Open Journal Systems at the Victoria University of Wellington Library
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Latency of Fluid Antenna Systems in Mobile Devices: Is a Liquid-Metal Slug Too Sluggish?
No full textMobile communication devices like smartphones, tablets and smartwatches benefit from having multiple internal antennas as far apart as possible to reduce the spatial correlation between receiving antennas and increase channel capacity. However, the small form factor of such devices means that a substantial separation distance is not practical. Additionally, it is not always possible to reduce the size of the antennas to increase the separation distance. Fluid antenna systems are a recently proposed technology in which the physical position of a reconfigurable antenna can be changed to pick up the strongest signal. This project considered a fluid antenna system for a mobile device in which a slug of liquid metal can move to different positions or ‘ports’ in an electrolyte-filled tube upon exposure to a voltage pulse. In light of the spatial variation in signal strength along the tube, algorithms are designed to control the channel selection and movement of the slug. The project compared the performance of a single-tube system with a fixed-location antenna. Simulation results and analysis demonstrate that the conventional fixed-location antenna outperforms the single-tube system due to the latency in transmission caused by the slug’s movement. As a result, two modifications were explored to reduce latency. First, the fixed antenna is made available as a backup to address the outage during slug movement. Secondly, a novel two-tube fluid antenna system was designed to separate the transmission and channel selection functions into different tubes
Web Application for Pollution-Aware Route Planning
Get PDFAir pollution is linked to adverse effects on respiratory and cardiovascular health. It is estimated that outdoor environmental air pollution was responsible for causing 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019. Studies indicate that mitigating exposure to air pollution can lower mortality rates associated with it. One way to reduce exposure is by planning better travel routes for individuals at risk. As it stands, people sensitive to air pollution in Aotearoa New Zealand and in many countries internationally do not have access to tools that would assist in decreasing their outdoor exposure to it. Additionally, route-planning tools are limited in how the search is done and what metrics are used. To address this, a web application for route planning using air pollution data has been developed. The web application has three main components; a database server, a service logic server that contains the search algorithm and pre-processing scripts, and a user interface that communicates with the service logic server. Air pollution readings were taken in the Greater Wellington region and are spatiotemporal data mapped onto real geographic locations. Data is normalised using New Zealand’s National Environmental Standards for Air Quality (NES-AQ). The pathfinding algorithm uses a distance and air pollution-based heuristic with weights for all parameters. The resulting application allows users to customise route searches to prioritise or exclude air pollutants and also include road distance as part of the search heuristic. The paths found by the application are consistent and reproducible and allow users the ability to fine-tune searches to fit their needs and gain insights about air pollution in Wellington roads
Mobile Automation Testing Framework and QA Dashboard
Get PDFThis project has two parts. The first is on the evaluation and implementation of an automation testing framework for a mobile application, Onsite, and the second is on the design and creation of a dashboard for the QA team. Onsite is a mobile application for property valuations in India with a focus on alleviating its complex, inaccurate, or missing property addressing. However, the lack of automation in Onsite could lead to erroneous code leaking to releases. Moreover, the cost and time in finding and fixing bugs post-release is significantly higher than prevention through automated tests. Therefore, the first part of the project was on the evaluation and implementation of an automation testing framework for Onsite. The results of the evaluation have proven to be sufficient as it can produce the functionalities of the application in the testing scripts efficiently. The testing framework utilizes WebdriverIO, Appium, and BrowserStack. However, divergence occurred from the original goal after Onsite faced major changes that would invalidate the efforts of automation, resulting in the shift in focus from the implementation phase to code architecture, readability, and structure, instead of code coverage. As for the second part of the project, the QA Dashboard, the results are satisfactory as per stakeholder feedback. Moreover, it is evident that the QA Dashboard is satisfactory as it fulfils the original goal of providing an overview for the QA team and its managers. Specifically, the managers can utilize the dashboard during stakeholder sessions to show the status of automation within the squads and projects, while the QA team is able to determine priorities for the upcoming sprints based on areas lacking manual or automated testing
Surveying the .NZ Top Level Domain: Business Sector Categorisation
Get PDFThere is a vast amount of information present across “.NZ” domains, but no publicly accessible or viable tools or resources exist to categorise them. All currently existing solutions are either heavily rate-limited or require expensive monthly subscriptions, leaving no affordable option to categorise our dataset of 210,000 “.NZ” domains. Combining this new business category dimension of data with other data sets such as the Transport Layer Security (TLS) information or cookie usage of ”.NZ” domains would enable us greater insight into the landscape of New Zealand’s digital presence. With such a rich dataset, we can draw conclusions as to which of New Zealand business sectors are the most or least secure, which sectors have the greatest online presence, and more - providing a solid foundation for further research into how Aotearoa New Zealand’s online presence impacts our economy, cyber-security, and more. This project surveyed publicly available options for domain business categorisation, alongside developing a system capable of rapidly extracting website information and classifying it into one of 25 business categories. The developed classifier uses the ‘transformers’ Python library and categorises a test dataset with 70% accuracy, using only a website’s title, description, and keyword meta-tags. A command-line interface was also developed using the ’click’ Python library to allow for information extraction and classification via a scripting interface, enabling automation and integration with other systems. Thirdly, an SQLite database was designed and populated with both our dataset and information extracted from domains. With this system, it was discovered that the top ”.NZ” domain category in the dataset is ‘Business’ at 79,815 instances, followed by ’Arts & Entertainment’ with 25,983 instances, and ’Shopping’ with 12,647 instances
A Hate Speech Classifier Trained to Predict a Distribution of Ratings
