13553 research outputs found
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Leveraging advances in RNAi and CRISPR for improved biological pest control
No full textThe limitations of chemical pesticides and their associated risks highlight the need for more sustainable pest management strategies. Biological control using natural enemies offers an eco-friendly alternative but is sometimes constrained by efficiency and scalability. Emerging molecular tools—RNA interference (RNAi) and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-based gene editing—present novel opportunities to enhance existing biological control or to control pests directly. RNAi induces targeted gene knockdown via a non-heritable, transient response. CRISPR enables precise genetic modifications and could improve traits in beneficial insects or disrupt essential genes in pests, optionally including a gene drive for increased power. Although limitations remain for several species, these technologies could be valuable tools for integrated pest management. Their future implementation raises biosafety and regulatory considerations, particularly for self-propagating systems like gene drives. This review showcases developments in RNAi and CRISPR-based pest control, and calls for risk-based, adaptive governance to enable their responsible use in sustainable agriculture
Archigestures: Activating Urban Space
No full textStreet skateboarding emerged as a reaction to architecture, allowing people to reinterpret space on their terms. The contentious leisure activity exemplifies an underlying urge to do more than passively receive the urban environment. An overreliance on the universal experience has generated a desire to engage with architecture not as predetermined but as fluctuating, connected to the mind and body. This thesis explores how an unconventional spatial practice could help design architecture, providing occupants more opportunities to engage with the urban environment. Interpretive research is utilised to learn about skateboarding, play and the body. Following this, experimental and mixed media research applies the established knowledge through iterative design tests. The research reimagines Wellington's Civic Square before creating an urban network of appropriative follies in Wellington's CBD. The tests aim to challenge spatial demarcation conventions, rethink the status quo for desirable public spaces and identify ways street skateboarding's rationale can be integrated into the design process. The findings contribute to the discourse around urban play and advocate for more body-oriented design in the public realm. While skateboarding is one small thread in a much larger conversation, its teachings around designing better for the body warrant exploration—the prospect of channelling some of this understanding into more common spatial practices is the motivation for this research.</p
The Archivist
No full textThis thesis, The Archivist, is a speculative exploration of architecture’s role in the preservation and reconstruction of history in the face of environmental collapse. Inspired by the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959, ACFL), written by Walter M. Miller Jr., this thesis examines the role of the archive in acting as a threshold between history and its collective memory. It is an exploration of the forces at play within this transition, with architecture being the core medium of investigation. As in ACFL, this thesis builds up a fictional story that, together with the literature review, will investigate a metaphorical response using architectural design and representation.The thesis follows The Archivist, a character that exists after our society collapses due to climate change. His main role is to try to build up the history of the city which, like past civilisations, collapsed leaving only fragmented pieces as testimonies of the society’s development, struggles, and collapse. His work is to compose these fragments into his interpretation of the past, which acts as an allegory for the complex process archivist historians undergo in making sense of our past history. Disparate fragments are collected and organised into neat stories that tell us where we came from and why things are the way they are. The learnings gained from the Archivist’s interpreted compositions are then implemented in the design of his archive, the site of transition between history and collective memory. This Archive, focused on rebuilding after a civilisational collapse, mirrors the intricacies of the process of this transition. The Archive becomes an allegorical exploration of the complexities of archival process and the ways in which we understand our history.</p
Thinking Female Bodyspace and Housing Through Corporeal Feminist Theory
No full textNo description supplie
Whānau, Whenua, Whare
