BP’s use of posture to respond to the deepwater horizon crisis

This paper focuses on the posture the oil company BP adopted when faced with a legitimacy crisis during one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Against a backdrop of a discussion of the rhetorical aspects of image repair discourse and organisational legitimacy, Hearit’s strategy of corporate apologia was employed to determine the posture BP adopted in relation to the crisis. This paper adds to the literature on image repair strategies by heeding a call by Hearit for the context within which corporate apologia takes place to be taken account of, an approach that warrants a distinct line of research. The literature was further extended by complementing Hearit's strategy with semiotics and analysing its use in both the annual and sustainability reports. The additional focus on the sustainability reports is important, due to the high premium placed on sustainability in the changing business environment. On a practical level this paper contributes to an understanding of how organisations use sustainability reports to respond to legitimacy challenges

The interpretation of ERTS-1 imagery for soil survey of the Merida region, Spain

The author has identified the following significant results. Major landforms and some subdivisions could be easily recognized. Water bodies, river courses, extensive areas of miocene clays, and more recent coarse textured deposits could be delineated and existing soil maps at scales up to 1:100,000 could be updated

BATTERED WOMEN AND THE REQUIREMENT OF IMMINENCE IN SELF-DEFENCE

Should the South African courts abolish the traditional imminence standard, something must be used to stand in its place. The identification of the various alternatives which have been suggested to replace imminence - most notably the establishment of the "reasonable woman standard" as advanced in the case of S v Engelbrecht 2005 (92) SACR 41 (W) - has moved the law of self-defence into the realm of subjectivity. The end result not only undermines self-defence as a justification defence, but is also unworkable for a number of reasons. For instance, utilising expert testimony to explain how the battered woman’s syndrome affects individual perception would leave a judge with no meaningful way to determine if that abused woman’s belief in the imminence of danger was reasonable, even if viewed from her distorted perspective. It is suggested that no reference need be made to the "reasonable battered woman", since South African courts already do this to a limited extent by taking a number of factors into account in determining if the abused woman acted reasonably. By rethinking certain factors in the situation as a set of relatively innocuous normative propositions, the abused woman’s actions can be judged in accordance with standard propositions in the law of self-defence

Learning to live with ghosts:The practice of research

This research engages with the age-old existential questions that have preoccupied philosophy from its beginning: How to live? How to die? In dialogue with, first and foremost, the work of Jacques Derrida, I attempt to describe the tension that arises when, becoming ill, these general questions become particular and come to matter personally. Parallel to this research, I was diagnosed with an incurable auto-immune disorder, which required me to prepare for death, or a lung transplant—which I received in 2017. How to continue practicing philosophical thought while ill, when the body is foregrounded by continuous practical concerns? Using a phenomenological approach and deviating from the norms and conventions of academic discourse, this research makes a hauntological intervention into philosophy, from its spectral margins, from my sick-bed. As such, it looks at what thinking as a practice and experience entails, and under what conditions it is made possible. With texts by Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Annie Ernaux, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others, it argues for the presence of literature and poetry in and as philosophical thinking—as an alternative method to engage in the questions of life (and death), always as lived experiences, rather than as object of knowledge. This research concludes with On Wards, an experimental work of autobiographical fiction about the experience of having survived, thanks to organ donation

Microcosm Mountain : Exploring architecture's potential to make the pre-existing apparent in the manifold of the imaginary and physical

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references

Universal relations between Feshbach resonances and molecules

The susceptibility of ultracold gases to precise manipulation via external fields makes them ideal systems to study fundamental quantum mechanical phenomena. Various regimes, which are not possible to reach in condensed matter or nuclear physics, can be probed with these quantum gases. Especially the tunability of the interactions and confining potentials make that these ultracold gases offer unique possibilities to explore and study universal behavior. The tunability of the dominant two-body interactions in dilute ultracold atomic gases stems from the presence of Feshbach resonances. Via these resonances pairs of ultracold atoms can be associated to form ultracold molecules. In fact, measurements of Feshbach resonance positions can be used to reveal part of the underlying molecular structure. Vica versa, accurate molecular Born-Oppenheimer potentials can be used as input for full numerical coupled-channels calculations to reliably predict Feshbach resonances. For most of the heteronuclear mixtures currently studied however, the relevant molecular potentials are not accurate enough. As the coupled-channels method is often too elaborate and too time consuming to be used to fit the measured data to enable the construction of more accurate potentials, a need for accurate models which complement this established method is created. In this thesis we have developed a simplified model for resonant scattering of two ultracold atoms which fulfills this need. The asymptotic bound-state model (ABM) is a hierarchical model which can be systematically increased in complexity and accuracy. In its most simple form, the ABM only needs two parameters to predict the position and strength of Feshbach resonances: Two binding energies corresponding to the least bound state of the two molecular potentials involved. We demonstrate that this model, although it is solely based on bound states, can incorporate threshold effects. Additionally, the model can be extended to include: Multiple vibrational levels, overlapping resonances, and magnetic dipole-dipole interactions. This versatile model allows for a description of Feshbach resonances in a large variety of systems without accurate knowledge of the relevant molecular Born-Oppenheimer potentials. Being computationally light, the ABM can be used to analyze measurements of Feshbach resonances and hereby expose the basic underlying molecular structure. Additionally, the ABM is well suited to map out all available Feshbach resonances in a system. This ability is particularly useful when an optimal resonance is required for a certain experiment. For the 6Li-40K mixture we have utilized this ability to experimentally observe a strong Feshbach resonance which offers promising perspectives to reach the strongly interacting universal regime in a mass-imbalanced Fermi gas. By analyzing the various inelastic decay processes and the accuracy of the ab initio Born-Oppenheimer potentials, we predict a strong resonance in a mixture of metastable bosonic and fermionic helium atoms. For the homonuclear (bosonic as well as fermionic) helium gas we do not find strong resonances. For an ultracold gas of 40K atoms, an elaborate combined theoretical and experimental effort is presented to map out the Feshbach resonance structure. On the experimental side we observed 36 Feshbach resonances, 31 of which where observed for the first time. These observations are in excellent agreement with coupled-channels calculations which use unmodified Born-Oppenheimer potentials as input. On the theoretical side, we present a comparison between different simplified models of resonance scattering and the full numerical coupled-channels calculations. We have developed the resonant state model (RSM) to describe the resonant scattering of two ultracold atoms. This model is founded on resonant states, the natural (eigen) frequencies of the two-body system, and their non-trivial properties. Threshold effects are implicitly build into the RSM. The RSM can describe the effect of the continuum of scattering states, states which are neglected in the ABM, on the position and strength of a Feshbach resonance by only a few resonant states. Especially when a low-energy resonance is embedded in the continuum of scattering states, the effect of these states on the Feshbach resonance cannot be neglected. The RSM can be viewed as the natural generalization of the ABM. As the RSM can be based on just a few resonant states, it retains the computational simplicity of the ABM. Using the tunability of two-body interactions induced by a Feshbach resonance, we describe a crossover for a rotating Fermi gas between two strongly-correlated many-body states. We demonstrate that the correlation induced long-range interaction will shift the crossover with respect to the non-rotating case