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Gender and Political Leadership in Samoa: Fiame Naomi Mata‘afa and the 2021 Election
No full textThe election of Fiame Naomi Mata‘afa to the office of prime minister of Samoa has attracted attention on the grounds that it represents a victory for women across the Pacific region. But there is limited gendered analysis of her campaign and the highly contested formation of government process that followed. We fill that gap. Drawing on a range of empirical material, including interviews with Fiame, we argue that while her win was unequivocally one for women, she was not elected because she was a woman. We acknowledge that gender had some significance for the way she mobilized support, but find that her traditional status, experience, and the salience of the issues on which she campaigned were much more important in the minds of voters. These findings matter because the disjuncture between the dynamics of domestic politics and international commentary can be perceived as reinforcing the claim that a feminist agenda is being ‘imposed’ by outsiders.</p
Diverse Students’ Mathematical Wellbeing
No full textAbstractSupporting student wellbeing in schools is increasingly becoming a global priority. However, research and initiatives primarily focus on general wellbeing rather than subject-specific experiences. Given the pervasive levels of mathematics anxiety, negative attitudes, and disengagement in mathematics education, we argue for a more contextualised wellbeing approach. We define ‘mathematical wellbeing’ (MWB) as the fulfilment of values whilst learning mathematics accompanied by positive feelings (e.g., enjoyment) and functioning (e.g., engagement) in the discipline. We report on 3073 New Zealand Year Three to Eight students’ responses to a survey measuring their fulfilment of seven MWB values: accomplishments, cognitions, engagement, meaning, perseverance, positive emotions, and relationships. Students’ MWB was highest for relationships and perseverance and lowest for engagement and positive emotions; MWB declined from Years Three to Eight; females often rated higher MWB than males; school sociodemographic status was mostly not significant, whilst engagement and positive emotions differed across ethnicities. Research implications include understanding target areas to improve diverse students’ experiences and wellbeing in mathematics education.</p
Environmental Injustice: The Effects of Environmental Taxes on Income Distribution in an Oligopolistic General Equilibrium Model
No full textWe apply a static oligopolistic general equilibrium model to investigate the effects of an environmental tax on labor incomes, capital incomes, profits, and the distribution of income. The study is motivated by the fact that environmental taxation is one main political tool to realize environmental sustainability and support sustainable development. However, to ensure social and economic sustainability, the taxes applied must be perceived as fair by the majority of the civil society. Moreover, efforts to determine a fair taxation policy would ensure, inter alia, responsible consumption and production, and lower inequality in the economy, which are one of the two priorities of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 10 and 12). Therefore, it is necessary to determine the tax incidence to inform policymakers regarding the distribution of the tax burden. To examine environmental policy, we assume the government applies a policy objective to realize strong environmental sustainability, as proposed by the Dutch economist Rofie Hueting. The main result is that oligopolistic firms can shift the whole tax burden resulting from environmental taxes to workers and capital owners. Consequently, we show that environmental taxes can lead to more income inequality, and the more concentrated the markets, the bigger the social and economic inequality. Noting that addressing environmental problems is a priority of the UN SDGs, our analysis shows that approaching the issue using just environmental tax propositions is not advisable. These results of the analysis also provide a justification of why many members of the society tend to oppose environmental taxes.</p
Fixed-Wing UAV System for Aerial Tethered Delivery of Small to Medium Packages
No full textThe utilisation of UAVs to deliver packages has steadily increased in popularity over the past few years. However, delivering multiple packages of varying weights using long-range and endurance UAVs is still an emerging technology with immense potential to become an integral part of the mainstream postal system.
This work focuses on developing a fixed-wing UAV which can travel further with heavier packages than current multi-rotor or VTOL concepts. The aircraft must remain in the air to make this concept feasible, as landing an aircraft is not always possible. To achieve this, this work investigates an innovative approach involving the package attached to the aircraft by a long tether. This delivery must be completed within current ICAO regulations that require uncrewed aircraft to operate below a ceiling of 120m. To achieve this requirement, additional features are presented in this work that work together to ensure the delivery is accurate and repeatable under various environmental conditions.
