Will Liam save us? : an analysis of Apple's zero-waste goals and waste networks associated with the MacBook : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

As popular awareness of global environmental crises rises, the circular economy model is increasingly heralded as a means to address the environmental impact of traditional extractive economies. Technology provider Apple has been among high-profile corporations quick to adopt a circular model, announcing their plans to both end mining and become zero-waste. In this thesis, I analyse Apple’s zero-waste plans using my own notebook as a case study. A discourse analysis of the company’s 2017 Environmental Responsibility Report reveals that the zero-waste approach is (at least in part) a marketing strategy. It works to increase Apple’s power and consumer base. The zero-waste strategy is presented as distinct from their social responsibility, echoing the way that waste is conceptualised within the circular economy. Both Apple’s zero-waste plan and the circular economy rely heavily on technological innovation to offer solutions to waste. Waste is understood as something distinct from, and entirely controllable by, human intention. Individual case studies of my notebooks aluminium casing and hard disk drive demonstrate that vast waste networks of human and nonhuman actors enable Apple to function as they do, and are in fact integral to any economy organised around the pursuit of profit. Within this context, attempts to circumvent the worst harms associated with the extraction, production, consumption, and disposal contexts of ICT equipment will end up reinscribing or reinforcing wasteful practices. Through an auto-ethnographic description of dealing with the notebooks possibly failing battery, I argue that understanding ourselves as separate from waste networks (as zero-waste discourses encourage us to do) similarly forecloses the possibility of disrupting the most negative impacts of waste. Repair tentatively emerges as one way of destabilising the power of large corporations that benefit from capital such as Apple. Ultimately, the case studies presented here raise serious doubts about both Apple’s zero-waste strategy and the circular economy in general

Resurgence and Topological Strings

The mathematical idea of resurgence allows one to obtain nonperturbative information from the large-order behavior of perturbative expansions. This idea can be very fruitful in physics applications, in particular if one does not have access to such nonperturbative information from first principles. An important example is topological string theory, which is a priori only defined as an asymptotic perturbative expansion in the coupling constant g_s. We show how the idea of resurgence can be combined with the holomorphic anomaly equation to extend the perturbative definition of the topological string and obtain, in a model-independent way, a large amount of information about its nonperturbative structure.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. Pedestrian introduction to 1308.1695 and 1407.4821, based on my talk at String Math 2014. Submitted for the proceedings of that conferenc

Neural Network Applications

Artificial neural networks, also called neural networks, have been used successfully in many fields including engineering, science and business. This paper presents the implementation of several neural network simulators and their applications in character recognition and other engineering area

Eastern Taranaki Basin field guide.

Linking the onshore and offshore parts of Eastern Taranaki Basin: Insights to stratigraphic architecture, sedimentary facies, sequence stratigraphy, paleogeography and hydrocarbon exploration from the on land record

On the partition sum of the NS five-brane

We study the Type IIA NS five-brane wrapped on a Calabi-Yau manifold X in a double-scaled decoupling limit. We calculate the euclidean partition function in the presence of a flat RR 3-form field. The classical contribution is given by a sum over fluxes of the self-dual tensor field which reduces to a theta-function. The quantum contributions are computed using a T-dual IIB background where the five-branes are replaced by an ALE singularity. Using the supergravity effective action we find that the loop corrections to the free energy are given by B-model topological string amplitudes. This seems to provide a direct link between the double-scaled little strings on the five-brane worldvolume and topological strings. Both the classical and quantum contributions to the partition function satisfy (conjugate) holomorphic anomaly equations, which explains an observation of Witten relating topological string theory to the quantization of three-form fields.Comment: 35 page