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    Interesting life : how to make political video art in New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2008) Hewitt, Murray
    I started this thesis with the question how is it possible to make political video art in New Zealand? This came out of my desire to understand better the issues for artists currently making political work, as I found that in my practice I kept returning to political themes. It soon became apparent that I needed to include my journey out of community work into an art practice. It also seemed important to acknowledge a significant discovery, that for me, the process is often as important as the art produced. Therefore this paper includes an explanation of my change from community worker to artist, and its relevance to my art practice. And, a discussion about the importance of process: while the central and more pertinent question remains throughout, how to make political video art in New Zealand? I begin looking at philosophy confessing my assumptions about morality and looking at the struggles within postmodern subjectivity: and its implications for content in art work. The next section considers the modernist ideas of the Situationists, and of Joseph Beuys, and their hopes for the fusion of art and life, followed by reflections on my past involvements in community work. I then track the intention shown in the work of Beuys into the postmodern era looking specifically at the work Intervention to aid drug-addicted women. Shedhalle by the Austrian Art Collective Wochenklausur, considering their pragmatic, contextually-specific gestures of art. I look at two of my own works. Weeping Waters and Untitled, focusing on the importance of the process while making the distinction between the process and art.
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    Contemporary and historical performance practice in late eighteenth-century violin repertoire : observations on articulation, bow strokes, and interpretation : an exegesis submitted to Massey University and Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in Violin Performance
    (Massey University, 2014) He, Jun
    Since the 1970s, historically-aware performances of late eighteenth-century repertoire (and that of Mozart and Beethoven in particular) have prompted demands for a finer stylistic awareness on the part of the performer. Articulation in late eighteenth-century repertoire is of particular importance in this regard. In violin performance, bow strokes constitute the primary technique with which to render articulatory effects. In this study, I consider not only the link between the theoretical discussions of historically-informed performance (HIP) practitioners and the conventions of mainstream performance practice on the violin, but I investigate how best to merge musicological discussions of HIP with the practice of frequently performed repertoire on modern instruments today. Violin bow models play an important role in any discussion of articulation and bow strokes, and the use of old-style instruments represents the main divergence between HIP and mainstream performance. In this regard, observations on execution with the bow models used during the Classical era are important, and the differences between the so-called transitional bows and modern bows in performance will be informed by my own practice with a copy of a 1785 bow. Notation, which conveys the interpretative instructions of the composer, is one of the major areas of critical research of contemporary studies of the performance practices of the Classical era. Slurs, staccato markings, and passages without any articulation markings will be discussed from an interpretative perspective. Editorial issues of music scores and contemporary violin performance of the Classical era. Slurs, staccato markings, and passages without any articulation markings will be discussed from an interpretative perspective. Editorial issues of music scores and contemporary violin performances of the Classical repertoire will be touched upon, in conjunction with the consideration of performers' interpretative choices and understandings of late eighteenth-century notation.
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    The metaphorical rise of entrepreneurship
    (Massey University. Department of Management and International Business, 2006) Cardow, Andrew
    The words that have come to be associated with innovative and creative business enterprises – entrepreneur, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial – have their English origins in the realm of armed conflict. However over time the terms were colonised by the commercial world with the result that by the end of the 20th century the terms have become firmly embed within the language of commerce. Yet along the way the meaning attached to the terms have become disassociated with commerce. By the start of the 21st Century the term entrepreneurial has become a metaphor, a stand in for innovation, creativity, proactivity and risk. It is argued that such a metaphor is not owned by the commercial world and instead is a figure of speech that can be used in any situation where the speaker requires a conceptual word to mean innovation, risk, proactivity and creativity.
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    Modelling and interpreting pre-evacuation decision-making using machine learning
    (Elsevier BV, 2020-05) Zhao X; Lovreglio R; Nilsson D
    The behaviour of building occupants in the first stage of an evacuation can dramatically impact the time required to evacuate buildings. This behaviour has been widely investigated by scholars with a macroscopic approach fitting random distributions to represent the pre-evacuation time, i.e. time from noticing the first cue until deliberate movement. However, microscopic investigations on how building occupants respond to several social and environmental factors are still rare in the literature. This paper aims to leverage machine learning as a possible solution to investigate factors affecting building occupants' decision-making during pre-evacuation stage. In particular, we focus on applying interpretable machine learning to reveal the interactions among the input variables and to capture nonlinear relationships between the input variables and the outcome. As such, we use a well-established machine-learning algorithm—random forest—to model and predict people's emergency behaviour pre-evacuation. We then apply tools to interpret the black-box random forest model to extract useful knowledge and gain insights for emergency planning. Specifically, this algorithm is applied here to investigate the behaviour of 569 building occupants split between five unannounced evacuation drills in a cinema theatre. The results indicate that both social and environmental factors affect the probability of responding. Several independent variables, such as the time elapsed after the alarm has started and the decision-maker's group size, are presenting strong nonlinear relationships with the probability of switching to the response stage. Furthermore, we find interactions exist between the row number where the decision-maker sits and the number of responding occupants visible to her; the complex relationship between the outcome and these two variables can be visualized by using a two-dimensional partial dependence plot. An interesting finding is that a decision-maker is more sensitive to the proportion of responding occupants than the number of them; hence, the people sitting in the back are often responding more slowly than the people in the front.