The most critical feature is the use of a Mid Tether Drag Device, which has been demonstrated in both simulations and real-world experiments to effectively control the package within ICAO regulations. Other adverse effects are presented with the operation of the system in the environment, where a reinforcement learning agent has been trained to manage the complexity of the system and carry out mission operations. The agent is capable of handling various tasks, such as managing the loitering origin and rate of the UAV, identifying the best flight path and entry velocity, and adjusting the tether length to reduce vertical oscillations. This marks the first use of an RL agent in the tethered delivery system. This research is backed by experimental results, which are compared with computational simulations. Practical experiments are discussed to highlight differences from the computational environment.
The findings show that it is possible to safely and precisely deliver packages using a fixed-wing drone, allowing heavier packages to be delivered further than current concepts in various windy environments. The system is anticipated to be a game-changer in package delivery via drones, providing a faster, safer, and more cost-effective method to deliver multiple packages of varying weights.</p
Animating the Inanimate: Architectural ‘Magicking’ at Work
No full textThis is a practice-based PhD that seeks to reflect on the evolution of my practice as an architect and designer, exploring its motivations through a series of lenses applied to four distinct projects that track and reveal my recurring preoccupations. The operative manner of working is examined and framed in relation to broad connecting themes, uncovering traces of what I term “magicking” at work in my creative process as the design takes shape, as well as in the experience of the projects, where conventional perception of time and space is upended. This recurring theme of spatial and temporal distortion in projects is traceable in my creative process operating at all scales. The magicking unfolds via an animation of tangible energies perceived in inanimate elements of a site; presences and absences that become amplified and made manifest in the architectural details. The thesis explores practice at the intersection of magic and architecture – an uncomfortable pairing of worlds. Each belong to different realms: solid, rational, grounded, trustworthy versus ethereal, intangible, illusory, mystical.
In the early stages of the research, I selected three case study projects to frame and explore methods adopted in my design practice with its distinctive way of working. These three case studies explore the domestication of buildings with a particularly non-domestic former use: an abandoned former stable block in London, recently completed; a decommissioned lighthouse in Norfolk completed years earlier; and a derelict seventeenth century Sicilian farmhouse in a dormant volcano crater undertaken during the research process. A fourth case study was added, since it was ongoing throughout the PhD and distinctly different from the other three. A new-build project on an urban site evolved from a relatively blank canvas where the design process didnot involve riffing off an existing building. Also, unlike the first three, it was also not destined to become a home for me personally. Although derived from distinctly different building typologies, all three projects resulted in residential use but the fourth was a commercial mixed-use development. Moreover, this last case study, a gallery and apartment building in London’s Mayfair, presented a valuable opportunity to explore whether magicking is always at work, even given the context of commercial pressures when designing at a larger complex urban scale for a speculative property developer.
The research involved an analysis of the design approach to each of these specific projects, as well as what is particular about my methods when ‘domesticating’ a site and building. Using a ‘thinking through making’ process, I reflect on my creative practice through a lens of my flea-market collecting, tampering with books and several curious devices inspired by ancient navigational stick charts, which I assembled and then filmed. I also juxtapose the materials of the building site with nineteenth century embroidery via a ‘resampled sampler’ that I redacted to consider what is distinctive about my approach to domesticating. This offers up new insights into the grain of my creative practice, exploring the unconventional way in which my version of domesticating these buildings located on challenging sites unfolds, so that aspects of their un-domestic past-life, such as shipwrecks and volcanic eruptions, become amplified and brought to life through the architectural details.
