEMS acceleration sensors are theoretically able to measure the vibration characteristics of gears to detect wear. Important characteristics are the gear mesh acceleration with its frequencies and harmonic multiples (GMFi). Frequency range requirements for the sensors depend on the operating conditions of gears, the upper frequency limit needs to be greater or equal to 1.3 GMF$_{i,max}$. For the measuring range requirements, upper limits of 20 g RMS can be extracted within certain conditions. Data analysis requires a minimum frequency resolution which affects the size of memory needed for an integrated sensor system. However, there is a lack of research whether the sensitivity and internal noise behaviour of available MEMS sensors is good enough to measure relative changes in the vibration signals caused by wear

Comprehensive proteomic profiling of clinically relevant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Includes bibliographical references.Tuberculosis is an airborne infectious disease caused by the bacillus known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Despite limited genetic variability, Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains exhibit vast discrepancies in phenotypic presentation in terms of virulence, elicited immune response and transmissibility. This study aims to use Mass Spectrometry (MS) tools to quantitatively and qualitatively investigate the total proteome expressed by various epidemiologically significant strains within the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) as well as a clinically relevant non-tuberculous Mycobacteria (NTM) strain when cultured in vitro. We aim to use the experimental data obtained using discovery mass spectrometry to identify candidate proteins to use in the design of multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) MS experiments for targeted biomarker validation in patient derived biological samples such as sputum. Liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC MS/MS) and data capture were carried out using the LTQ Orbitrap Velos. 1D LC was carried out on gel fractionated samples to increase proteome coverage. This allowed a significant increase in the number of protein identifications of up to 80% proteome coverage per strain. Comparative analysis of the datasets was carried out to identify and define the core-proteome expressed across all strains as well as to identify differentially expressed proteins amongst the strains

Design of sensor integrating gears: methodical development, integration and verification of an in-Situ MEMS sensor system

State of the art vibration-based condition monitoring at gearbox housings faces uncertainties in the interpretation of measurement data due to signal transformations and noise. The state of research shows that direct measurements at the source of vibrations with integrated sensors provide higher quality data. Capacitive MEMS sensors seem predestined for integration, but there is limited research covering compactly integrated MEMS sensor systems for condition monitoring by vibration measurement. In this contribution an integrated MEMS sensor system is designed methodically based on VDI 2206. A sensor system is selected based on requirements extracted of previous contributions and verified on a rotational shaker test rig. Afterwards it is integrated on a gear wheel in a gear test bench. Several verification measurements using different principles and locations are performed to verify the measurands. Results show that the gear mesh vibrations including the sidebands can be measured with the integrated sensors which provide superior signal-noise-ratios compared to other locations. This proofs that the sensor integrating gear system is principally able to perform high quality condition monitoring

Sensor-integrating gears: wear detection by in-situ MEMS acceleration sensors [Sensorintegrierende Zahnräder: Verschleißdetektion durch In-situ MEMS Beschleunigungssensoren]

Gear tooth wear is a common phenomenon leading to malfunctions in machines. To detect wear and faults, gear condition monitoring by vibration is established. The problem is that the measurement data quality for detection of wear by vibration is not good enough with currently established measurement methods, caused by long signal paths of the commonly used housing mounted sensors. In-situ sensors directly at the gear achieve better data quality, but are not yet proved in wear detection. Further it is unknown what analysis methods are suited for in-situ sensor data. Existing gear condition metrics are mainly focused on localized gear tooth faults, and do not estimate wear related values. This contribution aims to improve wear detection by investigating in-situ sensors and advance gear condition metrics. Using a gear test rig to conduct an end of life test, the wear detection ability of an in-situ sensor system and reference sensors on the bearing block are compared through standard gear condition metrics. Furthermore, a machine-learned regression model is developed that maps multiple features related to gear dynamics to the gear mass loss. The standard gear metrics used on the in-situ sensor data are able to detect wear, but not significantly better compared to the other sensors. The regression model is able to estimate the actual wear with a high accuracy. Providing a wear related output improves the wear detection by better interpretability

Expectations and Employment Dynamics in New Zealand Manufacturing

The characteristics of short-run employment dynamics in New Zealand manufacturing and the role of business expectations are examined for the period since the 1970s, including the post-1985 employment slump. Based on econometric estimation, using both business survey based estimates of expectations and cointegration methods applied to conventional manufacturing data, we conclude that labour hoarding is present in manufacturing firms, that the short-run dynamics can be modelled as an error-correction process, that manufacturers' output expectations have a crucial influence on these dynamics and appear more important than relative price expectations, and that understanding how manufacturers' output expectations evolve is crucial to understanding New Zealand's recent manufacturing employment history. These conclusions appear robust for measuring employment dynamics by total hours worked while for numbers employed there was evidence of structural change during the post-1985 period for reasons that warrant fun her investigation

Tomato Tomahto: European Perspectives on Information Science

International audience‘And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart’ (Gershwin and Gershwin, 1937).In the lyric, ‘tomato tomahto’, the marked, or explicitly differentiated term, is tomahto, corresponding more to the English rather than the United States pronunciation. The marked term of a contrast characteristically designates the exception or minor term and the distinctions contained in the unmarked term may be implicitly, and incompletely, understood. Analogously, information science has often been implicitly based in the United States and influenced by American modes of thought, while European, including English, developments have been the occasionally marked and often minor term.This panel explores European perspectives on information science, explicitly and implicitly contrasting them with United States perspectives, from a base in a number of languages and in Europe and beyond.The panel employs diverse and complementary viewpoints and should make for a lively discussion. It concludes, in sympathy with Gershwin, that cooperation and integration, corresponding to increasing globalization, is the way forward.The combination of European and beyond and United States perspectives on information science is especially appropriate for the first ASIS&T Annual Meeting outside North America