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Adapted identity : a classical experiment on three iconic buildings
No full textRESEARCH QUESTION:
How can Auckland’s central business district retain its historic architectural identity while glass towers proliferate?
ABSTRACT:
Auckland City Council are actively encouraging tall buildings of up to 400 metres high in the Central Business District (CBD). The changes in the Auckland Unitary Plan have produced a masterplan that illustrates a city centre crowded with skyscrapers which tower above the CBD and dwarf the heritage buildings below.
In the past, these types of development have resulted in the demolition of heritage buildings or a compromise; the controversial technique of facadism where development retains a token gesture of heritage in return for a multi-storey tower above. This results in the controversial technique of facadism where development retains a token gesture of heritage in return for a multi-storey tower above.
It is claimed that the logic of an ‘all-glass’ tower development provides a ‘neutral’ architectural language that does not conflict with the token heritage component that is retained5. However, it leaves the city with a new identity that has little or no architectural heritage to reflect the history of Aotearoa. How can Auckland’s CBD retain its historic architectural identity while glass towers proliferate? The cultural identity of Auckland’s CBD is being slowly eroded a building at a time, similarly to Theseus’ Ship.
This project explores an alternative way of respecting heritage while still allowing for development. Based on international precedents, it investigates different techniques of designing developments to be built over and above heritage buildings.
To test the design proposals, three heritage buildings: Auckland Town Hall, Dilworth Building and Auckland Railway Station, have been selected with the hypothetical notion that towers may be built above them. In the experiment, the ‘control’ design is a simple glass tower. The possible variables, based on a study of precedents, are introduced as concept designs and then refined.
Whether or not the experiment is successful is for others to judge. The focus of the project is as much on the technique of the experiment as it is on the final result. It does not claim to find ideal solution, instead providing a basis on which to challenge the notion that glass skyscrapers in some way retain heritage of both individual buildings and the CBD as a whole
Do trees reduce water runoff during flood events? An assessment of soil hydrological properties in three different land-use types of varying tree density
Get PDFThe effect of trees on soil hydraulic and physical properties has been of interest for several centuries. While a variety of relevant studies have been undertaken in Europe, Northern America, Asia and Africa, very few studies have been conducted in New Zealand. This study aims to add some understanding and awareness to the overall pool of knowledge regarding New Zealand’s ecosystems, soils and the link to its vegetation. Three different land use types were tested; a grassland paddock (P), a 20-year-old restoration forest (RF) and a 400-year-old native Kahikatea dominant forest (KF). The main assessments included infiltration rate measurements (IR) and soil moisture content (SM). Hereby a single-ring infiltrometer and a Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) device were used. The average infiltration rate values tended to KF > RF > P, with the Kahikatea forest soil scoring 18 times higher (200.58mm/hr) than the pasture (10.97mm/hr) and 9 times higher than the restoration forest (21.92mm/hr). The average soil moisture content resulted in P = RF > KF with an overall difference of only 10.6% between the paddock/restoration forest and the Kahikatea forest (74.2%). The experiment proved that trees promote infiltration rates, water storage capacity and reduce surface runoff, hence decreasing the risk of perpetuated flood events. Trees are therefore a suitable tool for practicing natural flood management, to slow the spread and lower the level of a possible flood
The impact of corporate governance on firm value : evidence from listed manufacturing companies in SriLanka
No full textGood corporate governance is directly linked with the shareholder wealth creation and thereby influence the overall economic prosperity of entities. Firm value is regarded as one of the indicators for the creation of a wealth of an entity. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine how corporate governance practices impact on the firm value. Data was collected through reviewing the annual reports of 27 Sri Lankan manufacturing firms listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange from 2012 to 2016. The study used descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis to analyze data.
Findings revealed that the number of board meetings of listed manufacturing companies capable of improving firm value. Further, we identified that the control and risk management system of manufacturing entities positively impact firm value while board size and the board committees do not contribute significantly to improve the firm value of manufacturing sector entities in Sri Lanka.
