The novels of Maurice Gee (1962-1994) : Gee's New Zealand : in the throes of entropy : a thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

This inquiry explores the dualistic aspects of Maurice Gee's novels, particularly with reference to Prowlers and Going West. I will be highlighting the juxtaposition of opposing characters (the observers and the doers), and the opposition of mind and body - of idealism and empiricism - as developed in these two novels. I will also be investigating how Gee's novels explore the dynamics of human relationships, accounting for the recurrent themes of language, fear, death, love and madness, as they appear in his oeuvre. Chapter three explores how Gee's fiction deals with the difficulties of writing an objective account of someone's life. All these areas of investigation reveal an overall view that Gee's New Zealand society has gradually shifted towards a state of chaos and uncertainty within the last one hundred years. In chapter one I will explore the images and events, as depicted in Gee's autobiographical essay "Beginnings," that have shaped his creative imagination. I will show how they have been transformed, or re-worked, in his fiction, as well as how and why they stress the importance of imagination. I will be arguing how, through his characters, Gee continues to exorcise the traumas, conflicts and confusions of his own past, as well as demonstrating the didactic functions given to this process by his subjecting his main characters to similar experiences. I will show how Gee investigates the negative effects of a puritan heritage, and ultimately, how it can be damaging to the growing and developing adolescent psyche, causing confusion, and distorting one's perception of the real, particularly in the way it is expressed in the novel In My Father's Den. I will show how Gee's abhorrence of 'bureaucratic and institutional repression' is expressed in The Big Season, and the 'O' trilogy - at the level of community, - and in the two novels, The Special Flower and Games of Choice - at the level of family. More specifically, I will show how the narratives emphasize the need for the individual to break away from these constricting forces in order to find his own shape, and achieve a firm sense of personal identity. I will inquire into the ways in which Gee explores the idea of 'the mixed nature of the human condition' in the 'O' trilogy, and will commence a discussion of how this theme is developed in Prowlers and Going West, which will be expanded in the remaining two chapters. I will discuss how the sense of feeling 'special,' and of being in possession of 'special knowledge', can create the illusion of feeling privileged, but also how this can be seen as a burden, and how it can generate a sense of 'isolation,' thereby alienating the individual from the outside world. I will show how Gee's vision of the world can be interpreted as dualistic

On the Absence of a Normal Nonabelian Sylow Subgroup

Let $G$ be a finite solvable group. We show that $G$ does not have a normal nonabelian Sylow $p$-subgroup when its prime character degree graph $\Delta(G)$ satisfies a technical hypothesis.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

American dreams

The intention of this thesis is to investigate metaphorical narratives about experiences in American life. The commentaries depict cultural ironies and satirical imagery of everyday activity. The vessel is used as a stage for these metaphors. I used various glazes, stains, and atmospheres in firing, multiple techniques in construction, and a collection of common historical and personal imagery in each piece. A narrative environment appeared to be the best mechanism to convey statements in the vessels. This body of work reflects many of the experiences I had as a child. These experiences translate into many of the values our society was establishing in the nineteenth century. My intent is to capture those fundamental dreams and issues that affect our environment. I utilized detailed imagery to establish a series showing ecological and fundamental changes in our aesthetic values

Contraceptive confidence and timing of first birth in Moldova: an event history analysis of retrospective data

Objectives: To test the contraceptive confidence hypothesis in a modern context. The hypothesis is that women using effective or modern contraceptive methods have increased contraceptive confidence and hence a shorter interval between marriage and first birth than users of ineffective or traditional methods. We extend the hypothesis to incorporate the role of abortion, arguing that it acts as a substitute for contraception in the study context.Setting: Moldova, a country in South-East Europe. Moldova exhibits high use of traditional contraceptive methods and abortion compared with other European countries.Participants: Data are from a secondary analysis of the 2005 Moldovan Demographic and Health Survey, a nationally representative sample survey. 5377 unmarried women were selected.Primary and secondary outcome measures: The outcome measure was the interval between marriage and first birth. This was modelled using a piecewise-constant hazard regression, with abortion and contraceptive method types as primary variables along with relevant sociodemographic controls.Results: Women with high contraceptive confidence (modern method users) have a higher cumulative hazard of first birth 36?months following marriage (0.88 (0.87 to 0.89)) compared with women with low contraceptive confidence (traditional method users, cumulative hazard: 0.85 (0.84 to 0.85)). This is consistent with the contraceptive confidence hypothesis. There is a higher cumulative hazard of first birth among women with low (0.80 (0.79 to 0.80)) and moderate abortion propensities (0.76 (0.75 to 0.77)) than women with no abortion propensity (0.73 (0.72 to 0.74)) 24?months after marriage.Conclusions: Effective contraceptive use tends to increase contraceptive confidence and is associated with a shorter interval between marriage and first birth. Increased use of abortion also tends to increase contraceptive confidence and shorten birth duration, although this effect is non-linear—women with a very high use of abortion tend to have lengthy intervals between marriage and first birth

