scholarly journals Understanding Lone-Actor Terrorists: The Global Context and How it can be Applied to New Zealand

Author(s):  
Josinta Tillett

While the Christchurch mosque attacks on 15 March 2019 were asserted to have changed New Zealand’s national security context, arguably the possibility of such an attack was foreseen, and, internationally, there was evidence of increasing risk of such attacks occurring. This paper explores the current state of international lone-actor research, and looks at how this can be applied in an endeavour to prevent future attacks in New Zealand. This paper combines an overview of the international lone-actor phenomenon, with New Zealand’s historical and contemporary terrorism context, and explores the extent that international research may have a bearing on current and future lone-actor terrorism risk here. It argues careful attention to identifiable indicators and protective factors, as well as local context, as essential in the contemplation of current and future attempts to pre-emptively identify and prevent potential lone-actor terrorism in New Zealand.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nina Helen Finigan

<p>Environmental sustainability is becoming an increasingly essential component of modern life. The contemporary museums’ role as public educators, and as guardians of tangible and intangible culture, places them in a unique position to address the various issues surrounding environmental sustainability, from climate change, to bio-diversity loss, to conservation. There is increasing momentum behind the idea that museums should not only engage with environmental sustainability, but that they indeed have a responsibility to. Although museums throughout New Zealand are addressing environmental sustainability, there is currently no thorough examination of how they are doing this. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation was so find out the current state of environmental sustainability in New Zealand museums, and specifically how staff are approaching it. Through engaging in a case study of Te Manawa Museum, Gallery and Science Centre, Palmerston North, and specifically the environmentally themed exhibition Te Awa/The River: Heart of the Manawatu, this dissertation analyses and discusses the realities of addressing institutional environmental sustainability. While the previous literature surrounding this topic has addressed the many reasons why museums should engage with environmental sustainability, this dissertation has expanded on this by analysing and discussing the realities of addressing environmental sustainability from a staff perspective. Through interviews with five Te Manawa staff members, this dissertation has revealed that while museum professionals agree that engagement with environmental sustainability should become part of bottom line holistic sustainable development, the status of museums as trusted democratic institutions can place them in a conflicted space ‘in-between’ when dealing with polarising issues such as the environment. This is particularly relevant to the discussion around new-museological theory, and the importance of local context and reflexive community engagement, where the community essentially help drive museological direction and content.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nina Helen Finigan

<p>Environmental sustainability is becoming an increasingly essential component of modern life. The contemporary museums’ role as public educators, and as guardians of tangible and intangible culture, places them in a unique position to address the various issues surrounding environmental sustainability, from climate change, to bio-diversity loss, to conservation. There is increasing momentum behind the idea that museums should not only engage with environmental sustainability, but that they indeed have a responsibility to. Although museums throughout New Zealand are addressing environmental sustainability, there is currently no thorough examination of how they are doing this. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation was so find out the current state of environmental sustainability in New Zealand museums, and specifically how staff are approaching it. Through engaging in a case study of Te Manawa Museum, Gallery and Science Centre, Palmerston North, and specifically the environmentally themed exhibition Te Awa/The River: Heart of the Manawatu, this dissertation analyses and discusses the realities of addressing institutional environmental sustainability. While the previous literature surrounding this topic has addressed the many reasons why museums should engage with environmental sustainability, this dissertation has expanded on this by analysing and discussing the realities of addressing environmental sustainability from a staff perspective. Through interviews with five Te Manawa staff members, this dissertation has revealed that while museum professionals agree that engagement with environmental sustainability should become part of bottom line holistic sustainable development, the status of museums as trusted democratic institutions can place them in a conflicted space ‘in-between’ when dealing with polarising issues such as the environment. This is particularly relevant to the discussion around new-museological theory, and the importance of local context and reflexive community engagement, where the community essentially help drive museological direction and content.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1480
Author(s):  
Haiyang Zhang ◽  
Guanqun Zhang ◽  
Ricardo Ma

Current state-of-the-art joint entity and relation extraction framework is based on span-level entity classification and relation identification between pairs of entity mentions. However, while maintaining an efficient exhaustive search on spans, the importance of syntactic features is not taken into consideration. It will lead to a problem that the prediction of a relation between two entities is related based on corresponding entity types, but in fact they are not related in the sentence. In addition, although previous works have proven that extract local context is beneficial for the task, it still lacks in-depth learning of contextual features in local context. In this paper, we propose to incorporate syntax knowledge into multi-head self-attention by employing part of heads to focus on syntactic parents of each token from pruned dependency trees, and we use it to model the global context to fuse syntactic and semantic features. In addition, in order to get richer contextual features from the local context, we apply local focus mechanism on entity pairs and corresponding context. Based on applying the two strategies, we perform joint entity and relation extraction on span-level. Experimental results show that our model achieves significant improvements on both Conll04 and SciERC dataset compared to strong competitors.