The study has social and policy impact as it highlights the importance of corporate governance practices on improving the firm value of the Sri Lankan manufacturing sector. Focusing on one industry sector is an inherent limitation of the study, and industry sector comparison would be a potential future research area
Mautu i vae a vaea : weaving Fa'asamoa & landscape architecture
No full textFESILI O LE SUESUEGA - RESEARCH QUESTION:
How might Samoa utilize flooding as an opportunity to re-envision a future that embraces Fa'asamoa? (How can Apia reaffirm Samoan values to conceptualize sustainability through flooding?)
ABSTRACT:
The global crisis of climate change brings many uncertainties about the development and the liveability of many cities in the Pacific. The Apia town basin is under disruption, with projects proposing numerous strategies to reduce the annual effects of flash flooding. Some projects offering hard engineering approaches for short term solutions while others use management approaches that will be implemented and become effective in the long-term.
Flooding disrupts communities, commerce and ecology. This 18-month project sets out to disrupt engineering design by braiding it with Samoan traditional knowledge of water and ecological management. Overloaded infrastructure in Apia (Samoa) co-exists with annual flash flooding produced from the 3 water catchments (Vaisigano River, Vailima River, and Vaiusu River), bringing about destruction to commercial businesses, homes, and polluting the Apia harbour. River flooding in Samoa is a serious and reoccurring issue that generally affects the capital (Apia), located at the bottom of steep water catchments which overflow during heavy downpour. The flash flooding on April 2001, directly affected approximately 5,000 residents, causing damages that was estimated to exceed WST6.5 million).
The aim of this project is to increase the resilience of Apia, to better prepare and respond to climate change and to introduce landscape architecture to Samoa. The braiding of the Samoan knowledge with landscape architectural strategies translates ecological techniques of dealing with flooding for the community of Apia to achieve a mutual understanding.
Samoa is the heart of the Pacific, which is the most affected area and prone to flooding. The sea levels are constantly rising at an increasing rate each year. It is imperative that something is done immediately but effectively.
This project proposes not only to introduce landscape architectural strategies that can be enhanced with local knowledge and understanding, but also inspire and open the local people to use environmentally friendly approaches to heal and adapt to impacts caused by natural disasters. Tactical strategies that have low impact solutions with immediate results, and higher impact solutions that achieve long term resilience are being investigated. The new knowledge developed through this study will be discussed
Fit for educational purpose? : the findings of a mixed methods study of nurses’ decisions to participate in professional development and recognition programmes
No full textPrecursors to Professional Development and Recognition Programmes (PDRPs) emerged in the United States during the 1980s and, over the past three decades, have become well known and used in New Zealand. Pedagogically, PDRPs are often underpinned by the seminal work of Benner (1984) which supports nurses to develop critical and clinical thinking and importantly, expertise. As a tool supporting Continuing Professional Development (CPD), a PDRP has additional benefits. These include validation of regulatory continuing competence requirements and, at some levels, a financial reward. Yet, when given the option to participate in a PDRP, nurses choose not to. This article reports on findings from a recently completed, mixed methods study where nurses’ decisions to participate in a PDRP were examined. Their explanations portrayed how they were positively disposed to the programme but that time, confusion between regulatory competencies, and PDRP requirements, together with the responses of their colleagues, often made crossing the divide between simply liking the idea of PDRPs and submitting a portfolio impossible. Given this context, are PDRPs still fit for purpose
The rise and fall and rise again of an environmental social enterprise. (With apologies to the makers of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, one of my favourite British comedy series)
No full textKi te kahore, he whakakitenga, ka ngaro te iwi
Without foresight or vision the people will be lost
In this paper I update earlier work on the case study in social enterprise in waste and recycling, using a community-development methodology. The case study follows, as the title might suggest, the rise of a thriving community enterprise, its demise and period in the wilderness, and its rise again. The study draws on personal experience as an activist insider and islander; the records of our social enterprise and the extensive public record in the community media; the tireless support of fellow directors in the new social enterprise Island Waste Collective, and of Denise Roche, former Green Party MP with responsibility for the waste portfolio and current member of the ministerial Waste Advisory Board.
Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring (1962) was a clarion call to environmental concern which drew a sharp focus to the poisoning of the planet. Today’s environmentalism poses a powerful critique and, in the contemporary lens of sustainable development, addresses social and economic as well as environmental concerns. The separation of people from
planet as a locus of concern has not served either well. Nor are the realms mutually antagonistic or exclusive (Bradshaw & Winn, 2000). The bringing together of these two themes is evident from the time of the Brundtland Commission (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987) and after that through the major international governance conferences and resolutions such as Agenda 21 (United Nations Sustainable Development, 1992) and the Kyoto Protocol (UNFCCC, 1997). This case study describes how an enterprising community achieved social, economic and environmental goals, while building their community capacity and having much fun in the process. The crushing of the enterprise is briefly discussed, and tribute is paid to the spirit of the community which spawned the enterprise. The imminent rise, Phoenix-like, of a new community enterprise from the ashes of the old is predicted
Fiji Vale Ni Yaya Maroroi
No full textRESEARCH QUESTION:
How can indigenous design principles drive the design of a Fijian museum that allows the younger generation to reconnect to their cultural heritage?
Breaking down the research question into sub-categories:
- Researching into Fijian material culture.
- An exploration of Fijian design principles, architecture and Fijian built environments.
- Practical design application
ABSTRACT:
As time progresses and globalisation takes hold, cultural heritage knowledge slowly fades away from memory. The memory of where we came from, our stories, arts and crafts, religious beliefs, traditions, and the way we built our architecture. Those elements of traditions that created our identity are slowly fading. The deeper purpose for this research project is to reconnect us and future generations with our culture on a metaphorical, physical and spiritual existence. For this research project, a museum as an architectural typology can be used as a platform to recreate that lost connection with our cultural heritage. As a worldwide solution, a museum’s role is to collect and preserve culturally significant objects, ranging from religious artefacts, historical artefacts and tools to clothes, and in particular antiquities. This project seeks to go beyond the traditional role of a museum to be a place where visitors get to immerse themselves in Fiji’s living culture.
Site: Thurston Gardens (Suva, Fiji
Analysis of the metrics that influence the performance of SOAP/XML message routing in ESB Applications
No full textRESEARCH QUESTION:
What are the key performance metrics that influence the performance of SOAP/XML message routing tasks in ESB Applications?\
TASKS:
Finding ESB performance evaluation set up and method from existing literature.
Deciding on the possible performance metrics to be used in this research from existing literature
Designing test scenarios and typical ESB tasks according to the existing literature.
ABSTRACT:
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), as the code component of Service-orientated Architecture (SOA) implementation, has a significant impact on whole system performance. This thesis zooms in to evaluate the performance of different ESB applications in different SOAP/XML message routing tasks, and gain an understanding of the influence of each performance metric on ESB performance.
The research goal is to find out the key ESB performance metrics which influence the most in ESB performance from different ESB tasks and application settings. Compared with existing ESB performance evaluations, federated ESB evaluations, as well as performance metrics correlation analysis, are the main contributions of this study. In terms of the research scope, f our ESB applications – Tibco, BizTalk, Fuse, and Mule – were tested; bothsingle ESB experiments and federated ESB experiments have been conducted; nine test cases were included in single ESB experiments, 16 test cases were involved in the federated ESB experiments, and three ESB tasks have been performed during experiments.