Active templates: Manipulating pointers with pictures

Active templates are a semi-automatic visual mechanism for generating algorithms for manipulating pointer-based data structures. The programmer creates a picture showing the affected part of a data structure before and after a general-case manipulation. Code for the operation is compiled directly from the picture, which also provides the development environment with enough information to generate, automatically, a series of templates for other similar pictures, each describing a different configuration which the data structure may possess. The programmer completes the algorithm by creating matching after-pictures for each of these cases. At every stage, most of the picture-generation is automatic. Much of the tedious detail of conventional pointer-based data-structure manipulation, such as maintenance of current pointers, is unnecessary in a system based on active templates

Extracting information from the signature of a financial data stream

Market events such as order placement and order cancellation are examples of the complex and substantial flow of data that surrounds a modern financial engineer. New mathematical techniques, developed to describe the interactions of complex oscillatory systems (known as the theory of rough paths) provides new tools for analysing and describing these data streams and extracting the vital information. In this paper we illustrate how a very small number of coefficients obtained from the signature of financial data can be sufficient to classify this data for subtle underlying features and make useful predictions. This paper presents financial examples in which we learn from data and then proceed to classify fresh streams. The classification is based on features of streams that are specified through the coordinates of the signature of the path. At a mathematical level the signature is a faithful transform of a multidimensional time series. (Ben Hambly and Terry Lyons \cite{uniqueSig}), Hao Ni and Terry Lyons \cite{NiLyons} introduced the possibility of its use to understand financial data and pointed to the potential this approach has for machine learning and prediction. We evaluate and refine these theoretical suggestions against practical examples of interest and present a few motivating experiments which demonstrate information the signature can easily capture in a non-parametric way avoiding traditional statistical modelling of the data. In the first experiment we identify atypical market behaviour across standard 30-minute time buckets sampled from the WTI crude oil future market (NYMEX). The second and third experiments aim to characterise the market "impact" of and distinguish between parent orders generated by two different trade execution algorithms on the FTSE 100 Index futures market listed on NYSE Liffe

Multilevel models for cross-national comparisons: the association between individual and national-level demographic characteristics in fertility and partnerships

Multilevel models are increasingly used in social sciences and demography to both account for clustering within higher level aggregations and evaluate the interaction between individual and contextual information. While this is justifiable in some studies, the extension of multilevel models to national level analysis- and particularly cross-national comparative analysis- is problematic and can hamper the understanding of the interplay between individual and country level characteristics. This paper proposes an alternative approach, which allocated countries to classes based on economic, labour market and policy characteristics. Classes influence the profiles of three key demographic behaviours at a sub-national level: marriage, cohabitation and first birth timing. Individual data are drawn from a subset of the Harmonized Histories dataset, and national level information from the GGP contextual database. In this example, three country classes are extracted reflecting two Western patterns and an Eastern pattern, divided approximately along the Hajnal line. While Western countries tend to exhibit higher levels of family allowances albeit accounting for a lower share of spending which is associated with lower marriage and later fertility, Eastern countries generally show a higher share of spending but at lower absolute levels with lower cohabitation rates and early fertility

Latent class models for cross-national comparisons:the association between individual & national-level characteristics in fertility & partnership

Multilevel modelling techniques such as random models or fixed effect are increasingly used in social sciences and demography to both account for clustering within higher level aggregations and evaluate the interaction between individual and contextual information. While this is justifiable in some studies, the extension of multilevel models to national level analysis — and particularly cross-national comparative analysis — is problematic and can hamper the understanding of the interplay between individual and country level characteristics. This paper proposes an alternative approach, which allocates countries to classes based on economic, labour market and policy characteristics. Classes influence the profiles of three key demographic behaviours at a sub-national level: marriage, cohabitation and first birth timing. Woman level data are drawn from a subset of the Harmonized Histories dataset, and national level information from the GGP contextual database. In this example, three country classes are extracted reflecting two Western patterns and an Eastern pattern, divided approximately along the Hajnal line. While Western countries tend to exhibit higher levels of family allowances albeit accounting for a lower share of spending which is associated with lower marriage and later fertility, Eastern countries generally show a higher share of spending but at lower absolute levels with lower cohabitation rates and early fertility

Latent class models for cross-national comparisons:the association between individual & national-level characteristics in fertility & partnership

Multilevel modelling techniques such as random models or fixed effect are increasingly used in social sciences and demography to both account for clustering within higher level aggregations and evaluate the interaction between individual and contextual information. While this is justifiable in some studies, the extension of multilevel models to national level analysis — and particularly cross-national comparative analysis — is problematic and can hamper the understanding of the interplay between individual and country level characteristics. This paper proposes an alternative approach, which allocates countries to classes based on economic, labour market and policy characteristics. Classes influence the profiles of three key demographic behaviours at a sub-national level: marriage, cohabitation and first birth timing. Woman level data are drawn from a subset of the Harmonized Histories dataset, and national level information from the GGP contextual database. In this example, three country classes are extracted reflecting two Western patterns and an Eastern pattern, divided approximately along the Hajnal line. While Western countries tend to exhibit higher levels of family allowances albeit accounting for a lower share of spending which is associated with lower marriage and later fertility, Eastern countries generally show a higher share of spending but at lower absolute levels with lower cohabitation rates and early fertility