16,173 research outputs found
Guidebook for Pre-conference North Island Field Trip A1 ‘Ashes to Issues’, 28-30 November, 2008
No full textWelcome to New Zealand or Aotearoa – „Land of the long lingering day [twilight]‟ – and to our three-day pre-conference North Island field trip „Ashes and Issues‟. We trust your stay in New Zealand is both informative and friendly and there is something for everyone on the trip. The itinerary in brief and a map of the North Island showing the main scientific stops are shown above. At the time of guidebook preparation, we have a group of 23, including four students, on the tour with participants from Japan, Taiwan, USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand. The tour leaders are Prof David Lowe (Univ. of Waikato, Hamilton) and Dr Haydon Jones (Scion Research, Rotorua). Assistant leader is Prof Paul McDaniel (Univ. of Idaho, Moscow), on leave at the Univ. of Waikato July-December, 2008. We offer a warm welcome to you all. Because we have considerable distances to travel (especially Day 3), as well as a range of stops planned, we will need to leave the hotel at 8.00 am each day
Intra-conference and Post-conference Tour Guides, International Inter-INQUA Field Conference and Workshop on Tephrochronology, Loess, and Paleopedology
No full textNew Zealand consists of a cluster of islands, the three largest being North, South, and Stewart, in the southwest Pacific Ocean. They have a total land area of about 270 000 km2 (similar to that of the British Isles or Japan). The islands are the small emergent parts of a much larger submarine continental mass (Fig. 0.1) that was rafted away from Australia and Antarctica by sea-floor spreading in the proto-Tasman Sea between 85 and 60 Ma. Much of this New Zealand subcontinent is a remnant of the former eastern margin of Gondwanaland, the ancient southern supercontinent. The mainland islands form a long, narrow, NE-SW trending archipelago bisected by an active, obliquely converging, boundary between the Australian and Pacific lithospheric plates (Fig. 0.2), which has evolved over the last 25 million years (Kamp 1992). The plate boundary is marked by active seismicity and volcanic arcs, illustrating New Zealand's position as part of the Circum-Pacific Mobile Belt -the so-called "Pacific Ring of Fire". The NE-SW trend of the modem plate boundary cuts across mainly NW-SE oriented structural features inherited from earlier (mid-Cretaceous) rifting events
Reliable audiovisual archiving using unreliable storage technology and services
No full textThe drive for online access to archive content within ‘tapeless’ workflows means that mass-storage technology is an inevitable part of modern archive solutions, either in-house or provided as services by third-parties. But are these solutions safe? Can they assure the data integrity needed for long-term preservation of Petabyte volumes of data? The answer is no. Field studies reveal data corruption can take place silently without detection or correction, including in 'enterprise class' systems explicitly designed to prevent data loss. The reality is that data loss is inevitable to some degree or another from hardware failures, software bugs, and human errors. This paper presents ongoing work in the UK AVATAR-m project and in the recently started EC PrestoPrime project on a framework for storing large audiovisual files on heterogeneous and distributed storage infrastructures that allows various strategies for content replication, integrity monitoring and repair to be developed and tested
Role of tephra in dating Polynesian settlement and impact, New Zealand
No full textTephrochronology in its original sense is the use of tephra layers as time-stratigraphic marker beds to establish numerical or relative ages (Lowe and Hunt, 2001). Tephra layers have been described and studied in New Zealand for more than 160 years (the German naturalist and surgeon Ernst Dieffenbach described ‘recognizable’ tephra sections in his 1843 book Travels in New Zealand), and the first isopach map, showing fallout from the deadly plinian basaltic eruption of Mt Tarawera on 10 June 1886, was published in 1888 (Lowe, 1990; Lowe et al., 2002). More recently, a wide range of tephra-related paleoenvironmental research has been undertaken (e.g., Lowe and Newnham, 1999; Newnham and Lowe, 1999; Newnham et al., 1999, 2004; Shane, 2000), including new advances in the role of tephra in linking and dating sites containing evidence for abrupt climatic change (e.g., Newnham and Lowe, 2000; Newnham et al., 2003). Here we focus on the use of tephrochronology in dating the arrival and impacts of the first humans in New Zealand, a difficult problem for which this technique has proven to be of critical importance
Intra-conference Tour Day 2: Hamilton–Rotorua–Hamilton
No full textWe have a reasonably long day ahead of us, but it promises to be both interesting and relaxing. We will be examining a range of distal and proximal pyroclastic deposits including airfall and flow (ignimbrite) units derived from the Mangakino and Okataina Volcanic Centres, Taupo Volcanic Zone
(TVZ), tephric loess deposits, and buried paleosols on tephra beds- in other words, something for everyone attending our three-discipline conference. As well, we shall see a variety of volcanic landforms both on our journey from Hamilton and in the Rotorua region itself. We finish the day with a 'Caldera Dinner' overlooking Rotorua and Haroharo calderas, and Mt Tarawera, from the top of Ngongataha rhyolite dome
Biogeographic concepts define invasion biology
No full textCopyright © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.John R.U. Wilson, Eleanor E. Dormontt, Peter J. Prentis, Andrew J. Lowe and David M. Richardso
Contract and commercial Management: An International Practitioner Survey
