Multiple Temporal Dimensions Research Articles

‘Best Known Example of Relativity in Literature’: Personal Supertext of L.N. Tolstoy in V.V. Nabokov’s Novel “Pnin”

This article addresses the issue of interpreting the work and biographical myth of L.N. Tolstoy in V.V. Nabokov’s novel “Pnin.” The aim of the study is to examine how through the reconstruction of Tolstoy’s personal supertext, Nabokov conveys his philosophy of time. This question is relevant in the context of studying Nabokov’s historiosophy and the writer’s reflection on his own literary genealogy. The analysis reveals that in Nabokov’s reception, Tolstoy is a national genius who was able to recreate the effect of natural time flow. Explicit references to Tolstoy and his biography allow for correlating the characters’ reading experience and their perception of time: from frozen time during reading-performance to the reverse flow of time during co-creative reading. The motifs of Tolstoy’s works actualize the key problem of the relativity of time for Nabokov. Although the unreliable narrator emphasizes the power of time and fate over the lonely hero, in reality, Pnin has access to multiple temporal dimensions. Just like in “Anna Karenina,” the technique of temporal synchronization highlights the interconnectedness of characters’ fates. Tolstoy’s personal supertext enables Nabokov to understand the theme of family as a timeless connection between people that defines the characters’ place in the world.

‘Even a piece of paper has two sides’: multi‐scalar cosmologies of Japanese New Year cards

AbstractAnnually on 1 January, Japan's efficient postal system circulates 2.5 billion New Year cards to arrive simultaneously in every home in the country. Based on ethnographic fieldwork around Osaka, this article investigates the continued popularity of this exchange of paper forms in an age of smartphones and fast internet connections. Extending recent anthropological scholarship about digital data, I argue that these seemingly trivial cards have transformative potential. They are active, potent participants in the cultivation, accumulation, and ongoing care of multiple networks of social, economic, and spiritual relationships. Through an analysis of the material and aesthetic qualities of the cards, I highlight how their front‐back design embodies co‐existing, but contrasting, dimensions of Japanese relations along a qualification‐quantification and personalization‐standardization axis. The cards also produce depth and scale by linking intimate, domestic concerns with larger political and economic interests, while weaving together multiple temporal dimensions. Ultimately, they exemplify how the manipulation of surfaces can have profound cosmological consequences. These cards possess a spiritual and social potency that generates an all‐encompassing, intimate closeness that yearly rejuvenates society by reconstituting individuals as part of the whole.

A multi-scale self-supervised hypergraph contrastive learning framework for video question answering

Video question answering (VideoQA) is a challenging video understanding task that requires a comprehensive understanding of multimodal information and accurate answers to related questions. Most existing VideoQA models use Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to capture temporal–spatial interactions between objects. Despite achieving certain success, we argue that current schemes have two limitations: (i) existing graph-based methods require stacking multi-layers of GNN to capture high-order relations between objects, which inevitably introduces irrelevant noise; (ii) neglecting the unique self-supervised signals in the high-order relational structures among multiple objects that can facilitate more accurate QA. To this end, we propose a novel Multi-scale Self-supervised Hypergraph Contrastive Learning (MSHCL) framework for VideoQA. Specifically, we first segment the video from multiple temporal dimensions to obtain multiple frame groups. For different frame groups, we design appearance and motion hyperedges based on node semantics to connect object nodes. In this way, we construct a multi-scale temporal–spatial hypergraph to directly capture high-order relations among multiple objects. Furthermore, the node features after hypergraph convolution are injected into a Transformer to capture the global information of the input sequence. Second, we design a self-supervised hypergraph contrastive learning task based on the node- and hyperedge-dropping data augmentation and an improved question-guided multimodal interaction module to enhance the accuracy and robustness of the VideoQA model. Finally, extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MSHCL compared with stat-of-the-art methods.

Temporal patterns in taste sensitivity.

Individuals vary in their ability to taste, and some individuals are more sensitive to certain tastes than others. Taste sensitivity is a predictor of various factors, such as diet, eating behavior, appetite regulation, and overall health. Furthermore, taste sensitivity can fluctuate within an individual over short to long periods of time: for example, in daily (diurnal) cycles, monthly (menstrual) cycles (in females), and yearly (seasonal) cycles. Understanding these temporal patterns is important for understanding individual eating habits and food preferences, particularly in the context of personalized and precision nutrition. This review provides a summary of the literature on taste sensitivity patterns across 3 temporal dimensions: daily, monthly, and yearly. Good evidence for diurnal patterns has been observed for sweet taste and fat taste, although the evidence is limited to rodent studies for the latter. Obese populations showed limited variation to sweet and fat taste sensitivities over a day, with limited variation in sweet taste sensitivity being linked to insulin resistance. There were mixed observations of temporal variation in sensitivity to sour and umami tastes, and there were no patterns in sensitivity to bitter taste. Menstrual patterns in sweet taste sensitivity were consistent with patterns in food intake. Other taste modality investigations had mixed findings that had little agreement across studies. Hormonal changes in females influence taste sensitivity to some degree, although the overall patterns are unclear. Seasonal patterns have been less well studied, but there is weak evidence that sweet, salty, and bitter taste sensitivities change across seasons. Differences in seasonal taste patterns have been observed in subgroups susceptible to mental health disorders, requiring further investigation. Patterns of taste sensitivity are evident across multiple temporal dimensions, and more research is needed to determine the influence of these patterns on food intake. Dysregulation of these patterns may also be a marker of certain diseases or health conditions, warranting further investigation. Notably, the alimentary tastes (umami, fat, and carbohydrate) are underrepresented in this research area and require additional investigation.

