Search Marsden awards 2008–2017
Search awarded Marsden Fund grants 2008–2017
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2010
Title: Dialogic accounting: the challenge of taking multiple perspectives seriously
Recipient(s): Prof J Brown | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Prof J Dillard | AI | Portland State University
Public Summary: How can accounting facilitate democratic dialogue among people with different social and political perspectives? Rather than focusing on business, how might it enable expression of other viewpoints?
Accounting has traditionally focused on meeting the information needs of financial markets and maximising shareholder wealth. It has downplayed or ignored many issues of concern in contemporary society, including questions about corporate accountability, sustainability and social justice. Social and environmental (SEA) accountants consider that this limited focus is inadequate for a profession that purports to act in the public interest.
This research aims to foster new accountings that account for a much wider range of phenomena than traditional accounting. It seeks to enable groups such as environmentalists, ethical investors, unionists and indigenous communities, working with SEA accountants, to co-develop accountings that accord with their own political and value standpoints. These 'dialogic accountings' would provide multi-dimensional (financial and non-financial) information for accountability and decision-making purposes, and debate about organisational practices.
The project draws on contemporary political theory and research in other disciplines to further dialogic accounting theory. It will also develop these conceptualisations by working with SEA accountants, activists, unionists and Maori in a participatory action research case study.
Total Awarded: $595,707
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Prof J Brown
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 10-VUW-036
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: Did a previous collapse of the Antarctic Ice Sheet cause abrupt climate change in the Southern Hemisphere?
Recipient(s): Associate Professor AN Mackintosh | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr BM Anderson | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Professor L Carter | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr SR Eaves | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr F He | AI | University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr L Menviel | AI | University of New South Wales
Dr KP Norton | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr JB Pedro | AI | University of Copenhagen
Associate Professor M Rojas | AI | University of Chile
Associate Professor EA Sagredo | AI | Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Public Summary: The Antarctic Cold Reversal was a ~2000-year long cold interval which interrupted the most recent period of natural global warming approximately 14,000 years ago. While it is generally accepted that this abrupt climate event was initiated by circulation changes in the North Atlantic Ocean, new evidence suggests that the Antarctic Cold Reversal may have been enhanced by ice sheet loss and meltwater release from Antarctica to the Southern Ocean. Identifying the cause of this event is crucial for determining how melting ice sheets may influence the future climate system.
In this research, we will utilise geological deposits left behind by mountain glaciers in New Zealand and South America to reconstruct the magnitude and timing of climate change during the Antarctic Cold Reversal. We will then use our new glacier reconstructions with all available quantitative climate proxy archives to evaluate a suite of climate model experiments that are specifically designed to identify whether the Antarctic Cold Reversal was driven largely from the North Atlantic, or the Southern Ocean. Our findings will help to anticipate possible abrupt climate changes that could result from future ice sheet collapse.
Total Awarded: $960,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Associate Professor AN Mackintosh
Panel: ESA
Project ID: 17-VUW-094
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2009
Title: Did Indonesian tectonic uplift change ocean circulation and global climate 3-4 Myr ago?
Recipient(s): Dr M Quigley | PI | University of Canterbury
Professor D Haig | AI | The University of Western Australia
Professor JP Shulmeister | AI | University of Canterbury
Associate Professor JD Woodhead | AI | University of Melbourne
Public Summary: Tectonic constriction and uplift in the Indonesian seaway remains a provocative and testable hypothesis for causing global climate change around 3-4 Myr ago. This project will combine geological field studies in East Timor and isotope geochemistry at U Canterbury and U Melbourne to constrain the timing and origin of uplift in the Indonesian archipelago and the timing and magnitude of ocean temperature and salinity changes. The study will provide insight into tectonic-oceanographic-climatic linkages of global relevance and may provide information pertinent to the tectonic and climatic evolution of New Zealand.
