UC Research Repository
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The UC Research Repository collects, stores and makes available original research from postgraduate students, researchers and academics based at the University of Canterbury.
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Recent Submissions
Increasing microfinance risk tolerance through revenue sharing: An experiment
(Informa UK Limited, 2021) Clark, Jeremy; Spraggon, J
Microfinance has been found to be less effective for high risk/return borrowing groups. We report a group liability microfinance lab experiment that tests a mechanism to raise repayment rates among such borrowers. The mechanism offers partial revenue sharing among groups of borrowers, agreed to before individual business outcomes are realized and loan repayment is due. Such revenue sharing makes loan repayment optimal under more outcome states, increasing the expected benefit to each borrower of repayment to qualify for future loans. We further test the effect of allowing borrowers to renege on revenue sharing agreements after learning their business outcomes, prior to loan repayment decisions. Our results illustrate the problem that exogenously higher risk/return borrowing groups achieve lower loan repayment rates than lower risk/return borrowing groups. We find evidence that optional revenue sharing significantly increases high risk borrowers’ repayment rates, but that most of this gain is lost if they can renege on revenue sharing agreements.
Claiming Rights to Biocultural Food Heritage: Intellectual Property and Biodiversity Protection in Andean Community Territorial Life Projects
(2024) Jefferson, David; Coombe R
The rise and global spread of industrial capitalism through trade liberalization depended upon the
expansion of intellectual property systems into new regions and over new subject matters justified
by modern ideals of economic development premised on narratives of ‘progress’. The
encroachment of proprietary logics into the realm of food and agriculture, however, was
contentious, with opponents decrying perceived threats to food security, the possible erosion of
agrobiodiversity, and threats to ancestral agricultural knowledges necessary to preserve
biodiversity. More recently, the conventional assumption that subaltern peoples including
Indigenous communities, ethnic minority groups, and peasant farmers are unlikely to benefit from
the expansions of intellectual property has been challenged by the emergence of collective claims
to ‘rights from below’ pertaining to plants, farming practices, post-harvest processes, and local
cuisines. These collective stewardship rights are influenced and animated by environmental NGOs,
‘post-development’ social movements, and global peasant organizations, who articulate norms of
biocultural heritage and biocultural territories to assert new indications of geographical provenance
(marks indicating conditions of origin) to identify collective enterprises that protect ecosystems
characterized by multi-species relationships. In this socio-legal paper, we explore ethnographically
based research across academic disciplines that reveal a growing terrain of ‘territorialized life
projects’ centred upon food and agriculture in the member states of the Andean Community
(Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru). We demonstrate how the creative use of marks indicating
conditions of origin are being deployed by Indigenous, ethnic minority, and peasant producers to
assert rights to heritage foods and explore novel livelihood opportunities in new markets, while
supporting biodiversity conservation and food sovereignty objectives. Our work suggests that
territorialized, non-Western cultural traditions, spiritualities, and values may be used to interpret
and articulate new intersections of intellectual property and human rights norms by commercially
expressing local relationships to food as a source of identity, livelihood, and sustenance.
The One About Ethics [Podcast]
(2024) Bartneck, Christoph
Robots are just not machines. We treat them as if they were somewhat like humans. Including applying moral standards and expectations to them. Our behaviour towards robots matters. The way we treat them reveals much about ourselves. In today's episode we will talk about how being nice is not the opposite of being cruel to them. I invited Bob Douglas and Mary Blossom from the AI Research Institute to introduce us to the topic. They agreed to produce a short podcast dialogue to get us started. I then discussed their introduction with Michael-John Turp and Minyi Wang.
Fast three-dimensional phase retrieval in propagation-based X-ray tomography
(International Union of Crystallography, 2019) Thompson DA; Nesterets YI; Pavlov, Konstantin; Gureyev TE
The following article describes a method for 3D reconstruction of multi-material objects based on propagation-based X-ray phase-contrast tomography (PB-CT) with phase retrieval using the homogeneous form of the transport of intensity equation (TIE-Hom). Unlike conventional PB-CT algorithms that perform phase retrieval of individual projections, the described post-reconstruction phase-retrieval method is applied in 3D to a localized region of the CT-reconstructed volume. This work demonstrates, via numerical simulations, the accuracy and noise characteristics of the method under a variety of experimental conditions, comparing it with both conventional absorption tomography and 2D TIE-Hom phase retrieval applied to projection images. The results indicate that the 3D post-reconstruction method generally achieves a modest improvement in noise suppression over existing PB-CT methods. It is also shown that potentially large computational gains over projection-based phase retrieval for multi-material samples are possible. In particular, constraining phase retrieval to a localized 3D region of interest reduces the overall computational cost and eliminates the need for multiple CT reconstructions and global 2D phase retrieval operations for each material within the sample.
Patching Hele-Shaw Cells to Investigate the Flow at Low Reynolds Number in Fracture Networks
(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2021) Aghajannezhad P; Sellier, Mathieu; Becker, Sid
This research has found a novel computationally efficient method of modelling flow at low Reynolds number through fracture networks. The numerical analysis was performed by connecting Hele-Shaw cells to investigate the effect of intersections on the pressure field and hydraulic resistance for given inlet and outlet pressure values. In this analysis, the impact of intersecting length, intersecting angle and fracture aperture on the fluid flow was studied. For this purpose, two models with different topologies were established. The Hele-Shaw simulation results for hydraulic resistance, pressure and velocity agreed well with results obtained by solving the full Navier–Stokes equations (NSE). The results indicated an approximately linear relationship between intersection length and hydraulic resistance. Specifically, an increase in the intersection length increases the flow rate and as a result, the pressure along the intersection length decreases. The error associated with employing the Hele-Shaw approximation in comparison with NSE is less than 2%. All investigations were performed in the Reynolds Number range of 1–10.