Open Journal Systems at the Victoria University of Wellington Library
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Countering Justification Holism in the Epistemology of Logic: The Argument from Pre-Theoretic Universality
Get PDFA key question in the philosophy of logic is how we have epistemic justification for claims about logical entailment (assuming we have such justification at all). Justification holism asserts that claims of logical entailment can only be justified in the context of an entire logical theory, e.g., classical, intuitionistic, paraconsistent, paracomplete etc. According to holism, claims of logical entailment cannot be atomistically justified as isolated statements, independently of theory choice. At present there is a developing interest in—and endorsement of—justification holism due to the revival of an abductivist approach to the epistemology of logic. This paper presents an argument against holism by establishing a foundational entailment-sentence of deduction which is justified independently of theory choice and outside the context of a whole logical theory
‘Try, Learn, Adjust’: it’s time to bring workers into disability support policy
Get PDFAotearoa New Zealand is on the verge of significant change aimed at increasing disabled people’s access to and control and choice over the support they receive in order to have the flexible, high-quality care that enables them to lead ‘good’ lives. However, the system changes – Mana Whaikaha – designed to enact the Enabling Good Lives policy has its roots in neo-liberal funding and policy approaches that undervalue support work, and has largely overlooked workers and workforce development. The lack of recognition of the disability support workforce in this policy development threatens the success of the programme to provide quality support to disabled people
Consensual Sexual Activity before a Sexual Violation is not Mitigating
Get PDFThe Court of Appeal has signalled its intention to review its guideline judgment for sexual violation sentencing, R v AM, which includes guidance on when sentencing judges should treat prior consensual sex as mitigating. The argument this article makes is that the new guideline judgment should remove prior consensual sex as a mitigating factor for two reasons. The first is that treating consensual sexual activity before a sexual violation as mitigating embeds an outdated idea of what constitutes a "real rape" and fails to recognise and uphold sexual autonomy. The second reason for removing the mitigating factor is that it is incorrect as a matter of sentencing methodology to treat prior consensual sex as mitigating in its own right
Craik’s The New Zealanders: A Formative Case of Meaning-Construction
Get PDFFrom the 1820s, there was a surge in the number of books about New Zealand being published in Britain. George Craik’s The New Zealanders (1830) serves an exemplar of how many of these works – which tended to be more popular than academic – not only provided British readers with information about New Zealand and its indigenous people, but which also contributed to processes of meaning-construction that both reflected current trends in interpreting the non-European world, and to some extent anticipated new ways of understanding the indigenous other
Following through: the value of tracing British settlers across time and space
Get PDFMany statistics about British settlers in New Zealand come from death certificates. This article suggests, then trials, a longitudinal database by linking the records of 1,860 first generation settlers. They had high levels of internal migration before leaving Britain and between 20 and 30 percent lived in another country before they arrived here. Between 12 and 19 percent of them left, though only after 16 years on average. But return migration was only between 5 and 8 percent, a fraction of the estimates for Australia and the United States. Rather most men sought greener pastures elsewhere, notably Australia
Unleashing the full potential of teachers: Personal ecologies and funds of knowledge/identity as resources for curriculum making
Get PDFIn this paper we take a credit/asset view of the breadth of knowledge and expertise that teachers have to contribute to curriculum and curriculum making from their everyday and professional experiences. We argue and illustrate the value of teachers grounding their funds of knowledge and identity in designing curriculum that connects with their students and the local context. Teacher funds of knowledge and identity are part of their personal learning ecology. Barron (2006) defines this as encompassing the ideas/knowledge, relationships, and material and virtual resources that people draw on within and across their everyday lives. The ability to mobilise a personal ecology that goes beyond academic or formal/professional knowledge would seem to be a crucial capability for teachers as they localise curricula. Even more so when teachers aim to do this in ways that foster engagement, develop agency and progress student ‘achievement.’ We offer suggestions for researchers, school leaders and teachers interested in exploring the nature and use of funds of knowledge/identity within a learning ecology framing