Total Awarded: $266,667
Duration: 3
Host: University of Canterbury
Contact Person: Dr M Quigley
Panel: ESA
Project ID: 09-UOC-023
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2016
Title: Digging into the biggest explosive submarine eruption ever 'seen' to understand seafloor volcanism
Recipient(s): Professor JDL White | PI | University of Otago
Dr RJ Carey | AI | University of Tasmania
Professor M Manga | AI | University of California at Berkeley
Professor B Zimanowski | AI | University of Wuerzburg
Public Summary: This project exploits an unparalleled opportunity that we will use to gain a rigorous understanding of how explosive volcanism operates in the deep sea. In 2012 Havre seamount on the Kermadec arc north of New Zealand produced the largest submarine eruption known in history, scaling with Mt St Helens' stratosphere-piercing 1980 Plinian eruption on land. Eruptions to the surface from such water depths were unknown, yet Havre produced a 400 km2 pumice raft and vapour eruption column. A US-funded research cruise used deep submergence vehicles Jason and Sentry to provide a uniquely detailed, metre-scale resolution, topographic map of the rhyolite caldera volcano and 2012 eruptive features, and an extraordinary suite of samples collected systematically from dive-paths chosen and sites identified as the new map was constructed. The samples acquired during seafloor observation, and the amazing map itself, provide context for the proposed fragmentation experiments, heat-transfer experiments, and thermal column modelling, and will in combination reveal the factors modulating the eruption dynamics of explosive submarine eruptions. Nothing like this eruption’s scale, the cruise’s dataset, or the intensive multinational follow-up study has precedent with any previous explosive submarine eruption, and results of the work will be a touchstone for all future studies.
Total Awarded: $855,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Professor JDL White
Panel: ESA
Project ID: 16-UOO-134
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: Dilution of turbulent buoyant plumes: is it all in the how you turn the tap?
Recipient(s): Associate Professor CL Stevens | PI | NIWA - The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd
Dr AJ Lucas | AI | Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Associate Professor JD Nash | AI | Oregon State University
Dr JM O'Callaghan | AI | NIWA - The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd
Public Summary: We seek to understand ways of controlling dilution rates of buoyant plumes as they flow into a stratified ambient environment. This is a common phenomenon in the built environment with examples being wastewater outfalls and chimney exhausts. Recent developments suggest that variability in the inflow plume relative to the degree of ambient stratification will affect energy transfer and so ultimately influence dilution rates and transfer efficiency. We will examine this by building on exploratory work examining a surface plume in a natural laboratory, thus avoiding scale limitations. Our approach will transcend traditional sampling methods which were limited by poor vertical resolution which struggled with the thinness of the interface bounding the plume. Instead, we will employ techniques that include a NZ-developed drifting buoyancy profiler that can sample, at high resolution, the changing density structure of the plume as it moves. US colleagues will provide wire-walking profilers that achieve the same vertical resolution (~1cm) but in fixed locations. The measurements of dilution will be contextualized using an adaptive computational fluids solver so as to develop recipes for controlling the rates of dilution in a range of plume scenarios.
Total Awarded: $739,130
Duration: 3
Host: National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research
Contact Person: Associate Professor CL Stevens
Panel: EIS
Project ID: 13-NIW-003
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2016
Title: Dimension reduction for mixed type multivariate data
Recipient(s): Dr I Liu | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr RA Arnold | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr D Fernandez | AI | New York University
Professor SA Pledger | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: Multivariate data analysis methods are typically restricted by the assumption that the data are all of the same type. However many data sources contain data of mixed type: e.g. in a health survey data may be binary (family history of cancer, yes/no), nominal (ethnicity), ordinal (self-rated health, from poor to excellent), count (number of times under anaesthesia) or continuous (weight). Other examples of such data include ecological data on species/sites, and the large and complex big data collections that are increasingly common in biology (especially genetics), commerce and computer science. We may wish to find groups of respondents, each containing individuals who are similar in their patterns of response, and groups of questions that have correlated responses.
Where questions are found to be correlated their redundancy can be exploited and a reduced set of questions can be used in analyses. This dimension reduction is particularly important in large datasets (thousands of variables) where a full analysis is computationally infeasible.
In this project we will develop new methods for finding correlation structures within potentially large mixed type datasets. We will use finite mixtures to detect groups of similar individuals, and latent structures to identify correlated variables, thus enabling dimension reduction.
Total Awarded: $550,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr I Liu
Panel: MIS
Project ID: 16-VUW-062
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: Dipoles of charge or spin: what is the pairing mechanism in HTS cuprates?