No full textThe results of a global survey of the International Association of Contract and Commercial Management’s (IACCM) membership are presented. The survey sought to elicit information on topics such as job satisfaction, performance assessment, professional skills, and future challenges for the profession. The findings suggest that IACCM’s members are a “mature” group, with a high level of experience, formal education and job satisfaction. They are, however, particularly in the Americas, an aging workforce. Further, a high proportion of the respondents were dissatisfied with their potential career path and sceptical as to whether their company rewarded employees for high performance. Also, almost half the respondents stated that they wanted to leave their current position within the next three years. This was particularly true for those who supported the sales function: this subgroup was less satisfied with their current position and believed that their career path was more limited than those who support procurement and both ‘sales and procurement’. Likewise, new entrants to the profession considered their career path was more limited than both ‘directors’ and ‘managers’. These findings suggest that organisations could be faced with a potential problem in recruiting and retaining contract and commercial management professionals. To alleviate this, organisations should consider introducing (or enhancing existing) mechanisms that recognise and reward high performance and enable staff to acquire new skills and knowledge. The survey established a clear positive relationship for both job satisfaction and career path with support from the organisation in the acquisition of skills and knowledge and in providing clear and meaningful rewards for high performance
Establishing a body of knowledge and research agenda for commercial management
No full textThis paper compares and contrasts the role of commercial managers from a range of organisations and across industry sectors within the UK, as a first step in developing a body of knowledge for commercial management. It contends that there are persuasive arguments for considering commercial management, not solely as a task undertaken by commercial managers, but as a discipline in itself: a discipline that bridges traditional project management and organisational theories. While finding differences in approach and application both between and within industry sectors, it establishes sufficient similarity and synergy in practice to identify a specific role of commercial management in project-based organisations. These similarities encompass contract management and dispute resolution; the divergences include a greater involvement in financial and value management in construction and in bid management in defence/aerospace. It advocates the utilisation of the Internet to establish loosely based ‘communities of practice’ as a vehicle to disseminate good practice and cutting edge research pertinent to commercial managers. Also, the development of a body of knowledge for commercial management is recommended and key areas for targeted research to underpin the discipline proposed. These areas include: relationship management, value and value management, risk and uncertainty management, performance measurement, procurement and supply chain management, contract management, dispute resolution and conflict management, cost management, organisational learning and knowledge management, and bidding
Evolution of cooperation among tumor cells
No full textThe evolution of cooperation has a well established theoretical framework based on game theory. This approach has made valuable contributions to a wide variety of disciplines, including political science, economics, and evolutionary biology. Existing cancer theory suggests that individual clones of cancer cells evolve independently from one another, acquiring all of the genetic traits or hallmarks necessary to form a malignant tumor. It is also now recognized that tumors are heterotypic, with cancer cells interacting with normal stromal cells within the issue microenvironment, including endothelial, stromal, and nerve cells. This tumor cell???stromal cell interaction in itself is a form of commensalism, because it has been demonstrated that these nonmalignant cells support and even enable tumor growth. Here, we add to this theory by regarding tumor cells as game players whose interactions help to determine their Darwinian fitness. We marshal evidence that tumor cells overcome certain host defenses by means of diffusible products. Our original contribution is to raise the possibility that two nearby cells can protect each other from a set of host defenses that neither could survive alone. Cooperation can evolve as byproduct mutualism among genetically diverse tumor cells. Our hypothesis supplements, but does not supplant, the traditional view of carcinogenesis in which one clonal population of cells develops all of the necessary genetic traits independently to form a tumor. Cooperation through the sharing of diffusible products raises new questions about tumorigenesis and has implications for understanding observed phenomena, designing new experiments, and developing new therapeutic approaches.Author manuscript. Published in final edited form as: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 September 5; 103(36): 13474-13479.The final published version of this article is located at: www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0606053103NIH U56 CA113004; to David E. AxelrodR.A. was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant SES-0240852. D.E.A. was supported by NSF Grant IIS-0312953, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant U56 CA113004, and New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research Grant 1076-CCR-SO. K.J.P. is an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor and is supported by NIH Grants CA69568, CA102872, and CA093900.NIH CA69568; to Kenneth J. PientaNIH CA102872; to Kenneth J. PientaNIH CA093900; to Kenneth J. PientaNSF SES-0240852; to Robert AxelrodNJ Commission on Cancer Research 1076-CCR-SO; to David E. AxelrodAlso available in PubMed Central. PMCID: PMC155738
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