Open Journal Systems at the Victoria University of Wellington Library
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Improvements to Drinking Water: Monitoring, Reporting and Record-keeping Needed to Protect Health
Get PDFTaumata Arowai, the new independent water services regulator, recently consulted publicly on the drinking water rules for water suppliers. We use a case study on nitrate and official information requests to demonstrate the current weaknesses in the drinking water monitoring and reporting systems and why the reforms proposed by Taumata Arowai seem unlikely to substantively address many of these deficiencies. To ensure sufficient public health surveillance and robust epidemiological research into the potential health impacts of drinking water contaminants, Taumata Arowai should: 1) establish a national database for water supply and quality; 2) mandate the standardisation of reporting requirements across water suppliers; 3) increase the frequency and range of water quality testing; and 4) maintain a national map of water supplies. These upgrades are particularly important in an era of rapid land use changes and climate change
Living Within Biophysical Limits: green growth versus degrowth
Get PDFSince the early 1970s there has been vigorous debate over whether global economic growth can continue more or less indefinitely on afinite planet. Central to the most recent version of this debate are the claims and counterclaims of those advocating ‘green growth’ and those advocating ‘degrowth’. This article outlines and briefly assesses the main areas of agreement and disagreement between these contending schools of thought. It is argued that humanity must live within real, non-negotiable biophysical constraints. Failure to make the required transformation of the global economy soon will ultimately undermine social progress. But what level and form of global economic activity is ultimatel
Intergenerational Income Mobility in New Zealand
No full textIntergenerational mobility considers how a child’s outcomes are associated with their parents’ situation. If intergenerational mobility is low, then a child has less of a chance of moving up the income distribution relative to their parents. This can influence skills development, productivity growth and the achievement of improved living standards.
The findings presented in this article highlight the importance of policies that focus resources on improving educational outcomes for students from low socio-economic backgrounds, which would help lift intergenerational economic mobility and support higher living standards for all
An Expenditure based Approach to Measuring Child Poverty in New Zealand
Get PDFPoverty is complex, has many dimensions and is difficult to define and measure. When considering child poverty reduction policies, we must thus consider as many different dimensions as possible. In this way, researchers can provide data to build a comprehensive understanding of the issues, allowing decision makers to apply their own judgements. This study aims to provide such data by exploring how household expenditure data can add to our understanding of child poverty
Rethinking Te Aro in the 1910s
Get PDFWellington's Te Aro neighbourhood is particularly notable for both its broad expanse of relatively flat land and for its rectilinear grid of streets and associated superblocks in a city otherwise known for its hills and irregular road system. Over the course of the nineteenth-century after the start of European settlement in 1840, the town acres within the superblocks of Te Aro were more intensively developed in myriad ways, resulting in a haphazard arrangement of worker dwellings, commercial premises, and industrial outfits aligned along largely private lanes and alleys. With the notable exception of the street grid, nearly all vestiges of this initial, Victorian-era development were progressively destroyed during the twentieth century.
Although most of the architectural and urban reinvention of Te Aro did not occur until the decades following World War II, acknowledgment of the major factors that would ultimately contribute to this process - traffic congestion, the low quality of the existing building stock, and a strong shift away from residential functions - became more and more emphasised during the 1910s. A writer for the Evening Post in 1913 imagined the neighbourhood just seven years in the future: "the dingy wooden boxes on Te Aro Flat will have given place to handsome warehouses and shops and factories …The problem of traffic, already threatening trouble … is certainly a task for the ablest engineer nowadays to suggest a way out" (Autos "The Future" p 3). This degree of optimism for rapid change was quickly tempered by the realities of world war and, in retrospect, the 1910s can be interpreted as a period of incubation for ideas about architecture urban planning in Te Aro that would only come to fruition later in the century
Code of Ethics for Automatic Speech Recognition
Get PDFAutomatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which turns human speech into text, has had a long history of development and continues to improve and expand. Both academic and industry discussions on the technology present ethical issues regarding the privacy, security, and use of user data, as well the accuracy of ASR for different demographics. This paper reviews the literature on such ethical issues and proposes a code of ethics that addresses them. A case study on Google ASR products is conducted, evaluating that the industry still has improvements to make, especially in user data collection and use, and in accuracy
Code of Ethics: A Transoral Robotic Surgery Case Study
Get PDFRobotics is a high technology that integrates various disciplines such as computer engineering, artificial intelligence, mechanics, bionics, and so forth. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, multiple fields such as engineering, medical, computer and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) are reviewed in order to satisfy the objective that to develop a code of ethics for robotics. For the main outcomes of the paper, a code of ethics that combines multiple fields is produced. In total, there are five essential ethical principles that are outlined in the code of ethics. In addition, the paper also proposes the idea that there can be a concise ethical risk assessment to apply to any robotic product or service in order for any stakeholders to intervene in time to calibrate its ethical value, such that the robotic technology can truly be beneficial to human society
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