SCULPTING INFRASTRUCTURE - A TEMPLE TO NATURE

<p>Off the coast of Paraparaumu lies one of New Zealand’s most iconic tourist attractions, the Kapiti Island nature reserve. Home to many native plant and wildlife species, this island sanctuary offers a unique nature experience that is under appreciated. The now flourishing nature deserves to be honoured a respected by locals and tourists of the Kapiti region. To date there is no designated building where ticket purchases and bio-security checks can be undertaken for island visitors. No obvious link exists from the local shops to the beach front where the visitors depart. This presents an opportunity for a gateway building to create a slice of the Island’s nature on the mainland. In doing so this would honour and celebrate the sanctuaries nature, installing a level of reverence for the island as visitors pass through. This thesis looks to explore the possible synergies between nature, highway infrastructure and religious architecture types. In order to develop a critical understanding of each architecture type and the possible synergies, explorations involving mass, volume and symmetry were conducted. These specific qualities put the project into a tradition of monumentality. As an understanding of this tradition developed Louis Kahn became an important precedent for me. Just as the late Louis Kahn achieved presence in his buildings, I argue that monumentality could be used in developing a successful synergy between infrastructure and religious architecture types. In the same way monuments and temples typically evoke respect I believe a monumental building on the Paraparaumu beach front will install a reverent homage towards nature as visitors to the island pass through. Throughout this thesis the series of design experiments involving traditional monumental qualities explore the synergies between nature, highway infrastructure and religious architecture types. The exploration utilizes the gateway building as a project to test the possible synergies in context . Operating within a design-led research methodology, varied approaches using multiple mediums explored formal language, spatial experience, composition and proportion of monumentality. The final design, situated on an existing roundabout, is a cylindrical concrete temple connecting the shop and beach front. The form is a subtracted mass obtained through an exploration of subtraction and composition. This temple evokes the desired homage towards nature as its visitors pass through to the island. Although grand in size, I argue, because the temple is situated on a traffic island, the over bearing power of monumentality is played down, respecting its surrounding context. As the design process unfolded a shift occurred in the preferred method for experiments. In the early stages a reliance on a digital experimentation method existed, however a shift towards an analogue experimentation method occurred as an understanding of monumentality and possible synergies between nature, highway infrastructure and religious architecture types were realised. This shift in methodology, required more precision and rigor for each experiment, invoking a deeper understanding of each success and failure. Critically reflecting on this transition forms the discussion of my thesis, understanding the opportunities of Paraparaumu and how a modestly scaled building can be developed that still imposes its significance in the surrounding context.</p>

SCULPTING INFRASTRUCTURE - A TEMPLE TO NATURE

<p>Off the coast of Paraparaumu lies one of New Zealand’s most iconic tourist attractions, the Kapiti Island nature reserve. Home to many native plant and wildlife species, this island sanctuary offers a unique nature experience that is under appreciated. The now flourishing nature deserves to be honoured a respected by locals and tourists of the Kapiti region. To date there is no designated building where ticket purchases and bio-security checks can be undertaken for island visitors. No obvious link exists from the local shops to the beach front where the visitors depart. This presents an opportunity for a gateway building to create a slice of the Island’s nature on the mainland. In doing so this would honour and celebrate the sanctuaries nature, installing a level of reverence for the island as visitors pass through. This thesis looks to explore the possible synergies between nature, highway infrastructure and religious architecture types. In order to develop a critical understanding of each architecture type and the possible synergies, explorations involving mass, volume and symmetry were conducted. These specific qualities put the project into a tradition of monumentality. As an understanding of this tradition developed Louis Kahn became an important precedent for me. Just as the late Louis Kahn achieved presence in his buildings, I argue that monumentality could be used in developing a successful synergy between infrastructure and religious architecture types. In the same way monuments and temples typically evoke respect I believe a monumental building on the Paraparaumu beach front will install a reverent homage towards nature as visitors to the island pass through. Throughout this thesis the series of design experiments involving traditional monumental qualities explore the synergies between nature, highway infrastructure and religious architecture types. The exploration utilizes the gateway building as a project to test the possible synergies in context . Operating within a design-led research methodology, varied approaches using multiple mediums explored formal language, spatial experience, composition and proportion of monumentality. The final design, situated on an existing roundabout, is a cylindrical concrete temple connecting the shop and beach front. The form is a subtracted mass obtained through an exploration of subtraction and composition. This temple evokes the desired homage towards nature as its visitors pass through to the island. Although grand in size, I argue, because the temple is situated on a traffic island, the over bearing power of monumentality is played down, respecting its surrounding context. As the design process unfolded a shift occurred in the preferred method for experiments. In the early stages a reliance on a digital experimentation method existed, however a shift towards an analogue experimentation method occurred as an understanding of monumentality and possible synergies between nature, highway infrastructure and religious architecture types were realised. This shift in methodology, required more precision and rigor for each experiment, invoking a deeper understanding of each success and failure. Critically reflecting on this transition forms the discussion of my thesis, understanding the opportunities of Paraparaumu and how a modestly scaled building can be developed that still imposes its significance in the surrounding context.</p>