Author(s):  
Glen E. Bodner ◽  
Rehman Mulji

Left/right “fixed” responses to arrow targets are influenced by whether a masked arrow prime is congruent or incongruent with the required target response. Left/right “free-choice” responses on trials with ambiguous targets that are mixed among fixed trials are also influenced by masked arrow primes. We show that the magnitude of masked priming of both fixed and free-choice responses is greater when the proportion of fixed trials with congruent primes is .8 rather than .2. Unconscious manipulation of context can thus influence both fixed and free choices. Sequential trial analyses revealed that these effects of the overall prime context on fixed and free-choice priming can be modulated by the local context (i.e., the nature of the previous trial). Our results support accounts of masked priming that posit a memory-recruitment, activation, or decision process that is sensitive to aspects of both the local and global context.


2020 ◽  
pp. 089202062096985
Author(s):  
Karen Starr

Fundamental widespread changes affecting education’s purposes, policies and practices have had transformational repercussions for school business across the developed world. Subsequently, school business demands and accountabilities continue to escalate in scope and complexity and governments, education authorities and school communities are acknowledging the primacy and imperative of proficient school business leadership. International research chronicling the subsequent rapid professionalisation of school business leaders demonstrates pervasive policy moves that have re-focused school business priorities. Drawing on research conducted in Australia, USA, UK, Canada and New Zealand this article describes recent widespread changes before discussing issues and trends portending future professional adaptation for school business leaders whose work lies at the cross hairs of macro pressures and micro necessities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 102831532110162
Author(s):  
Svetlana Kostrykina

The article investigates the concept of internationalization in higher education for society (IHES) and discusses the role of social license to internationalize, its contextual variations, and implications for internationalization practices in New Zealand and Indonesia. The notion of social license to operate is common in the extraction and some service industries; however, the concept of social license to internationalize constitutes an innovative direction for research concerned with IHES and the global international education industry. Social license to internationalize emerged as a pivotal feature of internationalization practices in New Zealand and Indonesia. It reflected the public recognition of IHES, manifested in the cultural and social value of internationalization. The construction of social license to internationalize presented itself as a strategic priority for the governments and higher education institutions (HEIs) in both research settings. The conceptual underpinnings of social license to internationalize, and hence the means of constructing the latter varied depending on the local context, but they served a common purpose of reification of internationalization practices. The study of social license to internationalize contributes to a broader discussion on IHES and sheds lights on the mechanisms of building meaningful and mutually beneficial connections between the stakeholders of the global international education industry and the wider public.


Author(s):  
Wilfrid Greaves

This article examines the implications of human-caused climate change for security in Canada. The first section outlines the current state of climate change, the second discusses climate change impacts on human security in Canada, and the third outlines four other areas of Canada’s national interests threatened by climate change: economic threats; Arctic threats; humanitarian crises at home and abroad; and the threat of domestic conflict. In the conclusion, I argue that climate change has clearly not been successfully “securitized” in Canada, despite the material threats it poses to human and national security, and outline directions for future research.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Lei Zhang ◽  
Xiaoli Zhi

Convolutional neural networks (CNN for short) have made great progress in face detection. They mostly take computation intensive networks as the backbone in order to obtain high precision, and they cannot get a good detection speed without the support of high-performance GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). This limits CNN-based face detection algorithms in real applications, especially in some speed dependent ones. To alleviate this problem, we propose a lightweight face detector in this paper, which takes a fast residual network as backbone. Our method can run fast even on cheap and ordinary GPUs. To guarantee its detection precision, multi-scale features and multi-context are fully exploited in efficient ways. Specifically, feature fusion is used to obtain semantic strongly multi-scale features firstly. Then multi-context including both local and global context is added to these multi-scale features without extra computational burden. The local context is added through a depthwise separable convolution based approach, and the global context by a simple global average pooling way. Experimental results show that our method can run at about 110 fps on VGA (Video Graphics Array)-resolution images, while still maintaining competitive precision on WIDER FACE and FDDB (Face Detection Data Set and Benchmark) datasets as compared with its state-of-the-art counterparts.


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