The discord between discourse and data in engendering resilience building for sustainability

This paper explores how gender is considered in the resilience discourse, and the extent to which there is an evidence base to support the targeting of women in resilience programmes. The paper provides an overview of the approaches adopted in the fields of gender and development and gender and environment, and the critiques of these approaches. Mainstream approaches to engendering policy and practice are charged with being essentialist and instrumentalist, drawing on women’s ‘natural’ attributes and altruism, placing women at the service of the policy agenda, rather than served by it. Despite these critiques it highlights how these approaches have been borrowed by ‘newer’ policy arenas such as disasters and within this, resilience building. An analysis of the gendered language in resilience highlights a contradictory discourse, presenting women as vulnerable and as agents for change, and an explicit instrumentalism. The paper notes that in the disaster resilience discourse much of the focus actually remains on vulnerability, problematising this and how vulnerability/resilience are defined and measured generally, and in gender terms. The pseudo-scientific constructions of ‘objective’ knowledge at the base of much policy are critiqued from a feminist theoretical and practical perspective. It concludes that there is no reliable evidence base on which to base any policy moves to ‘engender’ resilience. As such the focus on women in resilience must be based on gendered assumptions and/or other policy aims, and as such the inclusion of women in resilience building is more about efficiency, than about equality

Design knowledge capture for a corporate memory facility

Currently, much of the information regarding decision alternatives and trade-offs made in the course of a major program development effort is not represented or retained in a way that permits computer-based reasoning over the life cycle of the program. The loss of this information results in problems in tracing design alternatives to requirements, in assessing the impact of change in requirements, and in configuration management. To address these problems, the problem was studied of building an intelligent, active corporate memory facility which would provide for the capture of the requirements and standards of a program, analyze the design alternatives and trade-offs made over the program's lifetime, and examine relationships between requirements and design trade-offs. Early phases of the work have concentrated on design knowledge capture for the Space Station Freedom. Tools are demonstrated and extended which helps automate and document engineering trade studies, and another tool is being developed to help designers interactively explore design alternatives and constraints

The geothermal world videogame: An authentic, immersive videogame used to teach observation skills needed for exploration

Interviews with geothermal professionals have identified geothermal concepts (i.e. knowledge) and skill sets that entry-level geologists commonly lack when beginning a career in the geothermal energy sector. To help address these issues, an authentic and immersive 3D free-roaming videogame called ‘The GeoThermal World’ was designed and piloted in 2012 at the University of Canterbury to teach undergraduate students about geothermal fieldwork and resource exploration. An experiment was carried out to compare students’ learning experiences in a real fieldwork activity at Orakei Korako to learning experiences in the virtual setting of the videogame. Both settings were designed with the same outcomes in mind: to provide the students with a level of background knowledge and operating procedures to do basic geothermal fieldwork. Several datasets were collected to characterize the students learning and to allow us to compare their overall experiences and perceptions of the tasks in different settings. In both activities, we aimed to teach the students how to observe, characterize and record geologic information at a hot spring. Preliminary results indicate that both settings are successful at teaching geothermal concepts with some strengths and weaknesses identified in both. However, the settings seem to be complementary to one another. Hence, ideally, field teaching experiences as a part of the undergraduate geology curriculum could be supplemented by digital or virtual experiences. This may cut down on the time required to ‘skill-up’ new entry-level geologists who may be lacking geothermal-specific field knowledge and skills. Further development of ‘The GeoThermal World’ will allow us to refine the authenticity and create more complex virtual geothermal settings and challenges

Mobility and Trapping of Molecules During Oxygen Adsorption on Cu(110)

Adsorption of oxygen on Cu(110) at 4 K has been investigated by scanning tunneling microscopy. We have observed that weakly bound, “trapped” molecules coexist with pairs of atoms which are preferentially oriented along [110] and [001]. Molecules and atoms are both adsorbed in hollow sites. Clustering of O2 at step edges perpendicular to [110] indicates substantial anisotropic mobility of the molecular precursor. It is concluded that precursor dynamics and multidimensionality of the potential energy surface have a dominant influence on the dissociative chemisorption of O2 on Cu(110)

Angle-resolved Auger spectrum of the N₂ molecule

Angle-resolved Auger electron spectra of N2 have been measured with good statistics at photon energies corresponding to the π* resonance and the σ* shape resonance, below and above the N 1s threshold, respectively. Angular anisotropy is observed in both cases, but disappears as expected far above threshold. Satellite Auger transitions also show some angular anisotropy close to the N 1s threshold. This is attributed to the creation and decay of conjugate shakeup initial states, which have non-ground-state symmetry

Core Hole Double-Excitation and Atomiclike Auger Decay in N₂

Core hole decay spectra of the free N2 molecule show evidence for hitherto unobserved molecular resonances both below and above the K-shell photoionization threshold. Based on earlier calculations they are assigned to doubly excited neutral states which could not be seen below threshold in recent high resolution absorption spectra because of the more intense core-to-Rydberg excitations. By calculating the Auger spectrum of core-excited nitrogen atoms, we show that the features are atomiclike

Laser-controlled fluorescence in two-level systems

The ability to modify the character of fluorescent emission by a laser-controlled, optically nonlinear process has recently been shown theoretically feasible, and several possible applications have already been identified. In operation, a pulse of off-resonant probe laser beam, of sufficient intensity, is applied to a system exhibiting fluorescence, during the interval of excited- state decay following the initial excitation. The result is a rate of decay that can be controllably modified, the associated changes in fluorescence behavior affording new, chemically specific information. In this paper, a two-level emission model is employed in the further analysis of this all-optical process; the results should prove especially relevant to the analysis and imaging of physical systems employing fluorescent markers, these ranging from quantum dots to green fluorescence protein. Expressions are presented for the laser-controlled fluorescence anisotropy exhibited by samples in which the fluorophores are randomly oriented. It is also shown that, in systems with suitably configured electronic levels and symmetry properties, fluorescence emission can be produced from energy levels that would normally decay nonradiatively. © 2010 American Chemical Society

On red shifs in the transition region and corona

We present evidence that transition region red-shifts are naturally produced in episodically heated models where the average volumetric heating scale height lies between that of the chromospheric pressure scale height of 200 km and the coronal scale height of 50 Mm. In order to do so we present results from 3d MHD models spanning the upper convection zone up to the corona, 15 Mm above the photosphere. Transition region and coronal heating in these models is due both the stressing of the magnetic field by photospheric and convection `zone dynamics, but also in some models by the injection of emerging magnetic flux.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, NSO Workshop #25 Chromospheric Structure and Dynamic

High-resolution C 1s photoelectron spectra of methane

The C 1s partial photoionization cross section and photoelectron angular distribution of methane (CH4) have been measured with high-energy resolution between threshold and 385 eV photon energy. From the analysis of the vibrational fine structure on the C 1s−1 photoelectron line a vibrational energy of 396±2 meV and an equilibrium bond length of 1.039(±0.001) Å for the CH+4 ion have been determined. The lifetime broadening was found to be 83(±10) meV. The weak feature in the photoabsorption cross section just above threshold does not influence the vibrational fine structure in a way typical for a shape resonance. We therefore suggest that it is due to doubly excited states of the type C (1s)−1(Val)−1(Ryd)1a(Ryd)1b, an assignment which is supported by recent Auger decay studies. Measurements of the shakeup structure revealed six satellite lines, one of which increases strongly in intensity at threshold, thus pointing to the existence of a conjugate shakeup process