Increasing the deterrence of airport security checks by managing expectations through communication: a hypothetical scenario experiment

Selective security screenings are discussed as a potential strategy to reduce costs and waiting times at airports, while keeping security high. However, the limited literature suggests that traditional security screenings, where all passengers are screened, are perceived as more deterrent for criminal activity and more secure from passengers’ perspectives. The goal of this study was to investigate whether targeted communication on an airport’s website can counteract the detrimental effect of randomised airport security checks on deterrence. The study results confirm prior findings that people with illegal intentions prefer randomised security checks compared to traditional security checks. However, there are hints that tactical communication could be a tool to improve security at airports. All in all, the insights gathered in this study should be taken as a sign of caution, when considering switching to selective security screenings. Future directions for investigating the effect of tactical communication are discussed.

Fuzzy Integral-Based Multi-Classifiers Ensemble for Android Malware Classification

One of the most commonly used operating systems for smartphones is Android. The open-source nature of the Android operating system and the ability to include third-party Android apps from various markets has led to potential threats to user privacy. Malware developers use sophisticated methods that are intentionally designed to bypass the security checks currently used in smartphones. This makes effective detection of Android malware apps a difficult problem and important issue. This paper proposes a novel fuzzy integral-based multi-classifier ensemble to improve the accuracy of Android malware classification. The proposed approach utilizes the Choquet fuzzy integral as an aggregation function for the purpose of combining and integrating the classification results of several classifiers such as XGBoost, Random Forest, Decision Tree, AdaBoost, and LightGBM. Moreover, the proposed approach utilizes an adaptive fuzzy measure to consider the dynamic nature of the data in each classifier and the consistency and coalescence between each possible subset of classifiers. This enables the proposed approach to aggregate the classification results from the multiple classifiers. The experimental results using the dataset, consisting of 9476 Android goodware apps and 5560 malware Android apps, show that the proposed approach for Android malware classification based on the Choquet fuzzy integral technique outperforms the single classifiers and achieves the highest accuracy of 95.08%.

An Analytical Survey of WSNs Integration with Cloud and Fog Computing

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are spatially scattered networks equipped with an extensive number of nodes to check and record different ecological states such as humidity, temperature, pressure, and lightning states. WSN network provides different services to a client such as monitoring, detection, and runtime decision-making against events occurrence. However, the WSN network still has some limitations in computing power, storage resources, and battery life, which make the network is restricted for data transformation. It is due to less supportive battery power, and limited memory of nodes. The integration of WSN and cloud offers an open, adaptable, and more reconfigurable stage for different security checks and regulating requirements. In this paper, we discovered how WSN and cloud computing (CC) are integrated and help to accomplish different goals. Additionally, a comprehensive study about procedures and issues for an effective combination of WSN-CC is presented. This work also presents the work proposed by the research community for WSN-CC. Besides, we explored the integration of WSN/IoT with Fog computing (FC). Based on investigations, WSN integration with Fog computing (FC) has many benefits with respect to latency, energy consumption, data processing, and real-time data streaming. FC is not a substitute for distributed computing, so far it is utilized to improve the productivity of the sensor.

Hustling the Platform

An increasing amount of sex work in the United Kingdom is now digitally mediated, as workers and clients identify each other, agree prices and services, undertake security checks, and often make payment through various platforms and websites. Existing accounts of “digital sex work” have been both overly technological deterministic and optimistic, largely invisibilizing capital and the new forms of power and control it enables. The authors argue that the dominant platform for digital sex work in the United Kingdom, AdultWork, is reshaping the market in direct sexual services, driving down standards and prices, and normalizing risky behaviors. The article posits that these changes in the sex industry are symptomatic and reflective of wider shifts in labor-capital relations and technology and therefore argues that bringing research on platform work and sex work into closer dialogue is mutually productive. Studies of digital sex work would benefit from critical insights into power and control in platform work, while scholars of platform work—and of work and employment more generally—have much to learn from paying attention to the gendered labor of sex workers. In particular, resistance and collective organizing among sex workers, some of the most marginalized workers in contemporary capitalism, can suggest wider strategies of labor resistance and transformation in platform work and beyond.

Masked Face Recognition

The World is facing a huge health crisis due to the rapid transmission of coronavirus (COVID-19). In order to effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19 virus, almost everyone have to wear a mask as its one of the most important element to prevent from this virus as per World Health Organization (WHO). It makes conventional facial recognition technology almost ineffective in several cases, such as community access control, face access control, facial attendance, facial security checks at airports, etc. Thus, there's an immediate requirement to improve the recognition performance of the existing technology on the masked faces. The current advanced face recognition approaches are architected based on deep learning, which depend on or requires a large number of face samples. With no publicly accessible datasets or database of face samples available, a dataset needs to be created for the recognition system.