Through this reflection I discover new ways of understanding my work, such as the profound influence of my collecting on my design practice. I also identify and examine the influences from other creative practitioners on my own practice, including female trailblazing architects, contemporary artists and surrealists as well as ardent collectors. The research reveals ‘alchemical’ methods of working, involving bringing together notable and disparate elements of a building in context and reconfiguring them to create an entirely new experience which deeply resonates with a site and its layered backstory, to anchor it with a renewed sense of place. Having identified these important touchpoints in my projects I reflect on the strong influence of performance from artforms such as set design and choreography which is demonstrated by the inherent sense of narrative and kinetic elements alive in my work, as well as the experience of the buildings. The study also reveals an impetus to highlight non-tangible elements such as smell and sound in the creative process, like the Siren’s voices channelled through The Farmhouse in Sicily and the aroma of a Scottish distillery emanating from the walls of a whisky lounge in Seoul clad in charred barrel staves. The magic at work involves finding ways to weave these other senses into the experience for an augmented perception of time and place that is newly embedded in the sites and buildings.
The research uncovers how my working method begins with a heightened sensorial forensic selection process of so-called ‘specimens’, both physical and metaphysical, plucked then rearranged to highlight previous presences and tangible absences in a site and its existing buildings. This process seeks to reawaken and make manifest hidden energies that are brought to life in the experience of the architecture – an animation of the inanimate that I term architectural ‘magicking’. This creative process takes root irrespective of the scale of a project, operating in much the same way when designing a small intimate piece of jewellery as well as a new-build commercial development. The design thinking is aligned with my habit of collecting, where observations of a site are intuitively selected and put together in an assemblage of metaphorical specimens in a tray that are grouped and arranged then regrouped, paired up and juxtaposed for heighted effect. These catalogues of oddities comprised of seemingly mundane, apparently discarded, and unrelated physical objects and traces of past lives lived are carefully gathered together and recomposed, bestowing the components with new status. These blended animations become an anecdote retold, a play reperformed, a place reimagined, imbuing the new buildings with dramatic narrative tension and a latent temporality.
With this new awareness of the factors influencing my creative process, I seek to reinforce these powerful motivations and drive my practice in new directions.</p
From standardising cultural data to coordinating data cultures: the history and politics of digital heritage aggregation in Australia
No full textBy bringing together metadata from multiple collecting institutions, digital heritage aggregators offer the potential for diverse and dispersed audiences to engage with the collective cultural collections of a nation, state, or region. For institutions and policymakers, such endeavours promise greater value for public money, increased audiences, and democratised access to cultural heritage. This article explores how these idealised promises of digital heritage aggregators run up against the actual politics and practices of their implementation. This is grounded in a history of attempts to aggregate heterogeneous and geographically distant museum collections across Australia into a single ‘distributed national collection’. Australia’s landscape of museums has long been characterised by several major public institutions, which often play a coordinating role, and thousands of small (often volunteer-run) museums. We argue that aggregating cultural collections is not just a matter of standardising metadata but coordinating different needs, capacities, and priorities, particularly the divides between major museums and community collecting organisations. In response, we suggest a shift in the study of such collaborative endeavours, from the aggregation of cultural data to the coordination of data cultures. In practice, this approach eschews a top-down approach to bringing together heterogeneous organisations in favour of resolving tensions and disparities in divergent values, resources, and priorities.</p
Anelastic deformation of magnesium and its alloys – A review
