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<p>In her poetry collection, <em>The Wild Iris</em><em>,</em> Louise Glück constructs her own version of the divine garden of Eden with its own modern issues. The essay explores how passivity is portrayed and defended in the collection, both through her female speaker and in the way the garden has been constructed. The speaker latches on to different forms of passivity, such as devotion, perseverance and prayer, and refuses to adapt to her surroundings and contribute to the garden. The speaker distances herself from her physical surroundings, building walls as opposed to accommodating to her environment as she is encouraged to from her god and family; in this way she avoids visible progress and development. This isolation and refusal to adapt is a choice and an exhibition of the speaker's power; there is self-awareness present in the reader's refusal to adapt as she attempts to maintain the status quo. As a result, the speaker’s passivity allows her to elevate herself above the other humans in the collection; embracing passivity allows her to transcend progress. Other ways in which progress is avoided are also explored; Glück presents many voices in the collection that all seek contact and fail to achieve it. The reader is also involved, becoming yet another character that fails to interfere and communicate.</p>

In her poetry collection, The Wild Iris, Louise Glück constructs her own version of the divine garden of Eden with its own modern issues. The essay explores how passivity is portrayed and defended in the collection, both through her female speaker and in the way the garden has been constructed. The speaker latches on to different forms of passivity, such as devotion, perseverance and prayer, and refuses to adapt to her surroundings and contribute to the garden. The speaker distances herself from her physical surroundings, building walls as opposed to accommodating to her environment as she is encouraged to from her god and family; in this way she avoids visible progress and development. This isolation and refusal to adapt is a choice and an exhibition of the speaker's power; there is self-awareness present in the reader's refusal to adapt as she attempts to maintain the status quo. As a result, the speaker’s passivity allows her to elevate herself above the other humans in the collection; embracing passivity allows her to transcend progress. Other ways in which progress is avoided are also explored; Glück presents many voices in the collection that all seek contact and fail to achieve it. The reader is also involved, becoming yet another character that fails to interfere and communicate.

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The operation of a chemical process plant has become more complex with the addition of process integration and intensification. A greater emphasis on producing goods with the lowest product variability in the safest manner possible and stringent environmental regulation limiting the quantity of effluent release have all put more constraints on the physical and economic performance of the chemical plant. The performance of a plant is quantified by the ability of the process system to achieve its objectives, which is governed by its process design and control. The conventional approach to process design and control selection starts sequentially by proposing a process flowsheet for the plant. The selection criteria for a flowsheet are normally based only on its environmental impact and economic merits. It is after a process flowsheet is deemed financially suitable that process control development commences. However, a more integrated approach to process design and control stage may thus lead to a plant that has better achievable performance. The aim of this project is to provide a new approach to quantitative dynamic controllability analysis for integration of process design and control by using the concept of passivity and passive systems. Passivity is an input/output property of processes. Passive processes are stable and minimum phase and therefore very easy to control. For a given process, its shortage of passivity, which reflects destabilizing effects of factors such as time delays and Right-Half Plane (RHP) zeros, can be used to indicate its controllability. The project focuses in developing the proposed controllability analysis by combining the idea of passivity and IMC invertibility, which is then formulated into an optimization problem that can be solved by either using Semi-Definite Programming or Non-Linear Optimization. The achievable performance of the plant is quantified in terms of the sensitivity function of the open-loop process. The selection of a process from four different heat-integrated distillation column schemes was used as a case study and the result had clearly shown that the passivity-based controllability analysis was able to select a process based on the plant achievable performance under the constraint of passivity and design parameters.

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Vector Fitting is employed to approximate the Frequency Response Analysis (FRA) measurement data of a 13.8 kV/136.8 kV, 50-MVA single phase transformer. The frequency response of the primary and secondary coils as well the coupling between the coils have been measured in the frequency range of up to 2 MHz. The measured data includes the stray capacitances that exist between the coils. A circuit synthesis model is used to represent the measured data in the form of a two-port passive RLC network. The derived network is implemented in a commonly used power system transient simulator (PSCAD/EMTDC). The proposed RLC model is passive to ensure the stability of the network. The model can be used to investigate transient response of the transformer including the simulation of switching and lightning overvoltage transients. The results are compared with those derived from existing simple models.

Melodrama is a popular mode of address that privileges affect at the expense of reflection and critique. Generally held in disrepute, melodrama's simplicity and sensationalism are widely read as a sign of social and psychological alienation. Melodrama responds to its critics, however, with ever-renewed and self-assured appeals to affect itself. Melodrama's irreducible privilege of affect in mind, therefore, the thesis proposes that affect admits description in Levinasian terms as a "radical passivity." The Levinasian proposal on affect, moreover, is extended to a theory of cinema, which, it is shown, is particularly well suited to melodramatic expression. / Affect or "embodied passivity," Levinas explains, is irreducible to phenomenological notions of intentionality, psychoanalytic conceptions of psychic investment or cognitive appraisals of psychic processing. To be a body is to be exposed to wounding but it is also a naIve agreement to the conditions of its sustentation. To be a body, in short, is to be capable of being affected. For Levinas this passive relation to what is other is the condition of an ethical responsibility that is absolute. Levinas's notion of embodied passivity, however, has aesthetic implications about which he was deeply ambiguous. Hence it is in the context of an aesthetics of embodied passivity, largely unexplored by Levinas, that the thesis examines melodrama's focus on affect and the specifically cinematic expressions of embodied passivity. / Melodrama's accessible address, however, reduces the Other, as Levinas would say, to caricatures, mobilizes affect in the direction of a "monopathic" response and disavows, in the process, the encounter with alterity to which it appeals. Nonetheless melodrama "fleshes out the cliche" or exploits the stereotype in the service of having, precisely, some affect. Such is the melodramatic privilege of enlivenment over the circumstances of its orchestration. Hence it is possible to appraise melodrama's heightened orchestrations of style, its recourse to emphasis and its enduring appeals to suffering and happiness, as prevailing testimony to the (unspeakable) nature of the body's irreducible vulnerability. Melodrama's elemental if simplistic vision is that affect matters absolutely.

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