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Interview with Neil Smith
No full textThis interview with Neil Smith, carried out in 2002, is the second in a series of interviews with practitioners who have made significant contributions to the field of community development in Aotearoa New Zealand. Neil was very ill but, in spite of the pain, he insisted on completing the interview; it is the story of a man who lived by his values. For example, during World War Two he was a conscientious objector and forced to work as a scrub cutter in various isolated camps. At one camp, he met various lecturers from Victoria University, Wellington, who were also incarcerated for the duration of the war. During this period, he participated in adult education classes, which inspired him. He later studied social work at Victoria University under the same lecturers. Through his involvement in the social workers’ association in the 1970s, he helped persuade Auckland City Council to establish the community development office. Sadly, Neil died shortly after this interview
Landscape, isolation, and belonging in performance: The art of directing in Aotearoa/New Zealand
No full textKey features of the domain; landscape and identity
SETTINGS
• Isolation
• Social mobility and access; ‘one degree of separation’
• Co-operative effort
• Belonging
• Detail/ big picture dichotomy
• Genuine exploration for newness
• Risk
• Proximity to audience
ELEMENTS
• Interpretive Confidence
• Melding of techniques; ‘Magpie-ism’
• the nomadic tendency of artists
• reterritorialization of the self
• the unique ‘line of flight’ of the artist
- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus
• Non-theatrical material and its influenc
Progress report : the Real Time Web Series (2016-2020)
No full textThe Real Time Web Series (RTWS) traverses between a process video and oral history podcast. The RTWS is a project that launched in 2016 by Dr. Bobby ‘Berst’ Hung. As an artist, researcher, and teacher, his objective is to document graffiti in New Zealand and to capture the perspectives of past and present graffiti writers through oral history. As an ephemeral artform, graffiti is often found on walls, trains, and other public spaces but its lifespan is short lived. When painted illegally, the artworks risk being painted out by council within hours of creation, or the likelihood of other graffiti writers covering the artwork in a fight for visual space. All that seldom remains are the photographic images, video, and untold stories of the action. While the internet and social media has helped to share, document, and promote graffiti in New Zealand, the contextual factors influencing the stylistic developments of the scene, our whakapapa, ideological shifts, and histories, continue to remain untold and inaccessible for wider audiences. With five decades of graffiti history in New Zealand since the 1980s, there is no published record or documents that have consolidated an official graffiti story. As a result, there is very little knowledge to pass down to aspiring graffiti writers for the future.
[RTWS is an accessible online platform that shares local stories to international audiences
Designing the bridges : highlights from Ako Aotearoa supported foundation, bridging and LLN research projects. A report prepared for Ako Aotearoa
No full textNew Zealand society is diverse, complex and stratified. It has a sophisticated first world education system with comprehensive coverage from early childhood through to the most exacting research-based doctoral study. While this system provides for the great majority of New Zealanders, there remain groups whose participation in tertiary education requires significant and extraordinary effort to ensure equity of opportunity and successful inclusion. This is an important issue given the established links between tertiary education and employment, income and engagement with social and economic support systems.
The groups that are marginal to the established systems include those whose prior educational experience has left them under-prepared for tertiary study, rural and migrant workers whose locations and prior learnings make access to learning very difficult, those with ongoing learning and social engagement disorders, bi/tri-lingual groups where English is as yet not functional for study purposes, and social and cultural groups often located away from urban centres who wish to engage or re-engage with learning within their communities and their cultural frames.
The purpose of this report is to present a group of research projects funded by Ako Aotearoa and to synthesise their findings. These projects have all worked to address the issue of how to design education to ensure the successful participation of those groups described above in New Zealand society and its workplaces. The educational designs and strategies offer ways to enhance life chances to the benefit of the individual, family and community. New Zealand gains from the productive clash of differences these groups bring to our knowledge and understanding and hence our creativity, innovation and our future solutions.
The funded projects described in this report are exceptionally diverse both in regards to the people who have been participants and the people who have run the projects. The methods are various with a focus on qualitative designs, and the outcomes range in quality and strength. Each contributes to building a picture of what organisations must do, programme designers must consider and teachers must deliver to achieve effective bridging. This picture includes how to engage the students, to foster relevant and valuable learning and to support students to the next step in their progress towards their goals.
The reader is invited to consider the themes described, look to the highlights of projects where work has been done and then go to the Ako Aotearoa website to read the full reports of those projects that match your interests.
The next section considers the context of bridging education and it describes previous research and analysis that had as its aim identifying the critical elements of successful bridging. These findings are then aligned to the individual projects
Hopo: The dread that clings
Get PDFHOPO is a term that has many definitions and explanations. This is complicated further by the fact that te reo Māori does not translate directly into English. There is very little literature concerning hopo. What does exist mainly explains hopo in spiritual terms. At the same time, hopo is mentioned very briefly in psychological terms. Supported by the extant literature, this paper will briefly explain hopo and recommend future research
A pilot programme of fruit grading system using computer vision
Get PDFRESEARCH QUESTIONS:
1. How can New Zealand’s agriculture industry use computer vision technologies to improve the accuracy of their fruit grading system?
