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Integrating behavioural and formal specifications
No full textBehaviour-driven development and formal methods have been shown to be effective techniques for different parts of the interactive system development process. However, when the different parts of an interactive system are combined, issues may arise due to the different focuses of the techniques. For a safety-critical interactive system, where safety is particularly emphasised, using either technique individually does not cover all aspects of the system. Thus a complementary approach of integrating behaviour-driven development and formal methods, would be better suited for developing safety-critical interactive systems.
This thesis presents an investigation into a method that integrates formal methods and behavioural specifications. This method enables the identification of any inconsistencies between the behavioural specification and the Z specification, allowing potential problems to be found and fixed earlier. We also demonstrate how our method supports ensuring consistency after refinement of the Z specification
Non-market valuation of urban ecosystem services in Penang, Malaysia
Get PDFThis thesis explores the non-market values of ecosystem services in Penang's urban green spaces, addressing threats posed by urbanization. Utilizing non-market valuation techniques, this study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the contributions of urban green spaces to the local economy. The first topic assesses urban residents' preferences using the best-worst scaling method, highlighting air quality as crucial but revealing inconsistencies in preferences. The second topic applies the travel cost method to analyse visit preferences and behaviours, emphasizing the significance of incorporating time-related costs for understanding travel patterns. The third topic employs a discrete choice experiment to reveal trade-offs between green space characteristics and travel distance, emphasizing the high value placed on improved air quality. The fourth topic uses a Seemingly Unrelated Regression model to explore the impact of spatial data on willingness to pay, showing insights into how spatial characteristics influence preferences. The fifth topic employs a simulation framework to assess the economic benefits of attribute changes in Penang's urban green spaces, emphasizing increased consumer surplus with improvements. Overall, these findings contribute valuable insights into resident preferences, spatial influences, and economic implications, offering guidance for sustainable urban development to local policymakers
CICADA
Get PDFCICADA is a name for a noisy insect and an author and a collection of creative nonfiction poetry. It is the story of a trans woman rediscovering herself after attending an All-Boys High School. CICADA is a clear midnight sky in the lake’s mirror. It is six panic attacks trying to convince an examiner on why they should give a shit about CICADA. CICADA wants to be angry. At her high school, at herself, and at the dead boy in the lake. CICADA wants to show you the ugly side of transformation and transition. CICADA also wants to piss without crying, but it seems it’s easier to write a manuscript than it is to untangle one’s own backlog of trauma.
Foregoing pride in being part of the LGBTQ+ community, CICADA opts to expose herself, all parts that are flesh and raw, all parts that are soft and ugly, all parts that are gruelling and never-ending.
CICADA is a reoccurring theme of a boy lost at sea. The dead boy is everything that was, and everything that is now wasted thanks to the emergence of CICADA. He is a vessel to direct anger at. He is innocent yet blamed and scrutinized by CICADA for stealing her years from her. When you look for the dead boy in the waters, you may also see the stars in its reflection, and find the lost girl floating in dance with the beloved dead boy.
The girl is dead potential, and everything that could have been, adrift in liminal outer space tied to a homemade spacesuit constructed by the dead boy. The dead boy and the lost girl are ghosts in the lived experience of the present CICADA, the transition, the artist, ‘the woman’ writing to the audience. Transition is often compared to a caterpillar’s journey of becoming the beautiful butterfly. CICADA is the opposite, enveloping the reader into the ugly reality of the never ending and every-day pains. The struggle to unlearn habits and to grow new skin as the old dead skin decays and rots away. It depicts a colossal range of everyday experiences and complications of living as a trans woman. CICADA overcomes tasks such as: getting dressed, showering, going to the bathroom, and even needing to revamp her social circle and career. CICADA also battles with herself. Her need to distance herself from the innate feeling of needing to educate, clashes with the desire of confronting the ignorant and standing with strength and visibility.