No full textThe deformation of Mg is made up of elastic, anelastic and plastic components. Unlike the elasticity and plasticity which have been widely studied, the anelasticity has been routinely ignored in many published works when characterising the behaviour of Mg and its alloys, due mainly to the difficulty in measuring the small region of anelasticity during deformation. This paper reviews the anelastic deformation of Mg and Mg alloys, covering its potential causes, affecting factors, and its implications on several material properties. The evidence from the literature suggests two possible mechanisms which may be responsible for the anelastic deformation: reversible {10 1‾ 2} twinning and reversible incipient kink bands in the form of basal dislocation loops. Several factors, such as grain size, loading direction, solute concentration, precipitation, strain rate and temperature, are also observed to influence the magnitude of anelasticity. A direct consequence of anelastic deformation is the variation of elastic modulus values. This can lead to ambiguities and errors in determining stiffness, yield strength and fatigue behaviour if a constant nominal elastic modulus is used in engineering analyses. This review paper has shown that the anelastic deformation of Mg remains under-reported and suggested some possible directions for future research.</p
From Individual Disconnection to Collective Practices for Journalists’ Wellbeing
No full textJournalists are increasingly experiencing the negative consequences of online news transformations, such as trolling and harassment, as well as audience distrust. Despite acute need, intra-organisational efforts to support journalists’ online wellbeing have so far been limited. More recently, research has explored how journalists have turned to individual practices of disconnection, such as blocking, muting, or small breaks from online media to mediate the impacts of their everyday online labour (Bossio et al., 2024). Building on this research, this study explores how these individual practices are moving toward collective practices of disconnection. Using interviews with 21 journalists, this study traces how emergent collective practices might contribute to systemic change in journalism. We argue that in lieu of intra-organizational support, journalists seek to disconnect through informal sharing of experiences and support as well as collective efforts toward inter-organisational training and intra-organisational formalization mentoring programs.</p
Thiazolotriazoles As Anti-infectives: Design, Synthesis, Biological Evaluation and In Silico Studies
No full textThe rational design of novel thiazolo[2,3-c][1,2,4]triazole derivatives was carried out based on previously identified antitubercular hit molecule H127 for discovering potent compounds showing antimicrobial activity. The designed compounds were screened for their binding efficacies against the antibacterial drug target enoyl-[acyl-carrier-protein] reductase, followed by prediction of drug-likeness and ADME properties. The designed analogues were chemically synthesized, characterized by spectroscopic techniques, followed by evaluation of antimicrobial activity against bacterial and fungal strains, as well as antitubercular activity against M. tuberculosis and M. bovis strains. Among the synthesized compounds, five compounds, 10, 11, 35, 37 and 38, revealed antimicrobial activity, albeit with differential potency against various microbial strains. Compounds 10 and 37 were the most active against S. mutans (MIC: 8 μg/mL), while compounds 11 and 37 showed the highest activity against B. subtillis (MIC: 16 μg/mL), whereas compounds 10, 11 and 37 displayed activities against E. coli (MIC: 16 μg/mL). Meanwhile, compounds 10 and 35 depicted activities against S. typhi (MIC: 16 μg/mL) and compound 10 showed antifungal activity against C. albicans (MIC: 32 μg/mL). The current study has identified two broad-spectrum antibacterial hit compounds (10 and 37). Further structural investigation on these molecules is underway to enhance their potency.</p
Machine Learning Model Reveals Determinators for Admission to Acute Mental Health Wards From Emergency Department Presentations
No full textThis research addresses the critical issue of identifying factors contributing to admissions to acute mental health (MH) wards for individuals presenting to the emergency department (ED) with MH concerns as their primary issue, notably suicidality. This study aims to leverage machine learning (ML) models to assess the likelihood of admission to acute MH wards for this vulnerable population. Data collection for this study used existing ED data from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2021. Data selection was based on specific criteria related to the presenting problem. Analysis was conducted using Python and the Interpretable Machine Learning (InterpretML) machine learning library. InterpretML calculates overall importance based on the mean absolute score, which was used to measure the impact of each feature on admission. A person's ‘Age’ and ‘Triage category’ are ranked significantly higher than ‘Facility identifier’, ‘Presenting problem’ and ‘Active Client’. The contribution of other presentation features on admission shows a minimal effect. Aligning the models closely with service delivery will help services understand their service users and provide insight into financial and clinical variations. Suicidal ideation negatively correlates to admission yet represents the largest number of presentations. The nurse's role at triage is a critical factor in assessing the needs of the presenting individual. The gap that emerges in this context is significant; MH triage requires a complex understanding of MH and presents a significant challenge in the ED. Further research is required to explore the role that ML can provide in assisting clinicians in assessment.</p