Bring the bird music back across New Zealand part of Smart Hamilton Smart Space

Every day, all around New Zealand, the dawn chorus tells us that our birdlife is one of our greatest treasures. Yet, New Zealand’s native birds are under threat from introduced predators such as possums, rats and stoats. How can modern information technology help to solve this problem

How to find a Morepork

In a previous blog (https://www.2040.co.nz/blogs/news/first-morepork-automatically-identified), you may have read about how I started down the road of automatically detecting morepork calls. Since then I’ve made some further progress and thought I’d share the journey so far with you

I wish I could believe you: the frustrating unreliability of some assessment research

Many practitioner researchers strive to understand which assessment practices have the best impact on learning, but in authentic educational settings, it can be difficult to determine whether one intervention, for example the introduction of an online quiz to a course studied by diverse students, is responsible for the observed effect. This paper uses examples to highlight some of the difficulties inherent in assessment research and suggests some ways to overcome them. Problems observed in the literature include: assuming that if two effects are correlated then one must have caused the other; confounding variables obscuring the true relationships; experimental approaches that are too far removed from reality; and the danger that self-reported behaviour and opinion is sometimes different from student’s actual behaviour. Practical solutions include: the use of an experimental or pseudo-experimental approach; the use of mixed methods; and the use of meta-analysis

The Significance of Purchasing Behavioural Characterisation on Sustainable Design Education of Students

More and more businesses appear to be adopting the societal (or sustainable) marketing concept as their business philosophy. This is an attempt to increase their competitiveness and promote their attitude of considering consumers' wants at the same time as meeting society's long term interests. Organisations are engaging with the sustainable agenda and many communicate this to publicly demonstrate their commitment to saving the worlds finite resources. Directives such as WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive) have also forced organisations to consider the recovery of their products at the end of service life. In line with the industry environment, and in providing creative solutions to design problems, product design students are encouraged to take account of the market, technical, functional, visual, and humanistic aspects of design as well as exploring the possibility of making their designs sustainable. Consideration of factors including waste reduction, how the product could be manufactured more efficiently and hence more cheaply by using fewer parts, less material, reducing assembly time and non-conformance are very important and can give the edge, in terms of competitive advantage. This paper assesses the product related purchase behavioural characteristics, and associated decision making process, by which purchases are made. It endeavours to identify the difference between the considerations that students take as designers and the choices they make as consumers. Following critical analysis of the primary research undertaken the outcomes are discussed

CacophonyViz: Visualisation of Birdsong Derived Ecological Health Indicators

The purpose of this work was to create an easy to interpret visualisation of a simple index that represents the quantity and quality of bird life in New Zealand. The index was calculated from an algorithm that assigned various weights to each species of bird. This work is important as it forms a part of the ongoing work by the Cacophony Project which aims to eradicate pests that currently destroy New Zealand native birds and their habitat. The map will be used to promote the Cacophony project to a wide public audience and encourage their participation by giving relevant feedback on the effects of intervention such as planting and trapping in their communities. The Design Science methodology guided this work through the creation of a series of prototypes that through their evaluation built on lessons learnt at each stage resulting in a final artifact that successfully displayed the index at various locations across a map of New Zealand. It is concluded that the artifact is ready and suitable for deployment once the availability of real data from the automatic analysis of audio recordings from multiple locations becomes available

The Cacophony Project on Maungatautari

The Cacophony Project has arrived at Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari and has been making regular audio recordings at one of the high points in the sanctuary since October 2018. The project aims to greatly improve the ability to eliminate pest predators throughout New Zealand and monitor the effects on bird life that this brings. It is well known that eliminating the last few pests using traditional techniques is difficult. The Cacophony Project envisages that this can be overcome by using lures such as sound and light to attract the last of these pests to one of numerous locations where they can be automatically identified using thermal cameras and artificial intelligence before beginning killed in a safe and humane manner

Is that what they said? An automated reference finder

This work investigates the feasibility of using freely available online resources to create an application that can automatically discover and display original source articles that a student cites and references. A prototype application was created that used CiteSeerExtractor to extract reference details from the student work, and then used Crossref.org to return web page addresses of the original journal articles or abstracts. Initial results successfully demonstrate that the idea is effective. It is concluded that further development would result in a useful tool for assisting in the marking of student work

Discouraging Federal actions that reduce the value of private property: evaluating procedural and financial approaches

A regulatory taking occurs when a court concludes that a government action has taken private property for a public use without paying just compensation to the owner--a violation of the fifth amendment. Often, the remedy is a monetary award whose value is determined by the court. ; In recent years there has been considerable interest in creating a statutory complement to the constitutional law of takings. Some believe that a statutory scheme, using procedural financial approaches, would discourage federal regulatory activities that reduce the value of privately owned property. The procedural approach would require federal agencies to evaluate the property value effects of proposed actions before undertaking them. The financial approach would require that federal agencies pay from their own budgets for any compensation awards that result from their decisions. ; This paper compares the existing procedural and financial approaches to the ones proposed. It describes the model of agency incentives and the regulatory environment implicitly assumed by these proposals and compares them to the literature on regulatory decision making and administrative law. Finally, the paper discusses some of the institutional factors likely to affect the outcome of the proposed reforms, including the role of the courts in enforcing analysis requirements, the extent of agency discretion, and the federal budget process.Environmental protection

The Role of Transaction Costs and Risk Premia in the Determination of Climate Change Policy Responses

Transaction costs and risk have generally not been taken into account in assessing the Kyoto mechanisms JI, CDM and emissions trading. However, they can have a significant influence. With regard to the project-based mechanisms, the factor that most determines the influence of transaction costs on the implementation of a project is the size of the particular project. For some projects transaction costs amount up to over 1000 ?/ton C reduced, which proves the necessity of streamlining procedures, as recognised in the Marrakesh Accords. With regard to international emissions trading it will be of high importance to build on experience with past national emissions trading schemes in order to keep transaction costs low. However, international trading schemes of the type envisaged under the Kyoto Protocol are likely to have significant issues that have not been addressed in previous national experience. In addition to transaction costs, we determine country risk premia to account for the fact that projects in different states may induce different levels of risk of default or project failure. --transaction costs,risk premia,Kyoto Protocol,emissions trading,small scale projects

Analysis of morepork vocalizations recorded using a permanently located mobile phone

The purpose of this work included the annotation of audio recordings of bird vocalizations to be used to train a machine learning algorithm to automatically detect bird calls. In addition, this work was intended to demonstrate the ability of The Cacophony Project’s mobile phone based ‘Bird Monitor’ for on-going monitoring of bird vocalizations.This work is important because it forms part of The Cacophony Project’s strategy to provide a low cost and robust means of collecting bird vocalization information to help determine the effectiveness of pest control activities. The main results show that the Bird Monitor does reliably capture bird calls over an extended period and can be used to create many annotated recordings from a real situation. It is concluded that the approach of choosing the distinct call of the Morepork as an entry into the area of automatic bird call counting was valid