Population ecology and energetics of Macrotermes bellicosus Smeathman (Isoptera)

Imperial Users onl

Site responsibility : eco-art and environmental ethics in the anthropocene.

This dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary theory for examining the ethical dimensions of contemporary eco-art, based on the conceptual interplay between the art historical discourse of site specificity and philosophy of environmental ethics. It considers how eco-art redefines site specificity as eco-ethically-oriented site reform, and argues that eco-artists’ site-reformative actions are not only environmentally impactful and beneficial, but are also site-responsible because they realize humankinds’ moral obligations to respond to the human-caused ecological crises of the present by improving the degraded conditions of specific sites and amending site-destructive conduct. Site-reformative eco-artworks in turn yield variable propositional content that demonstrates site responsibility by giving moral clarity, import, and binding force to specific, actionable, human-behavioral changes conducive to the pursuit of ecological sustainability. I apply this theory of site responsibility to ten different eco-artworks representative of the genre’s three predominant modes of site reform: documentary, activism, and remediation. This framework for eco-art ethics is ideally suited for analyzing the morally relevant attributes of the broad spectrum of artistic practices that have developed within the field of eco-art since the late 1960s, and is designed to facilitate well-reasoned assessments of their eco-ethical value

The effect of evolving micro-structural length scale on the macroscopic constitutive behaviour of granular media

Granular media are ubiquitous throughout the world and developing a comprehensive understanding of their behaviour is a pressing challenge. Of particular importance is accounting for the localisation of deformation into thin bands that feature intense grain crushing. This thesis develops a framework that predicts the formation of these bands and the grain size evolution, using experimental, theoretical and numerical approaches. Our experimental approach uses spatio-temporal plotting and Fourier analysis to extract information from photographs, allowing a sub-grain resolution of the velocity field. We investigate the effect of grain size polydispersity on the width of shear bands. Our theoretical approach develops a novel constitutive model that combines two existing formulations. We enrich Breakage Mechanics with the Cosserat continuum by an elastic upscaling that includes Cosserat state variables. This regularises Breakage Mechanics, allowing it to predict strain localisation phenomena such as shear bands, and adds physical fidelity to Cosserat models. Our numerical approach uses linear stability analysis and the finite element method to determine the conditions that result in strain localisation. The linear stability analysis gives the expected initial thickness and the initial post-localisation tendencies of the system. This information informs the finite element analysis, which is used to perform a rigorous post-localisation analysis. This thesis provides a framework which can be used to explore and further model the evolution of systems that experience strain localisation accompanied by intense grain crushing, ranging from standard laboratory tests to seismogenic faults

The City's Hostile Bodies: Coriolanus's Rome and Carson's Belfast

When change is articulated in literary cities, from the early republican Rome of Coriolanus (1608) to the Troubles Belfast of Ciaran Carson‘s Belfast Confetti (1989), bodies become agents of that change. These bodies-at-war induce stasis: a civil war in which the domestic is politicized, the political domesticated. To resolve the violence at the heart of evolving polities, hostile bodies claim sovereignty over the city: Shakespeare‘s plebeians or Coriolanus; Carson's unionists or nationalists. Both texts resolve antagonisms through the paradoxical logic of hospitality, realizing divided yet fully functioning cities where hosts hospitably contest with other hosts, and bodies underpin the political (r)evolutions

Emission Line Galaxies in the STIS Parallel Survey II: Star Formation Density

We present the luminosity function of [OII]-emitting galaxies at a median redshift of z=0.9, as measured in the deep spectroscopic data in the STIS Parallel Survey (SPS). The luminosity function shows strong evolution from the local value, as expected. By using random lines of sight, the SPS measurement complements previous deep single field studies. We calculate the density of inferred star formation at this redshift by converting from [OII] to H-alpha line flux as a function of absolute magnitude and find rho_dot=0.043 +/- 0.014 Msun/yr/Mpc^3 at a median redshift z~0.9 within the range 0.46<z<1.415 (H_0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, Omega_M=0.3, Omega_Lambda=0.7. This density is consistent with a (1+z)^4 evolution in global star formation since z~1. To reconcile the density with similar measurements made by surveys targeting H-alpha may require substantial extinction correction.Comment: 16 preprint pages including 5 figures; accepted for publication in Ap