From Excluded Middle to Homogenization in Plumwood’s Feminist Critique of Logic
Get PDFA key facet of Valerie Plumwood’s feminist critique of logic is her analysis of classical negation. On Plumwood’s reading, the exclusionary features of classical negation generate hierarchical dualisms, i.e., dichotomies in which dominant groups’ primacy is reinforced while underprivileged groups are oppressed. For example, Plumwood identifies the system collapse following from ex contradictione quodlibet—that a theory including both φ and ∼φ trivializes—as a primary source of many of these features. Although Plumwood considers the principle of excluded middle to be compatible with her goals, that she identifies relevant logics as systems lacking a hierarchical negation—whose first-degree fragments are both paraconsistent and paracomplete—suggests that excluded middle plays some role in hierarchical dualisms as well. In these notes, I examine the role of excluded middle in generating oppressive homogenization and try to clarify the relationship between Plumwood’s critique and this principle from several contemporary perspectives. Finally, I examine the matter of whether Plumwood’s critique requires relevance or whether a non-relevant logic could satisfy her criteria and serve as a liberatory logic of difference
New Technologies, Established Ideas: Drone Cameras and the Privacy Torts
Get PDFThis article considers what the challenges posed by drone camera technology tell us about the desirable operation of the New Zealand privacy torts. It highlights, in particular, the importance of recognising the normative nature of the reasonable expectation of privacy test, of considering the claimant's signals that observation was unwelcome when applying it, and of ensuring that privacy protection extends beyond publication of private information
User Impersonation Project
Get PDFVolpara Health is a company focused on finding ways to detect breast cancer with AI in the early stages before it becomes lethal. They have a customer facing application that helps clinicians better assess if their clients have a possibility of breast cancer. Currently, Volpara has no system in place that allows a support team member to log in as one of their clients to help diagnose issues/problems with the dashboard without the client needing to provide their login information. This causes a lot of issues with privacy and security as anyone with the login information of users can access confidential files and other internal systems. This led to the need for a custom solution that allows the impersonation of a user to access the dashboard and no other service. This project provides the desired custom solution that would allow the support staff to check the customers’ dashboard quickly and efficiently for their issues causing less downtime and a better customer support experience. Tools used for developing the project include TypeScript, Angular for the front-end and C#(.Net) for the backend. The performance and security of this project are key, this requires website and backend load tests and performance metrics, as well as security tests to make sure all sensitive methods require authorization to be executed and that the website cannot be bypassed in any way to gain sensitive information. On top of these tests are user tests to make sure the solution is easy and straightforward to use without the need for extra training that would cause more overhead for Volpara Health
Better, Faster Optimisation
Get PDFDiscovering input parameters that yield optimal outputs in black-box functions poses a challenge in various domains, including machine learning and robotics applications. These challenges stem from the complex relationships among input parameters and between inputs and outputs, relationships that are unknown to the search algorithm. This means conventional mathematical techniques like gradient descent and differentiation are inapplicable, instead necessitating a systematic trial-and-error exploration of inputs. Numerous algorithms have been developed to address this issue; however, their performance falls significantly short of perfection. Recognising the potential for improvement, the objective of this project was to design, implement, and evaluate novel algorithms aimed at addressing limitations within existing ones and surpassing their performance. This evaluation necessitated the creation of a testing environment to facilitate robust comparisons between different algorithms. Particular emphasis has been placed on stochastic methods that harness probability distributions to guide the exploration of potential optimal inputs. Within this scope, CMA-ES and Bayesian Optimisation have both demonstrated success through different techniques, but they also exhibit significant shortcomings. As such, the project explores concepts that leverage the successful aspects of both algorithms to address their flaws and enhance performance. The research has produced two innovative enhancements to these existing algorithms and demonstrates their potential to surpass current performance
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