No full textAccess to healthy, affordable housing remains a pressing challenge in Aotearoa, affecting both whānau and the whenua. This research responds to this need by advancing innovative, equitable, and sustainable housing strategies. By blending Indigenous knowledge systems with circular construction methods and Passive House principles, the study aims to design a modular, highperformance self-build whare prototype that supports future papakāinga initiatives. Collaborating with XFrame for prefabrication expertise and guided by the principles of Te Whare Hangahanga, this research explores the potential of existing prefabricated systems to create a proof-ofconcept whare. The iterative process integrates both qualitative and quantitative approaches to demonstrate how these systems can empower whānau to build homes that are affordable, environmentally sustainable, and resilient. With transformative Indigenous agency at the forefront, this research offers a pathway to address housing inequities while enhancing the wellbeing of both whānau and whenua.</p
The vein preservation experiences of people with chronic kidney disease and criteria for medical alerts to prevent harm
No full textA significant challenge that patients with chronic kidney disease face is avoiding medical treatments that could damage the veins needed for an arteriovenous fistula for haemodialysis. Patient safety is described as a wicked problem in healthcare. To improve patient safety, designers must identify the patients' journeys, their interactions with healthcare providers, and the socio-technical systems that surround them. This research aimed to understand and describe the experiences of patients with chronic kidney disease, their whānau, their healthcare providers, and the systems and strategies currently in use. It also aimed to create the design criteria for a medical alert to protect patients' veins. Previously, the design requirements for a medical alert that best suits patients with CKD in Aotearoa New Zealand were not known.Under a pragmatist research paradigm, qualitative semi-structured interviews, observations, and participatory design workshops were used to understand people's experiences with vein preservation. A participatory methodology was chosen to emphasise collaboration and inclusivity. It included a significant proportion of Tangata Whenua to ensure that any design innovations suit people who experience health inequalities in Aotearoa New Zealand. The findings were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.The research indicates there is a lack of awareness and acknowledgment among healthcare providers regarding the importance of protecting veins for dialysis fistulas. While patients recognise the need to protect their veins, power imbalances between patients and healthcare providers can negatively affect patients and their ability to prevent harm. The visibility and effectiveness of medical alerts for vein preservation in the New Zealand medical warning system and phlebotomy systems are inadequate, resulting in healthcare providers' unawareness, alert fatigue, and potential long-term damage to patients' veins. Medical warning alert wristbands create patient identification and staff workload concerns.Service blueprints, patient storyboards, and systems diagrams were also created as part of this research to depict the patient's journey with CKD, their interactions with healthcare providers and healthcare systems, and where medical harm most often occurs. A set of design criteria was developed to serve as a foundation for formulating and evaluating a medical alert to improve patient safety and change healthcare providers' behaviours to protect patients' veins for dialysis fistulas. These design criteria can potentially increase healthcare providers' awareness and acknowledgment of the potential long-term harm to patients' veins, foster shared knowledge of vein preservation, and significantly reduce the need for patients to advocate for themselves to prevent medical harm and ultimately contribute to a more positive experience for renal patients, their whānau, and their healthcare providers. This research also highlights the importance of understanding people's experiences and real-world problems in Aotearoa New Zealand to inform the design of medical alert systems.</p
OLD HOUSE AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA: SKETCHING PERSONAL AND PLANETARY HISTORIES - Full Paper
No full textJust at the edge of the sea in South Bay, Te Waero o te Hiku,1 Kaikōura,2 Aotearoa3 sits an old, rundown family house. It’s a tiny shed-turned-home hand-built in 1953. Earthquakes and southerlies have
battered its yellow painted 50’s optimism over the years, and it’s more like flotsam from the sea and
reef than a statement of human resistance. The little house seems to be in conversation with its vast
context. It has complex miniature microclimates: tiny variations in surface, dust, light, air, sound,
birds nesting in the roof—as well as memory, lost gardens, clumsy attempts at repair. Outside are
enormous weather systems, immense sea, dynamic rock. Old House explores the strange architecture
of this personal and planetary conversation through a multi-media architectural drawing installation.
4
Multiple ‘sketch creatures’ roam through Te Auaha gallery drawn from hand bent music wire,
projected images, graphite, stones, seaweed, as well as VR portals, smell and sound. Participants
engage with these multi-sensorial architectural sketches, becoming immersed in unruly architectures
of the old Kaikōura house and its dynamic landscape context. Old House is part of an ongoing project
exploring relations between personal and planetary dynamics through ‘expanded’ architectural
drawings.
