Not a typical union but a union all the same : opinion leaders, employers, dissatisfaction and the formation of New Unions under the Employment Relations Act 2000 : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Studies in Human Resource Management

This research examined the rapid formation and proliferation, in New Zealand, of new predominantly workplace-based unions under the Employment Relations Act 2000 (ERA). More specifically, it examined the motivations and interests of the individuals responsible for forming New Unions, and the process by which the decision to form a New Union was made. To date, scholars have placed little emphasis on these issues and have given greater weight to describing New Unions, and on comparing their structure, activities and character against that of older, more established unions. When compared, the typical New Union has not fared well its small size, limited finances, and limited interests outside of enterprise based bargaining is argued to be ineffective in comparison to the size, finances and activities of larger, more established unions. The status of New Unions as 'genuine' union organisations has also been questioned, particularly as many are regarded as, or more accurately implied to be, incapable of operating at arm's length from employers. In simple terms' many New Unions are not seen as genuine unions as their formation is argued to be an employer not an employee driven phenomenon. However, evidence of actual employer involvement in New Union formation and. more importantly, their activities post-formation is relatively sparse, as are explanations for why employers would consider such involvement necessary. If, as argued, the goal of employers' is to undermine the existing union movement, then the current legislative climate already allows them to do so without recourse to a New Zealand version of the company union phenomenon seen elsewhere. The current climate characterized by employers' to passing on of union negotiated terms and conditions, union recruitment and retention difficulties, and the availability of decollectivist strategies that have been successful without the formation of a tame in-house unions. Critically, in focusing on how New Unions operate, the role of employers, and comparisons with established unions', scholars have overlooked the motivations and interests of New Union members. Some scholars have linked workers' dissatisfaction with, and possible opposition to, the wider union movement to New Union formation. But beyond this, no direct or definitive examination has been provided of why workers chose to form, and subsequently join, organisations that are, according to scholars, ineffective and unable to operate independently. By interviewing New Unions, their employers, and older, more established unions, this study addressed these and other questions, and re-examined New Union formation. The study questioned in particular why those unions formed, the motivations and interests of the workers who formed them, and challenged suggestions that they are not genuine unions. A number of significant findings emerged from the research process. New Union formation was found to be an employee not an employer driven phenomenon, and little evidence was found of actual employer involvement in their formation. Workers' negative personal and shared experiences with the behaviour of older unions and their members and officials were significant to New Union formation. Also significant were the actions and attitudes of key opinion leaders who provided the expertise and knowledge needed to form and operate New Unions, but more importantly acted as a source of workers shared experiences with other unions. Overall, the findings of this study make an important contribution to existing research by re-defining the significance of existing findings. But more importantly, they challenge existing arguments that New Unions are not genuine union organisations that New Union members are opposed to traditional concepts of unionism, and question in particular the relevance of existing empirical definitions and descriptions of the genuine union

On F-Algebroids and Dubrovin's Duality

In this note we introduce the concept of F-algebroid, and give its elementary properties and some examples. We provide a description of the almost duality for Frobenius manifolds, introduced by Dubrovin, in terms of a composition of two anchor maps of a unique cotangent F-algebroid.Comment: 13 pages; v2 has small changes, it has improved exposition. Revised version to appear in: "Archivum Mathematicum

A Bayesian approach to the study of white dwarf binaries in LISA data: The application of a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo method

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) defines new demands on data analysis efforts in its all-sky gravitational wave survey, recording simultaneously thousands of galactic compact object binary foreground sources and tens to hundreds of background sources like binary black hole mergers and extreme mass ratio inspirals. We approach this problem with an adaptive and fully automatic Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler, able to sample from the joint posterior density function (as established by Bayes theorem) for a given mixture of signals "out of the box'', handling the total number of signals as an additional unknown parameter beside the unknown parameters of each individual source and the noise floor. We show in examples from the LISA Mock Data Challenge implementing the full response of LISA in its TDI description that this sampler is able to extract monochromatic Double White Dwarf signals out of colored instrumental noise and additional foreground and background noise successfully in a global fitting approach. We introduce 2 examples with fixed number of signals (MCMC sampling), and 1 example with unknown number of signals (RJ-MCMC), the latter further promoting the idea behind an experimental adaptation of the model indicator proposal densities in the main sampling stage. We note that the experienced runtimes and degeneracies in parameter extraction limit the shown examples to the extraction of a low but realistic number of signals.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in PRD, revised versio

Abelian and non-Abelian statistics in the coherent state representation

We further develop an approach to identify the braiding statistics associated to a given fractional quantum Hall state through adiabatic transport of quasiparticles. This approach is based on the notion of adiabatic continuity between quantum Hall states on the torus and simple product states---or "patterns"---in the thin torus limit, together with a suitable coherent state Ansatz for localized quasiholes that respects the modular invariance of the torus. We give a refined and unified account of the application of this method to the Laughlin and Moore-Read states, which may serve as a pedagogical introduction to the nuts and bolts of this technique. Our main result is that the approach is also applicable---without further assumptions---to more complicated non-Abelian states. We demonstrate this in great detail for the level $k=3$ Read-Rezayi state at filling factor $\nu=3/2$. These results may serve as an independent check of other techniques, where the statistics are inferred from conformal block monodromies. Our approach has the benefit of giving rise to intuitive pictures representing the transformation of topological sectors during braiding, and allows for a self-consistent derivation of non-Abelian statistics without heavy mathematical machinery.Comment: 38 pages, 11 figures, REVTeX 4-1; grammar and typo fixes, published versio