The Conservation Movement in New Zealand

Over the past 150 years of European settlement of New Zealand, the basis of economic growth has been the exploitation of her natural resources. The object of this study is to examine the character, motives, and exploitation of the natural resources, and the growth of attitudes to conservation. Because of the scope that such a study could cover, it is necessary to restrict it to the more outstanding characteristics of the movement for conservation in New Zealand. In the first chapter the conservation movement, particularly that of the United States, will be discussed. This will be followed in Chapter II by an examination of the resource elements of New Zealand in terms of their nature and degree of exhaustibility. In Chapter III, conservation policies and attitudes towards various resources will be identified, from the early years of European settlement to the end of World War II. The changing attitudes to the utilisation of resources, will be examined to determine their relative importance in deciding how various resources will be utilised. Contemporary attitudes to the utilisation of utilisation of resources, and to the conservation of those resources will be examined in Chapter IV. In the final chapter an attempt will be made to - 6 - identify a "conservation movement" in New Zealand in terms of the development of attitudes to resource use over the 150 years of European settlement. This study is made with the aim of highlighting developments in conservation thought at a time when the implications of' "conservation" are assuming increasing importance for New Zealand

Military Settlement in the Middle Waikato Basin

Military settlement formed a brief but distinctive phase in the European occupation of the Middle Waikato Basin. Prior to the 1863 - 1864 Waikato War, few Europeans, other than a small number of missionaries and traders, were settled in the region. The setting of the Middle Waikato Basin was largely unmodified by Man, except along the major rivers where a dense Maori population was settled. During the 1850's, the encroachment of European settlers upon Maori tribal lands in many North Island regions, including the Waikato, led to an increase in tension between the two populations and open conflict. This conflict slowed down the progress of colonization in the North Island. To enable colonization to continue in those regions disturbed by Maori unrest, a scheme of military settlement was devised. The aim of this scheme was the formation of compact, self-sufficient defensive settlements to act as a deterrent to Maori unrest. These settlements would also provide an assurance to settlers of security for their life and property. Military settlement in the Middle Waikato Basin consisted of two phases. In the first phase, the nodal points of the military settlements, the townships, were established and occupied by the military settlers. In the second phase, farm districts were surveyed around the nodal points and the military settlers moved out from the townships to occupy and develop the land they were allocated. A number of factors, relating to deficiencies in the scheme of military settlement and to the particular problems of settlement in the region, contributed to the failure of the military settlers to successfully establish farms on the land they were allocated. The scheme of military settlement largely failed as a method of colonization in the Middle Waikato Basin. However, the pattern of human occupation, established in the initial phase of military settlement, remained when the need for defensive settlements had gone, and forms the basis of the present pattern of settlement

Quantum Fields in a Big Crunch/Big Bang Spacetime

We consider quantum field theory on a spacetime representing the Big Crunch/Big Bang transition postulated in the ekpyrotic or cyclic cosmologies. We show via several independent methods that an essentially unique matching rule holds connecting the incoming state, in which a single extra dimension shrinks to zero, to the outgoing state in which it re-expands at the same rate. For free fields in our construction there is no particle production from the incoming adiabatic vacuum. When interactions are included the total particle production for fixed external momentum is finite at tree level. We discuss a formal correspondence between our construction and quantum field theory on de Sitter spacetime.Comment: 30 pages, RevTex file, five postscript figure file

Parametric amplification of metric fluctuations through a bouncing phase

We clarify the properties of the behavior of classical cosmological perturbations when the Universe experiences a bounce. This is done in the simplest possible case for which gravity is described by general relativity and the matter content has a single component, namely a scalar field in a closed geometry. We show in particular that the spectrum of scalar perturbations can be affected by the bounce in a way that may depend on the wave number, even in the large scale limit. This may have important implications for string motivated models of the early Universe.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, LaTeX-ReVTeX format, version to match Phys. Rev.

Topological defects: A problem for cyclic universes?

We study the behaviour of cosmic string networks in contracting universes, and discuss some of their possible consequences. We note that there is a fundamental time asymmetry between defect network evolution for an expanding universe and a contracting universe. A string network with negligible loop production and small-scale structure will asymptotically behave during the collapse phase as a radiation fluid. In realistic networks these two effects are important, making this solution only approximate. We derive new scaling solutions describing this effect, and test them against high-resolution numerical simulations. A string network in a contracting universe, together with the gravitational radiation background it has generated, can significantly affect the dynamics of the universe both locally and globally. The network can be an important source of radiation, entropy and inhomogeneity. We discuss the possible implications of these findings for bouncing and cyclic cosmological models.Comment: 11 RevTeX 4 pages, 6 figures; version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Evidence against or for topological defects in the BOOMERanG data ?

The recently released BOOMERanG data was taken as ``contradicting topological defect predictions''. We show that such a statement is partly misleading. Indeed, the presence of a series of acoustic peaks is perfectly compatible with a non-negligible topological defects contribution. In such a mixed perturbation model (inflation and topological defects) for the source of primordial fluctuations, the natural prediction is a slightly lower amplitude for the Doppler peaks, a feature shared by many other purely inflationary models. Thus, for the moment, it seems difficult to rule out these models with the current data.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Some changes following extraordinarily slow referee Reports and new data. Main results unchanged (sorry

Cosmological parameters from SDSS and WMAP

We measure cosmological parameters using the three-dimensional power spectrum P(k) from over 200,000 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in combination with WMAP and other data. Our results are consistent with a ``vanilla'' flat adiabatic Lambda-CDM model without tilt (n=1), running tilt, tensor modes or massive neutrinos. Adding SDSS information more than halves the WMAP-only error bars on some parameters, tightening 1 sigma constraints on the Hubble parameter from h~0.74+0.18-0.07 to h~0.70+0.04-0.03, on the matter density from Omega_m~0.25+/-0.10 to Omega_m~0.30+/-0.04 (1 sigma) and on neutrino masses from <11 eV to <0.6 eV (95%). SDSS helps even more when dropping prior assumptions about curvature, neutrinos, tensor modes and the equation of state. Our results are in substantial agreement with the joint analysis of WMAP and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, which is an impressive consistency check with independent redshift survey data and analysis techniques. In this paper, we place particular emphasis on clarifying the physical origin of the constraints, i.e., what we do and do not know when using different data sets and prior assumptions. For instance, dropping the assumption that space is perfectly flat, the WMAP-only constraint on the measured age of the Universe tightens from t0~16.3+2.3-1.8 Gyr to t0~14.1+1.0-0.9 Gyr by adding SDSS and SN Ia data. Including tensors, running tilt, neutrino mass and equation of state in the list of free parameters, many constraints are still quite weak, but future cosmological measurements from SDSS and other sources should allow these to be substantially tightened.Comment: Minor revisions to match accepted PRD version. SDSS data and ppt figures available at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/sdsspars.htm

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele