This study investigates and characterises the ways place and space occur in Eavan Boland's Object Lessons, May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, Anne Dillard's The Writing Life, and a selection of journal material accompanied by poetry. The author's purpose in doing this is to gain insight into the creative processes of these writers and the nature of their engagement with the ongoing venture that Anne Dillard has termed 'the writing life'. This phrase, while evoking a sense of duration and commitment as regards writing, also invites questions about how such a vocation takes shape within the life of a writer. Both the terms 'place' and 'space' come trailing. Each may describe inner experiences, as well as pertaining to the realm of physical perception. Each is also a current focus of critique and contestation in various disciplines - for example, those of anthropology and geography - and by feminist thinkers.The author's introduction refers to some of these revisionings. Findings are summarised in the conclusion. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

When new development threatens a valued landscape it is not just the physical landscape that is being affected, but the collective memories, meanings and identities that the landscape holds. Planning theory and practice currently offer relatively little guidance as to how to address meaning and value, particularly at a landscape scale. Recent literature from a variety of disciplines has stressed the need to develop holistic models of understanding landscape. Particular emphasis has been laid on the absence of integration of disciplinary approaches, and the need to involve communities in defining what is important and distinctive about their own landscapes. The thesis sets out to develop a conceptual framework to assist in understanding multiple cultural values in landscapes. Although the primary focus of the research is to address the perceived shortcomings in planning theory and practice, its potential relevance to inter-disciplinary work also forms a major component of the research approach. Values in landscapes include those expressed by associated communities and those identified through a variety of disciplinary approaches. Using case studies, the research explores the nature and range of landscape values as expressed by those with special associations with particular landscapes. It also examines the nature of the meanings and values ascribed by disciplines with an interest in landscape, and how various disciplines model landscape so as to convey these values. Analysis of these findings generates a landscape framework consisting of two related models. The Cultural Values Model offers a conceptual structure with which to consider the surface and embedded values of landscapes in terms of forms, practices and relationships. The Dimensional Landscape Model provides a structured way of linking expressed values to the landscape, using dimensional concepts of nodes, networks, spaces, webs and layers. The landscape framework is found to be useful not only for generating a comprehensive picture of key landscape values, but also in offering an integrated approach that has utility both for planners and for other landscape-related disciplines.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität Oldenburg, (2006?). / Includes bibliographical references (p. 311-315).

Physical habitat for instream biota derives from a combination of stream system structural and hydraulic phenomena. Consequently, the quantity and quality of physical habitat is dynamic both over time and in space along the river, laterally, longitudinally and vertically. Its characterization through stream assessment and classification leads to a better understanding of factors that determine and limit habitat extent and quality. This thesis investigates the effects of space and time on nearshore aquatic habitat in the gravel reach of Fraser River, British Columbia by employing a large river, stage-adaptive habitat classification system. The distribution and abundance of habitat are spatially quantified at the reach scale (32 km), and temporally quantified through a period of about 60 years at several adjacent gravel bars (7 km), and at approximately 500 m3 s-1 increments in discharge during the declining limb of the flood hydrograph at two well-developed gravel bars. Of the ten habitat types evaluated, the bar edge habitat type is most abundant by length and number of units. However, its relative importance is reduced when weighted by fish-habitat association characteristics. Preferred habitat types (channel nook, eddy pool and open nook) are frequent and available to aquatic organisms, and most common at well-developed bars and in zones of equilibrium long-term sedimentation. Preferred habitat was at a maximum 30 years ago when major new bars developed and the thalweg shifted, effectively increasing the amount of bar shoreline and nearshore habitat. This increase is due to substantial change in river planform morphology following a 30-year period of large annual floods. However, amounts of habitat did not increase exclusively during periods of higher than average flows, or decrease exclusively during periods of lower than average flows. Instead, habitat abundance response to flow may occur with a two- or three-year lag. Short term changes in stage are critical to amount of preferred habitat. Optimal discharge for maximum preferred habitat vailability is in the range of approximately 2500 m3 s-1 to 4000 m3 s-1, which approximates long term mean flow. As flow increases, the proportion of preferred habitat compared with total bar shoreline decreases. Comparison with the 2006 flow duration curve shows that 15 – 30 % of discharges are optimal for maximum fish density and biomass. These discharges occurred during April 27 to May 17 and July 14 to August 7, 2006.

Following Smith's (1991, 1997) two-component theory, this dissertation investigates the structural characteristics and the semantic properties of the temporal system, including tense, mood, viewpoint aspect, situation aspect and discourse modes, of Iquito, a highly endangered and moribund language spoken in the northern Peruvian Amazon. Iquito has three tenses: Extended Current Tense, Recent Past Tense, and Distant Past Tense. Extended Current Tense gives a Reference Time (RT) frame from the day which includes Speech Time (SpT) to the infinite future. Therefore, situations occurring earlier on the same day or unrealized situations both appear in sentences with this tense. The temporal interpretation is inferred from the combination of aspect and mood morphology. Recent Past Tense gives a frame of RT from yesterday to one to two years prior to SpT. Distant Past Tense gives a frame of RT from one to two years prior to SpT extending backward to the infinitely remote past. Temporal boundaries among the tenses are not rigidly fixed in terms of a metrical conception of time. Iquito has seven perfective aspects, including a General, a Momentary, a Remote, two Deictic, an Allative, and an Ablative Perfective Aspect and one Imperfective Aspect. Remote Perfective Aspect incorporates an adverbial component while Ablative and Allative Perfectives incorporate directional components and Deictic Perfectives incorporate deictic components. The system of perfective aspects in Iquito manifests the importance of expressing the realization of an event in conjunction with information about the time of the day, location, and routing in terms of location. Regarding situation aspect, I propose that there are six types in Iquito, including States, Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, Semelfactives and Motions, which all manifest language-specific correlates. With respect to grammatical moods, realis and irrealis moods are manifested in Iquito through a typologically unique strategy: word order change and vowel hiatus resolution. Regarding Discourse Modes, I find four modes in Iquito, including Narrative, Report, Description and Information. In addition, Quoted Speech manifests an interesting mixture of modes. This dissertation adds another dimension to the close connections among tense, aspect and mood, and contributes to linguistic documentation and advances the structural and semantic analysis of Iquito and Amazonian languages. It also contributes to research on the crosslinguistic variation of temporal semantics and to linguistics in general through an interesting case study. / text

Political contention has entered a new age. Over the past three years unprecedented large-scale movements have challenged states across the globe, and social media has been an important component in their development and articulation. With the advent of social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, ordinary people have the technological ability to instantaneously transcend space, time and resources (Aouraugh and Alexander 2011; Castells 2012; Earl and Kimport 2009, 2011; Eltantawy, Nahed and Wiest 2011; Gerbaudo 2012; Hands 2011; Holmes 2012; Mason 2012). Are we currently living in a historical moment where a new repertoire of contention is emerging? If so, how is social media changing the way we collectively contest for our interests? The theoretical framework I propose in this paper advances and elaborates a social geographic approach in the framing of political contention that emphasizes the importance of the spatiality and temporality created by the hashtag (#) in the development and articulation of today's social movements. In addition to secondary sources about the protests in Brazil (#VemPraRua), I draw on participant observations to analyze a new modular form of protest I call the "hashtag movement." I claim that the hashtag (#) creates a new space/time (Massey 1992, 2007; Soja 1996) that fundamentally shifts the process of nation-ness (Anderson 2006) and marks a new phase in the mediazation of modern culture (Thompson 1991); two fundamental shifts that I argue are comparable to the structural and cultural shifts that formed the modern repertoire of contention (Anderson 2006; Della Porta and Diani 1999; McAdam 1999; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001; Sewell 1990, 1996; Swidler 1986; Tarrow 1993, 1994; Tilly 1986, 1995a, 1995b; Young 2002). / text

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Fluctuation phenomena are important to many physical systems, such as the fusion plasma. Noise theory is used to study the time and space correlations of stationary Markovian fluctuations that are statistically homogeneous and isotropic. The relaxation of the fluctuations is modeled by the diffusion equation. The spatial correlations are modeled by the exponential decay. Based on these models, the correlation function and the power spectral density of random fluctuations. We also find that the fluctuation-induced transport coefficients may be estimated by the correlation length and the correlation time. The theoretical results are compared with the observed plasma density fluctuations from tokamak and helimak experiments.

We consider shear-free radiating spherical stars in general relativity. In particular we study the junction condition relating the pressure to the heat flux at the boundary of the star. This is a nonlinear equation in the metric functions. We analyse the junction condition when the spacetime is conformally flat, and when the particles are travelling in geodesic motion. We transform the governing equation using the method of Lie analysis. The Lie symmetry generators that leave the equation invariant are identifed and we generate the optimal system in each case. Each element of the optimal system is used to reduce the partial differential equation to an ordinary differential equation which is further analysed. As a result, particular solutions to the junction condition are presented. These exact solutions can be presented in terms of elementary functions. Many of the solutions found are new and could be useful in the modelling process. Our analysis is the first comprehensive treatment of the boundary condition using a symmetry approach. We have shown that this approach is useful in generating new results. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2011.