The single ESB experiment results show that Mule ESB applications had the best performance and Fuse ESB applications had the lowest performance. The federated experiment results show three good performance cases with Mule ESB involved, which is consistent with the single ESB experiment results. The federated experiment results also suggest that the combination of two well-performing single ESBs is not necessary to result in good performance ESB applications
Overall, response time was the performance metrics that gave the best indication of ESB performance and influence the most to ESB performance. The findings of this research not only allow architecture to choose suitable ESB applications but also enable more research on federated ESB evaluation. Apart from this, the research contribution to ESB performance metrics correlation analysis is very useful to the ESB performance testing and monitoring community. Nevertheless, the research could have included more test cases, and further statistical analysis and result verification would bring a more comprehensive understanding of ESB performance
The effectiveness of concomitant use of cross-sectional anatomy and CT images in teaching anatomy to medical imaging students
No full textBACKGROUND:
Cross-sectional anatomy is crucial in the comprehensive study of the details of the whole body to the medical students in general; while to the medical imaging students in particular. Furthermore, it is most important to the medical imaging specialists during their education or after graduation to improve their skills in imaging interpretation; mainly for CT scan and MRI.
OBJECTIVE:
To determine the value of teaching cross-sectional anatomy to medical imaging students and its effectiveness to improve their skills in imaging interpretation.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
Fifty-eight students from the medical imaging program were were included in this study. Students were divided into two groups; Group I (29) from the academic year 2017-2018 had been taught sectional anatomy without concomitant use of CT images 1 year before the test, Group II (29 ) from the academic year 2018-2019 and were studying sectional anatomy with concomitant use of CT images. The educational methodology consists of identifying anatomical structures displayed in plastinated sections from human cadavers available on online resource and its corresponding anatomical structures in computed tomography (CT) sections from healthy patients on the same or another online resource. To assess and verify the impact of learning sectional anatomy on radiological knowledge, students were asked to identify ten anatomical structures on thoracic CT images at the level of the aortic arch (superior mediastinum).
RESULTS:
The percentages of students in groups I and II who correctly identified the anatomical structures in the test were measured. The percentage of errors in group II were much lower than the errors in the group I. Analysis of the results revealed a significant difference in test scores with scores of 89.7% and 65.5%, respectively.
CONCLUSION:
These results provide evidence that the implementation of the sectional anatomy as a tool in teaching anatomy becomes a crucial fact in medical imaging curricula and has a great impact on subsequent CT interpretation
Automatic assessment of dysarthric severity level using audio-video cross-modal approach in deep learning
No full textDysarthria is a speech disorder disease that can have a significant impact on a person's daily life. Early detection of the disease can put the patient into therapy sessions more quickly. Researchers have established various approaches to detect the disease automatically. Traditional computational approaches commonly analysed acoustic features like Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Spectral Centroid, Linear Prediction Cepstral (LPC) coefficients and Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP) from speech samples of patients to detect dysarthric speech characters like slow speech rate, short pauses, mis-articulated sounds, etc. Recent research has shown that some machine learning algorithms can also be deployed to extract speech features and detect the severity level automatically.
In machine learning, feature extraction is a crucial step in dealing with classification and prediction problems. For different data formats, different well-established frameworks have been developed to extract and classify the corresponding features. For example, for an image data processing system, Convolution Neural Network (CNN) can provide the underlying network structure for the system to analyse the video data to obtain the visual features. In contrast, for audio data processing system, Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms can be applied to obtain acoustic features. Therefore, the selection of the framework to be used mainly depends on the modality of the input. As early steps in development of machine learning approaches for automatic assessment of dysarthric patients, classification systems based on audio features have been considered in literature; however, recent research efforts in other fields have shown that using an audio-video cross-modal framework can improve performance of the classification systems.
In this thesis, for the first time, an audio-video cross-modal framework is proposed using deep-learning algorithm that the network takes both audio and video data as input to detect severity levels of dysarthria. Within the deep-learning framework, we also propose two network architectures using audio-only or video-only input to detect dysarthria severity levels automatically. Comparing with current one-modality systems, the deep-learning framework yields satisfying results. More importantly, comparing with systems based only on audio data for automatic dysarthria severity level assessment, the audio-video deep-learning cross modal system proposed in this research can accelerate the training speed, improve accuracy and reduce the amount of required training data