2. What are the similarities and differences in object detection and image classification effectiveness in grading fruits?
3. What factors influence agricultural companies’ decision on embracing computer vision for fruit grading in New Zealand?
ABSTRACT:
Traditional fruit grading work depends on a large labour force during harvesting time. However, the grading accuracy varies, resulting in difficulties in product quality management. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of New Zealand's farming industries lack seasonal workers from overseas. Hence, they are looking at taking advantage of promising computer vision technologies to avoid reliance on the labour-intensive grading method.
This research project designs a prototype fruit grading system using object detection algorithms to automatically sort fruits (e.g., squash), minimising manual intervention during the production process. The proposed system consists of fruit handling and image processing modules. Amazon's machine learning platform SageMaker and Google's machine learning framework TensorFlow are the two main software components in the system. We tested the prototype in a simulated production environment. The result proved that the selected approach could suit farming industries to achieve automation transformation during post-harvesting. Other findings include that object detection has better performance than image classification on identifying defects on fruits. The high cost of setting up a new fruit grading system has hindered agriculture companies from adopting the plan. Further research within this topic could incorporate farming experts to help gain higher dataset accuracy during labelling jobs and choose a proper approach to avoid unnecessary difficulties in manipulating data between different machine learning platforms
Analysing construction cost estimation factors as a map
Get PDFFor construction projects, different factors such as the type the of project, material costs, project conditions and duration are combined to estimate the total project cost. Hence it is essential for the relationships between these factors to be well-defined in order to produce an accurate cost estimate of each stage of the project. The aim of this paper is to formulate and implement a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based approach that allows the user to properly quantify and visualize the relationship between these (non-spatial) factors in a virtual geospatial space, providing accurate cost estimates. To achieve this, Voronoi polygons are used in the developed method to transfer duration and completion time of each project stage from one-dimensional data into a two-dimensional space (spatialisation). A sigmoidal shape is then utilised as a profile and scaled to convert the two-dimensional map into a three-dimensional map based on the material costs and difficulty of each activity. This provides a visualization tool that is similar to a topographic map. The generated maps are then compared to quantify and identify inconsistencies between duration, difficulty and cost of each activity for a house-construction project. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in identifying the best cost estimation scheme
Cementing a future
No full textRESEARCH QUESTION
How could the abandoned Wilson’s Cement Works facility in Warkworth be adapted to reconnect with its changing town and community?
ABSTRACT
New Zealand’s industrial heritage has been responsible for much of the growth and development of the nation, providing employment, and building communities. Many of these industrial buildings are now in a state of disrepair; undervalued by locals, with little consideration to re-purpose them. An example of this is the Wilson’s Cement Works on the outskirts of Warkworth.
In the wake of their demise, the Cement Works ruins serve as an undeniably poignant reminder of past endeavours. Despite the lack of motivation to reconnect them to the town, they are a culturally significant set of buildings that are intrinsically linked to the society of Warkworth. Therefore, in a time when the community is going through a substantial change, an opportunity presents itself to heal this fractured relationship by weaving them together with the new fabric.
Firstly, a process of rediscovery must take place prior to reintegrating the cement works. A narrative has been formed through an historical, architectural, and urban analysis to bring out the qualities of the material remaining, as well as the historical value. The research into the 19th century conservationists and industrial theorists has been combined with case studies, to derive adaptive reuse approaches specifically for this project. These approaches assist in creating a design response that reintegrates the community into the ruins whilst respecting all facets of the facility’s life. The programme considered for the site is a bio-based crafts college, and marketplace cafe. The outcome respects all the layers of history to enhance the experience of the aged structures
Learning to mitigate emissions : relevance of research with Maori hapu and iwi
No full textCurrently, there is insufficient research on how New Zealand can achieve environmental sustainability through Māori iwi (tribe) and hapū (subtribe) relationships with land and sea, via the Zero Carbon Act. It is now agreed emissions from human activities negatively impact our atmosphere and climate with increasing frequency and ferocity. Applied research is vital to accelerate emissions mitigation action, as industry effects are considerable. The Greenhouse Gas Inventory estimates that the agriculture and energy sectors alone contribute almost 90% of New Zealand’s gross emissions, contributing to global warming. The purpose of New Zealand’s Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act 2019 is to provide a climate change policy framework to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement. The Act is a ‘first step’ to carbon neutrality and nature restoration, but concrete, urgent climate joint-action is needed to achieve targets under the Act’s mitigation framework. This paper endeavours to address the research gap by considering specific beneficial partnerships that can be realised by co-creating research outcomes with hapū and iwi in Aotearoa, New Zealand and the cascading effect that the Act will have on other legislation, where mana whenua perspectives and implications are key considerations for the achievement of carbon mitigation targets. The importance of such a focus is in unlocking the potential of mātauranga (Māori knowledge systems), with relational co-creation through research. Stakeholders of the newly established New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology (NZIST) must diligently teach, model and research sustainability in every discipline, as employers demand graduates with environmental acumen