CICADA aims to play with distance, humour and joins the new voice of poetry, harmonizing with other queer writers who are creating the new poetic mould. CICADA barely touches the iceberg of transgender issues as a whole. CICADA is able to say a lot about a global issue from one person’s experience. Through a magnified lens and focus on one individual experience, it provides a scale and context of how important empathy and support is for the transgender community. There will be moments unrelatable, confusing, and oddly specific that will disarm any reader. CICADA is to feel like an alien. CICADA is for no one and for everyone. CICADA is selfish enough to be about the author and not the reader
Fathers’ help-seeking and support: The importance of relationships for mental wellbeing
Get PDFBecoming a father is a major transition for men, and may be a source of happiness and fulfilment, as well as distress. Perinatal mental health research has traditionally focused on mothers, with paternal mental health receiving limited attention. Men are adopting more caregiving roles and increasing their parental involvement, while maintaining their traditional role as a key provider for the family. Balancing these roles may lead to experiences of psychological distress, and help-seeking can be important in alleviating the impacts of paternal distress. However, research on fathers’ help-seeking and mental health needs remains scarce. Therefore, this thesis sought to better understand fathers’ experiences of help-seeking, and facilitators and challenges of paternal help-seeking to support mental health.
Study 1 involved in-depth semi-structured interviews with 11 fathers about their experiences regarding transition to fatherhood and seeking support and advice in early years of parenthood. Fathers reported experiencing distress and uncertainty during the transition to parenthood; however, most did not believe their distress required seeking professional help. Fathers also used a variety of individual and interpersonal coping strategies. Partners were the most important source of emotional support for fathers, but some fathers felt it was inappropriate to seek their partner’s support while she was coping with the stress of pregnancy and new parenting. This study revealed that fathers viewed themselves in a rather traditional role of provider and as a source of emotional and financial stability for their family. This led to work-life balance stress and, for some, created a dilemma where they felt unable to seek emotional support from their most trusted person—their partner.
In study 2 the role of social support, particularly partner support, was explored in relation to paternal mental health and parenting. Data from fathers participating in Growing Up in New Zealand (N = 2601) were used, focusing on data waves during pregnancy and at child ages 9 months and 2 years. Concurrent partner support, and to a lesser degree, other informal support (friends and family) was related to lower paternal distress during pregnancy and at child age 9 months. Although significant, the magnitude of the association was small. There was no evidence of social support in infancy buffering a negative association between distress and parenting outcomes at child age 2 years.
Study 1 found that most fathers did not feel that their distress warranted a professional intervention. Following from this, study 3 investigated the relationships among mental health literacy (MHL), emotional distress, and fathers’ perceptions of barriers and modes of mental health help-seeking. Data were collected from a community sample of New Zealand and Australian fathers (N = 129). The study involved completing an online vignette survey, the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale 21 Items (DASS-21), and two open ended questions. Those with a high DASS-21 stress score were more likely to report the individual in the vignette as needing help or having a mental health problem. regardless of the accuracy of this choice. Additionally, more fathers were able to correctly recognise clear symptoms of depression (typical depression) compared to masked depression. Fathers described several informal and formal sources for support and internal and external barriers (e.g., stigma and time/cost) to help-seeking.
This thesis adds to the growing knowledge on fathers’ mental wellbeing by examining paternal help-seeking and distress as well the role of social support. Overall, the findings of this research are consistent with the limited amount of existing research suggesting that partner support has a unique role in paternal mental health. The findings also suggest greater emphasis on the role of relationships and social support in fathers’ mental health and help-seeking. The main implications of this thesis for health professionals who interact with young families are that paternal mental health requires greater clinical and social attention, and fathers with low levels of social support, poor work-life balance and mental health literacy, and traditional masculine beliefs on help-seeking may be at high risk of experiencing mental health difficulties
Foresight in hindsight: Visions of the future from Julius Vogel, Āpirana Ngata, Truby King, and Ettie Rout, 1889-1923
No full textThis thesis examines seven future-focused texts authored by four New Zealanders: Julius Vogel, Āpirana Ngata, Truby King, and Ettie Rout. ‘The future’ is a neglected lens for historical research and this thesis explores the value of such an approach, using New Zealand society from the 1880s and to the 1920s as a case study. A methodological combination of textual analysis, biography, and historical contexts, including consideration of print culture, allows for nuanced examination of depictions of the future, and suggests such connections are vital to fully understanding histories of the future. This research serves as a framework to inform further exploration of historical future imaginings, either in New Zealand or in other geographic or temporal contexts.
