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The Soul of Sybil Jane Armstrong and other short stories
(The University of Waikato, 2026) McClintock, Kate; Slaughter, Tracey; Chidgey, Catherine
A care home worker learns a dark secret about her favourite resident. A young man with a brain injury desperately tries to warn his small town of impending disaster. A doctor is haunted by a dissatisfied patient. In 1930’s Alabama, a woman sells her soul to the devil to escape an asylum. The Soul of Sybil Jane Armstrong and Other Stories is a meditation on disability, horror, and the monsters we make and are made into by the world around us. This collection maps diverse experiences of disability, caretaking and unruly bodies and minds onto the horror genre, subverting expectations around agency, harm and the monstrous to explore how ableism shapes the things we fear and the things we ignore. I was inspired to write this collection by my own experiences of disability as a woman with cerebral palsy. Disabled bodies and minds feature heavily in traditional horror stories, from Frankenstein to Friday the 13th, but disabled characters are usually reduced to villains, monsters, or, at best, objects of pity. I sought to expand this framework, highlighting the horror present not in simply existing in a disabled body or mind, but in the navigation of a world designed to be hostile, and, indeed, in the harm which each individual is capable of, regardless of ability.
Puarenga stream alum dosing: Effects on Lake Rotorua biota 2023
(Environmental Research Institute | Te Tumu Whakaora Taiao, The University of Waikato, 2026) Tempero, Grant Wayne; Ling, Nicholas
Following eutrophication in the second-half of the 20th century, Lake Rotorua currently experiences regular algal blooms reducing the recreational amenity of the lake. In 2007, an Action Plan was formulated to limit nutrient inputs to the lake, thereby improving water quality. One approach to reducing dissolved reactive phosphorus reaching the lake was the initiation of continuous alum dosing of the Puarenga Stream in 2010. The aluminium component of alum (aluminium sulphate) binds with dissolved phosphate making it unavailable for uptake by algae and limiting their growth. As a condition of the current resource consent RM18-0213-AP to alum dose the Puarenga Stream, monitoring surveys of lake water, common bully, plant material and macroinvertebrates must be conducted every 5 years to test for bioaccumulation of aluminium.
A Lone Ranger, Two Smoking Barrels and the Dirty Dozen: Confirming the harmonious nature (convergence) of the alternating harmonic series and some serious series stuff
(City University of New York, 2026) Kashyap, Ravi
This study provides a proof of the convergence of the alternating harmonic series. The alternating harmonic series could be termed the more harmonious sibling of the harmonic series, which is divergent. As a byproduct of this proof - and the associated technique - we arrive at the convergence of a few other series and related results. All the main results are stated as propositions and corollaries, complete with proofs that are simple yet formal. In addition, we create a custom program - code - to numerically illustrate the convergence of one of the series. This serves as an example of how to approach series calculations using computational tools. We verify the convergence of all the series using mathematical software. Our findings confirm the convergence of the alternating harmonic series and several related series. To complement the mathematical content, we have given a compilation of several techniques that can aid in disseminating this knowledge across appropriate audiences. We discuss challenges with respect to mathematics education and provide some pedagogical prescriptions - for the classroom, or other educational settings - to approach the topics we have presented. Our suggestions can help ease the anxiety of participants - who tend to get uneasy when engaging with mathematical material - while performing symbolic manipulations. Despite the simplicity of our proofs - and our belief that these results are surely known - we were surprised that we could not find these results easily elsewhere. This indicates that an unintended consequence of the many advances in mathematics - and related knowledge creation - might be that some knowledge could either be getting lost or just becoming harder to find, which is the equivalent of getting lost in many cases. We outline a potential solution to mitigate this unwanted outcome.
Between empire, periphery, and the United States of America: The local and international origins of the Melbourne Social Survey (1941–1943)
(Taylor & Francis, 2021) Arnott, Georgina; Greenhalgh, Charlotte
This article sets out to test competing characterisations of early Australian social research through an explication of the origins of Australia’s first major social survey, the Melbourne Social Survey (1941–1943), and its historical retelling. It asks to what extent international social survey models, figures, intellectual approaches and finances shaped the survey, and what this reveals about the degree to which early Australian social research was defined by its position of global marginality. This article finds that histories of the survey have overestimated the influence of British survey models and intellectual traditions by paying disproportionate attention to its director from 1941, Wilfred Prest. It argues that a much more powerful inspiration for the social survey, and a new social research direction at Melbourne, can be seen in a trip to the United States of America taken by University of Melbourne Dean of Commerce, Douglas Copland, in 1926 and 1927. Planners of the Melbourne Social Survey were sure it would be ‘of major social significance’. Today, the story of the survey and its historical representation illuminates shifting forces that shaped early Australian social research, and contributes to ongoing debate about the way twentieth-century social science knowledge has been circulated globally.
The survey and the state: Governments and early social research in New Zealand and Australia, 1930s–40s
(Taylor & Francis, 2020) Arnott, Georgina; Greenhalgh, Charlotte
© Editorial Board, Australian Historical Studies 2020. This article tells the story of two pioneering social surveys designed to extend international developments in quantitative social research into the Antipodes: the 1937–38 survey of living standards in rural New Zealand and the University of Melbourne's 1941–43 urban survey of 7,609 households. Archival material associated with these surveys illuminates the influence of governments on the topics, methods and publication of survey results and the tensions their involvement caused for academic researchers. Caught between the strategic interests of funders and the higher ideals of social science, social researchers struggled to deliver significant findings about local populations.