5 This paper attempts to articulate the research: its poiétic scalar relations—how intimate,
personal histories of the house intersect and intra-act with abstract histories in the vast ‘planetary’
landscape beyond. The Old House research looks to destabilise relations between drawing, drawer and
the worlds being drawn, and in doing so, highlight the intertwining of personal and planetary
histories
Evolutionary Computation for Designing Deep Recurrent Neural Networks
No full textRecurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are a major class of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Suitable network architecture is vital for RNNs to achieve high performance. However, designing the architecture of deep RNNs (DRNNs) is a complicated and time-consuming process. Each layer of a DRNN contains numerous hyper-parameters. It is challenging to optimize the hyper-parameters of all layers jointly to achieve the best possible learning performance. Trial-and-error methods for designing DRNNs have been proven to be laborious and highly costly in practice. Therefore, an efficient automatic architecture search technique is needed to design DRNNs.Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a popular evolutionary computation based approach. Existing research works already explored the use of GAs in designing ANNs. But, most of the existing approaches focus on the design of fixed-depth ANNs. However, it is not easy to fix the depth of DRNNs in advance, since different problems need DRNNs of different depths. Hence, the potential of GA has to be further explored to evolve the architecture of DRNNs of varying depths.The primary goal of this thesis is to develop advanced GA approaches for designing Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) based DRNN architectures of varying depths effectively and efficiently.Firstly, this thesis proposes a GA-based algorithm called Two-Stage Surrogate-Assisted GA (TS-SA-GA) with a progressive incremental strategy to design the architecture of LSTM networks of varying depths. The progressive approach can effectively extend well-designed shallow networks to high performing deep networks. Moreover, the new GA-based algorithm adopts newly designed knowledge-driven crossover and mutation operators to identify and repair LSTM network designs affected by inappropriate use of activation functions, thereby significantly reducing the chances for GA to evolve hard-to-train LSTM network architectures. Furthermore, this thesis proposes a two-stage surrogate method to predict the trainability and fitness of LSTM networks. This improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the GA-based algorithm to evolve LSTM networks.Secondly, this thesis proposes a new algorithm called Evolutionary Design of LSTM Ensembles (ED-LSTM-Ensemble) based on multi-objective optimization techniques to evolve LSTM networks and ensembles simultaneously to directly utilize the ensemble performance to drive the evolution of base LSTM networks. Additionally, this thesis proposes a connection weight inheritance strategy to evolve LSTM networks and ensembles efficiently and effectively.Thirdly, this thesis proposes a new algorithm called Skip Connections through Evolutionary and Differential Architecture search (SCEDA) to design LSTM networks together with appropriate skip connections automatically. Designing LSTM networks together with skip connections is highly challenging. This thesis hybridize gradient-based DAS and evolutionary architecture search to optimize the architecture of LSTM networks with suitable skip connections in a single evolutionary process to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the search process.Finally, this thesis conducts an in-depth empirical analysis of the impact of activation functions on the trainability of LSTM networks based on the concept of Edge Of Chaos. The analysis reveals the strong interrelation between the activation functions across multiple layers of an LSTM network and the trainability of the network. The analysis also highlights the importance of controlling activation functions to avoid generating untrainable LSTM networks. On the basis of the analysis, this thesis proposes a machine learning model to guide the use of activation functions in LSTM networks.</p
Chemical Investigation of Nest Materials from the Solitary Bees Hylaeus relegatus and Hylaeus nubilosus
No full textSolitary bees are known to prepare nests for their larvae in order to provide protection from bacteria, fungi and the elements. The protective and biodegradable nature of the nest material has resulted in physical properties relevant to the field of durable water repellants, a source of persistent organic pollutants.Polyester nest materials produced by the Colletes genus of solitary bees were known to be derived from macrocyclic lactone monomers produced in their Dufour’s gland. Similar macrocyclic lactones were also found in the Dufour’s gland of three Australasian members of the Hylaeus genus of solitary bees. Developing an effective synthetic route to these macrocyclic lactones was thus the focus of the research prior to obtaining and analyzing authentic Hylaeus nest material.Synthetic efforts focused on generating a novel route towards macrocyclic lactones contained within the Dufour’s gland of the investigated solitary bee species, suspected to be the primary monomers of the nest material polymer. (16E)-22-Docos-16-enolide 2 and 22-docosanolide 3 were synthesized from 16-hexadecanolide 1 in 4/5 steps respectively - a shorter route than reported alternatives, from commercially available starting materials, outlined in Scheme 1. The strategy involved a ring enlargement beginning with a commercially available C16 lactone,transesterification of the starting lactone, oxidation of the α- and ω-hydroxyl groups, a Wittig olefination to transform the terminal aldehydes into alkenes, and ring-closing metathesis assisted by the Grubbs-II catalyst to give larger macrocyclic lactones. Polymerization of the macrocyclic lactones (16E)-22-docos-16-enolide 2 and 22-docosanolide 3 yielded poly((16E)-22- Docos-16-enolide) 4 and poly(22-docosanolide) 5.Utility of the devised synthetic route to macrocyclic lactones also led to the synthesis of novel compounds (17E)-19-methyloxacycloicos-17-en-2-one 6 and (1R,21R,19E)-3-oxabicyclo[19.2.2]pentacos-19-en-4-one 7.Analysis of authentic Hylaeus nest materials was undertaken once nest material samples were obtained. Infrared spectroscopy suggested nest materials of Hylaeus nubilosus and Hylaeus relegatus bees did not contain a polyester material, but rather, a proteinaceous silk-like component.Following this discovery, the highlight of this research was conducting primary amino acid analysis by pre-column derivatization via the ortho-phthalaldehyde/thiol reaction with sub-mg quantities of nest material followed by HPLC with fluorescence detection. This information aided future research involving the Hylaeus nubilosus genomic information, which coded for the production of the nest material.</p
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