From Vogel’s novel Anno Domini 2000 (1889) to Ngata’s 1892 essay The Past and Future of the Maori to King’s and Rout’s twentieth-century guidebooks on the care of babies and the use of contraception, the four authors utilize various textual forms to communicate their imagined future, and commonly frame their ideas within concepts of utopia and dystopia. This thesis compares the futures depicted by male and female authors, and those emerging from Māori and Pākehā cultural contexts. It examines futures envisioned by politicians, community leaders, and ostracized individuals. Shaped by preoccupations with empire, gender, and identity, these future-focused texts highlight relationships between national and global spaces. This in turn allows for a fresh exploration of New Zealand’s past, and especially the country’s colonial histories
An evaluation of the NuroChek system for concussion assessment and management
Get PDFCurrent methods of concussion assessment are subjective and vulnerable to error, and a missed concussion diagnosis could increase an athlete’s risk of further injury. An objective method of concussion assessment could provide valuable physiological data about injury severity and duration. The NuroChek system uses a flashing light stimulus to evoke electrophysiological activity, which is measured from occipital electrode sites and used to calculate a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and determine the magnitude of activity at the target location. Reductions in this activity are proposed to be associated with dysfunction or damage after concussion; in a previous study, the SNR was shown to decrease after concussion, and then return to baseline strength upon recovery.
To examine the utility of the NuroChek system and SNR output in concussion assessment and management, 157 participants were assessed with the NuroChek system as rugby athletes (n = 121), combat athletes (n = 19), or non-athlete controls (n = 17). All athletes were assessed at multiple time points, while the non-athlete control group was only assessed at one time point. All participants completed two trials of the NuroChek headset and at least one cognitive measure.
The first study (Chapter 4) examines the acute effects of concussion on the SNR, as well as any SNR changes after injury. Rugby athletes who sustained concussions (n = 21) were tested at multiple time points after their injuries with the NuroChek system and either the King-Devick (K-D) or the Sport Concussion Assessment Tool (SCAT-5). The post-injury and baseline SNR were compared to identify any changes within 3 days of concussion, as well as changes during the follow-up time points that might correspond with concussion recovery (up to 20 days post-injury and mid-season or end-of-season if available). No statistically significant changes were seen after concussion, W = 11.000, p = 0.612, d = -0.099, n = 8. When compared to the non-concussed male rugby athletes, the concussed athletes had significantly lower SNRs than the athletes who sustained regular repetitive impacts by the end-of-season, H(3) = 10.160, p = 0.017, d = 0.135, n = 76.
The second study (Chapter 5) examines the different effects that concussion history, age, and sex have on the SNR and its trajectory over time in those experiencing repetitive impacts. While the SNR was not affected by concussion history or age, there was a main effect for sex: male athletes demonstrated significantly higher average SNRs than female athletes at all three time points. Additionally, the SNRs from female participants demonstrated a significantly greater proportion of a harmonic artefact (51.8%, compared to 15.1% of data from male participants) that decreased the quality of the female data. Sex and repetitive impacts were examined for any interaction, but the sample sizes were too small in some subgroups for statistical analysis. A main effect of repetitive impacts on the SNR was also seen in rugby and combat athletes. This could indicate that repetitive impacts lead to higher SNR in athletes over time.
Overall, the SNR in this study was not sensitive to changes after concussion or during recovery. No evidence was found to support NuroChek’s use in the assessment or management of concussion in rugby athletes. Additionally, the potential effect of repetitive impacts on the SNR confounds the relationship between the SNR and concussion. Future development of electrophysiological assessment methods for concussion should consider the effects of repetitive impacts and sex
Distributed agent-centric system for indigenous data sovereignty
No full textThe sovereignty of indigenous data is a key issue facing indigenous communities. Holochain, a distributed ledger technology, has the potential to address some of the challenges indigenous communities face with respect to data sovereignty. The purpose of this thesis is to critically evaluate the feasibility of using holochain technology to support indigenous data sovereignty. This paper first explores the literature on holochain technology, examining its underlying architecture and features. The research employs a three-phase design science research methodology, conducting an experiment to explore the integration of a decentralized application, holochain, with a prominent cloud service provider. The first phase concentrates on emulating real data-sharing platforms that may utilize data at its disposal, following the principles of indigenous data sovereignty, where a centralized platform could be hosted on a cloud computing service with multiple services in operation. The second phase involves developing a holochain application guided by the principles of indigenous data sovereignty. The final phase seeks to combine the established centralized platform from the first phase with the outcomes of the holochain application from the second phase to experimentally assess whether both technologies can create a data sovereignty solution that aligns with the needs of indigenous data sovereignty. The results of the experiment will provide a solid foundation for understanding the current state of the field and identifying areas where holochain can potentially offer solutions. Furthermore, the results of our research indicate that holochain shows significant promise in tackling the issue of indigenous data sovereignty, although there are considerable limitations that must be addressed and resolved to achieve improved results
Row-column block designs: Efficiency and structure
No full textA row-column design is any rearrangement of the blocks of a combinatorial design into a rectangular array. A row-column block design is a row-column design in which the blocks form a balanced incomplete block design; that is, each pair of elements occurs in a constant number of blocks. In this thesis we study the efficiency and structure of row-column block designs. In particular, we use solutions to Heffter’s difference problem to give construct row-column block designs with 3 elements per cell with optimal regularity in rows and columns.