Get PDFThis project developed and tested an alternative methodology for dataset creation informing AI hate speech classifier systems. Information on AI development and training is largely kept private by social media companies that utilise them, including hate speech classifiers that are intended to protect people from being exposed to harmful content. This is problematic as there is little community input nor knowledge on the tools which are control the content they are served online. The methodology proposed by this project attempts to address this by asking people disproportionately targeted by hate speech online to inform the hate speech classifier developed by annotating instances of hate speech to create a dataset according to this project’s methodology. Those targeted by hate speech were asked to annotate in subscription to an ethical idea that they have a right to input in this process and they will be more effective at determining what counts as hateful towards members of their own group. As this is a pilot study practicality meant that the scope is restricted to people in the Rainbow community classifying Rainbow hate speech comments left online. A substantial process for altering survey design and ethics approval was required on this project, in part due to a more sensitive subject matter and potential to harm for survey participants. The dataset creation methodology developed in this project is intended to improve upon majority rules (gold standard) annotation classification by creating a pilot dataset and methodology which can be used by classifiers for soft label annotation
DOM Instrumentation to Display Provenance Data
Get PDFWith ever-evolving privacy laws, end users of software systems are increasingly expressing concerns about the usage of their data. Real-world incidents, such as the 2019 data breach affecting up to 112,000 Air New Zealand Airpoints customers, have contributed to a growing awareness of data privacy issues. In response to these concerns, Aotearoa New Zealand regulators re-evaluated the privacy act in 2020, imposing financial liability on data providers to mitigate potential breaches. To address the intentional obscurity of end users' data, this project contributes to an infrastructure enabling users to monitor the usage of their data when interacting with web applications. This is done by providing end users with increased transparency regarding the handling of their data during web browsing. Modern web applications have complex layered architectures, often involving server-side applications with existing solutions. Developing and retrofitting systems to support this transparency is both intricate and costly; hence, automation was the desirable approach. This research explored the implementation of a solution by extending support to an additional layer, exposing existing provenance data from the server-side domain to the client-side domain through manipulation of the client-side Document Object Model (DOM). This data was displayed back to the user as a pop-up instrumented within the DOM. To achieve this objective, a range of prototypes were developed to instrument the client-side DOM and expose existing provenance data. These prototypes included browser plugins, pure JavaScript instrumentation, and framework plugins. The project assessed the performance of each prototype by measuring performance overheads to determine whether the added performance cost is worth the functionality
‘We want bread, education and freedom’: An ethnographic snapshot of Athens on 17 November
Get PDF‘We want bread, education and freedom’ is an ethnographic experiment that traces and weaves together the unfolding of multiple crises in Greece in the mid-2010s. An ethnographically informed snapshot of a visit to the squatted hotel City Plaza in Athens, the piece unfolds by exploring the polysemy and versatility of the 1973 slogan ‘Bread, education, freedom’ and how it has been reappropriated and re-signified over time to make sense of the 2010 economic crisis and later, of the so-called refugee crisis. While the text pulls together historical events, political discourses and personal reflections, the graphics capture the Hotel City Plaza’s dense affects and lay bare those tensions, ambiguities and ambivalences that are often hard to verbalise and make sense of. Altogether this piece configures an unfished, raw and sensorial journey through the struggles of reconciling political belonging, positionality and intellectual commitment to anthropology
Commentary: climate policy in Aotearoa New Zealand – a backwards flip?
Get PDFIn 1975, Chris Nobbs, a young New Zealander trained in chemistry and economics and working at the Environment Directorate of the OECD in Paris, wrote a paper titled ‘The economics of stock pollutants: the example of cadmium’. Together with David Pearce, later an eminent environmental economist, he noted that ‘pollution taxes will not secure the optimal level of pollution … since such taxes are relevant only for flow pollutant situations’ (Nobbs and Pearce, 1975).
It was not until a generation later that it became widely accepted that carbon dioxide itself is a stock pollutant and that only ‘net zero’ CO2 emissions will halt CO2-induced global warming (Fankhauser et al., 2022). This has led to nearly 100 states and 1,000 large companies establishing net zero goals (Hale et al., 2022). One such is New Zealand’s Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act 2019, which requires the government to set and meet carbon budgets to reach net zero long-lived greenhouse gas emissions by, and beyond, 2050
The Experiences of the Managed: case management in the Aotearoa New Zealand prison system
Get PDFIn 2011, the Department of Corrections/Ara Poutama Aotearoa (Corrections) began a series of initiatives aimed at reducing reoffending, including introducing case management. In 2016 Corrections stated that case management had led to improvements in four areas: the assessment of prisoner needs; prisoner motivation to complete activities; scheduling of programmes; and levels of reintegration support. Using in-depth qualitative interviews of seven men formerly in prison in Aotearoa New Zealand, this study explores the perceptions that the formerly imprisoned have of case management, and examines the four improvements identified by Corrections. While based on a small and unique sample group, the study provides interesting indicative insights into case management in the prisons of Aotearoa New Zealand
"Sanitation and Ventilation as required in a Modern House": a review of by-laws in the 1890s relating to toilets in New Zealand Housing
Get PDFGood public sanitation has a long history in New Zealand, with Joseph Banks recording on 21 October 1769: "Every House or small knot of 3 or 4 has a regular necessary house where every one repairs and consequently the neighbourhood is kept clean." Although piped water was in main city centres (e.g. Dunedin, Wellington) by the 1860s, it was not until the 1880s that it became common in houses. By the 1890s "earth" or "water" closets were built onto laundry outhouse or at the farthest corner of the garden. As the population of cities increased, public health issues became more important, requiring the introduction of by-laws. As well as issues of sanitation, the by-laws were concerned with fire and public decency. The paper will review the evolution of council by-laws dealing with privies and toilets in Wellington in the 1890s
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