Recipient(s): Dr JL Tallon | PI | Callaghan Innovation
Professor NW Ashcroft | AI | Cornell University
Professor C Bernhard | AI | Fribourg University
Mr BPP Mallett | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr S Narayanaswamy | AI | Callaghan Innovation
Dr JG Storey | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: New Zealand plays a leading role in the commercial development of high-temperature superconductors through HTS-110 Ltd; and contributes extensively to fundamental knowledge of these materials. Despite huge international efforts their complex physics is still not understood. Superconductivity arises from pairing of electrons, but the “glue” that binds them remains unknown. Many believe it to be magnetism arising from spins residing on the copper (or iron) atoms. This proposal seeks to break the impasse by firstly introducing a new systematic approach to study these materials, namely changing ion size in order to systematically vary the electron interaction strength. This simple method is applicable to the complete range of physical spectroscopies available to the community and should introduce a more methodical approach to the global study of high-temperature superconductors. Secondly, we explore the implications of this approach for competing dielectric and magnetic models for electron pairing. Is it coherent fluctuations of charge or spin dipoles which do the business? Unexpectedly, preliminary results favour the former – a dielectric model, just as predicted by one of our team. We bring to bear both theory and experiment, including a wide range of established and new techniques, here and abroad, to settle the issue.
Total Awarded: $695,652
Duration: 3
Host: Industrial Research Ltd
Contact Person: Dr JL Tallon
Panel: PCB
Project ID: 13-IRL-005
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2009
Title: Disasters and asset pricing
Recipient(s): Professor H Berkman | PI | The University of Auckland
Professor B Jacobsen | PI | Massey University
Dr JB Lee | AI | The University of Auckland
Public Summary: Recent theories have been successful at explaining important puzzles in both economics and finance by including disasters - e.g.WWI and WWII and the Great Depression - into standard economic models. Our research provides large sample tests of several hypotheses based on rare disaster models. We utilize a database of more than 400 major international political crises that occurred over the period 1918- 2006. Since financial market prices are forward looking, we can use these 'events', to estimate the crisis-sensitivity of financial assets, allowing us to test the hypothesis that more crisis-sensitive assets generate a higher return.
Total Awarded: $326,222
Duration: 3
Host: The University of Auckland
Contact Person: Professor H Berkman
Panel: EHB
Project ID: 09-UOA-117
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2015
Title: Distributed data-intensive service composition
Recipient(s): Dr H Ma | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Professor S Hartmann | AI | Technische Universitat Clausthal
Public Summary: Service-oriented computing promises rapid development of software by combining many distributed interoperating, autonomous, reusable services on the Web. An emergency assistance system, for example, may combine available services for showing available spaces at hospitals, for tracking patients, for monitoring current road traffic conditions, and for visualizing routes on maps. Someone could then use it to allocate patients to the best hospital in shortest time in the event of hazards like earthquakes. The challenge of service composition is to compute new value-added services by selecting and combining existing services to meet not only the functional requirements of users, but also non-functional expectations of users, such as lowest price, lowest response time, or highest reliability and availability.
In the era of Big Data, the number and complexity of data-intensive services on the Web is increasing rapidly. While data-intensive services unlock valuable data, they bring new challenges to service composition, because composition with data-intensive services distributed on the Web must consider the costs of dependency checking, consistency enforcement, mass data transfer and storage. Traditional service composition approaches have not considered the impact of distributed mass data. We will investigate the optimisation problems of data-intensive service composition and develop heuristic algorithms for solving them.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr H Ma
Panel: MIS
Project ID: 15-VUW-096
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2016
Title: Distributed Processing with Information Privacy in Sensor Networks
Recipient(s): Professor WB Kleijn | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: Wireless sensor networks, are rapidly becoming commonplace. Distributed processing is natural for sensor networks, providing the potential to make the networks scalable and reliable. We argue that distributed processing additionally can provide privacy. However, existing distributed processing algorithms do not yet realize the fore-mentioned advantages. We will develop distributed-processing algorithms that are truly scalable (can operate locally within an unbounded network), provide privacy that is localized and subject to well-defined bounds, and include protocols to enter user instructions (``extract the speech of the talker in direction y'') via any local node of the network.
Total Awarded: $790,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Professor WB Kleijn
Panel: EIS
Project ID: 16-VUW-140