In Section 1 we review definitions and theorems related to Latin squares. We introduce related concepts of balanced incomplete block designs and incidence matrix and concurrence matrix of designs. In Section 2 we give our main results of row-column block designs with block size 3. In Section 3 we use Heffter’s difference problem to give some solutions. In Section 4 we explain efficiency measures for block designs. In Section 5 we introduce Trojan semi-Latin squares. We give efficiency measures for Trojan semi-Latin squares. In Section 6 we show the applications to experimental design. Original results are given in the following theorems: Theorem 2.9, Theorem 3.1, Theorem 3.3, Theorem 3.4, Theorem 4.2, Theorem 5.2, Theorem 5.12.
Results from Section 2 and Section 3 have been submitted as a manuscript for publication [17] (Xiao Nie, Row-column block designs with blocks of size three, Ars Combinatoria, submitted)
Building seismic resilience for New Zealand - Past, now, and future
No full textThe 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes exposed deficiencies in building performance, particularly in terms of interrupted functionality, extensive downtime, and uneconomical repairability. Amid the increasingly acknowledged emphasis on improving building resilience, the post-earthquake recovery has witnessed the emergence of a series of low-damage designs for retrofitted and newly constructed buildings, alongside a growing recognition of a functionality-centric approach to building codes. By collecting data from a joint US- New Zealand study tour, this research identified the resilience practices that had taken place after the 2010/11 Canterbury earthquakes to enhance building seismic performance in New Zealand. A number of low-damage design solutions have been observed. However, their adoption has also been hindered by factors such as a lack of finance, evidence-based information, skills and expertise, and community engagement, compounded by complexities of legislation requirements. To foster functional recovery-oriented building performance, there needs to be a systemic approach, including 1) sufficient performance validation of more advanced building designs, 2) revisions to building codes to provide an enabling regulatory environment, 3) widespread public education and communication in building risk mitigation, and 4) accessible training programs provided by engineering professional organisations such as Engineering New Zealand (ENZ), New Zealand Society of Earthquake Engineering (NZSEE), and Structural Engineering Society New Zealand (SESOC) for engineers on low-damage design concepts and risk-targeted design for maintaining functionality
Exploring bullying aganist academics in Pakistan: A corrosive workplace issue
No full textThe issue of workplace bullying in academia, particularly within the realm of education, has garnered attention and concern in various Western and Asian countries. Workplace bullying poses significant risks to educators, not only compromising their well-being but also detrimentally affecting the overall learning environment. This study makes a novel contribution by examining staff being bullied within the higher education sector in Pakistan, an unexplored focus that has received modest attention.
The study aims to explore workplace bullying factors using qualitative methods, focusing on academic staff members' firsthand experiences and coping strategies in university settings.
The results showed several risk factors associated with workplace bullying in HEIs in Pakistan. The finding shows that gender and culture are linked and should be considered when examining workplace bullying in the educational sector. Key themes emerging from the study link instances of workplace bullying to the volatile economic conditions and heightened competition in Pakistan’s higher education sector that act as barriers to formally report bullying incidents. Moreover, organisational culture and socio-cultural norms were also identified as significant contributors to the occurrence of workplace bullying in academia.
Based on the study's findings, suggested strategies to combat workplace bullying may include raising awareness and fostering respect for cultural diversity among all university staff, including administrators and managers, within Pakistan’s higher education institutions (HEIs). The research aims to educate academics, particularly women, about workplace bullying, empowering them to develop effective strategies for prevention and resolution