Suburban travelers pressed for time: Exploring the temporal implications of metropolitan commuting in Barcelona

This study explores the multiple temporal dimensions that commuting to a suburban location can have as an intensive and recurrent daily practice. Focusing on the suburban commute to a university campus in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region, a mobility survey is first combined with tracking data to explore the clock-time side of this phenomenon. The manner in which this daily practice is experienced is delved into using in-depth interviews. Results point out that intensive commuting is to be understood both considering its relation with daily travel time and its territorial context. Qualitative analysis shows how these suburban commuters are concerned for time, and presents strategies at different spatial and temporal scales. This paper provides insight to mobility studies by exploring the multidimensional nature of travel time, and to a growing mixed-methods research field by combining traditional and innovative sources.

Habituation: a non-associative learning rule design for spiking neurons and an autonomous mobile robots implementation

This paper presents a novel bio-inspired habituation function for robots under control by an artificial spiking neural network. This non-associative learning rule is modelled at the synaptic level and validated through robotic behaviours in reaction to different stimuli patterns in a dynamical virtual 3D world. Habituation is minimally represented to show an attenuated response after exposure to and perception of persistent external stimuli. Based on current neurosciences research, the originality of this rule includes modulated response to variable frequencies of the captured stimuli. Filtering out repetitive data from the natural habituation mechanism has been demonstrated to be a key factor in the attention phenomenon, and inserting such a rule operating at multiple temporal dimensions of stimuli increases a robot's adaptive behaviours by ignoring broader contextual irrelevant information.

Musical and film time

Comparative analysis of linear, non-linear and multiple temporal dimensions in music and film reveals that the understanding and utilisation of time in these two arts reflect not only the aesthetic inclinations of its creators and their subjective experiences of temporality but also their philosophical views and, sometimes, spiritual beliefs. Viewed in the context of contemporary theories about Time, particularly Shallis' interpretation of different temporalities as symbolic of various levels of reality and J. T. Fraser's concept of time as a hierarchical nest of different temporalities or Umwelts, the results of this comparison lead to the conclusion that the time in which music and film unfold belongs to a separate, artificial Umwelt of its own - art-temporality.

Co‐operating Continuities in the Music of Thomas Adès

ABSTRACTJonathan Kramer defined postmodern music as an ironic, fragmentary mix of past and present compositional procedures embodying multiple temporal dimensions. Recent theorising grounded in phenomenological and cognitive‐scientific accounts of musical experience suggests that it may be possible to develop a more insightful interpretative perspective by extending Kramer's notions of ‘direction’, ‘linearity’, ‘narrative’ and ‘motion’ to more fundamental concepts of continuity, beginning and ending. With respect to the search for a coherent analytical method, the music of the acclaimed young British composer Thomas Adès merits special attention, in part due to the consistency with which his work employs elemental continuities, but also on account of the variety of temporalities that he composes from them. The present survey aims to explore the means by which these continuities are made apparent, at the same time showing how they are obliged to co‐operate in order to articulate and direct time in characteristically postmodern ways. Excerpts are examined from a range of pieces, including Traced Overhead, Arcadiana and Asyla. These analyses illustrate the paradoxical nature of postmodern musical time, in which linearity can be understood to emerge from locally various periodicities and trends.

Aspects of time in the music of Horacio Vaggione

This article evokes the context in which Horacio Vaggione, the composer-theoretician, developed the basis of his thought, between his work in an electroacoustic, or later a digital, studio and the evolution of musical informatics, stressing the importance of the micro-temporal articulation of sound in view of a syntax of musical sound. The article presents several concepts that enable him to approach the temporal domain in an operative manner: the sound object in a digital environment, multi-scale time, micro-temporal operations, the figural approach. The article then discusses the emergence of musical time when listening to the composer's works, brings up several coincidences with T. Adorno's ultimate thoughts, and concludes with the syntactic properties of sound in multiple temporal dimensions for direct digital musical composition (écriture).

The notion of time in symptom experiences.

The experience of unpleasant sensations associated with the presence of symptoms prompts self-care or help seeking to obtain explanations for the symptoms, manage emotional responses, or obtain treatment for symptom alleviation and elimination. The purpose of this article is to summarize and comment on three existing symptom theories, with special attention to temporal factors. Existing theories are synthesized as the time dimensions of symptom experiences and symptom management processes are elucidated. Clinical examples and findings from empirical studies illustrate critical points. Existing theories describing the symptom experience and the process of symptom management refer implicitly to the role of time or use limited dimensions of time. Symptom experiences in time (SET) theory is proposed as a synthesis and extension of existing theories. The SET theory conceives the symptom experience as a flow process that explicitly incorporates temporal dimensions. Four dimensions of time are recognized: clock-calendar, biologic-social, perceived, and transcendent time. The four temporal dimensions are placed against a backdrop of "meaning-in-time" that brings forth the potential for transformation in a symptom experience. Increasing sophistication in design, measurement, and data analysis is required to test and evaluate SET theory-based propositions. The SET theory extends previous work by incorporating multiple temporal dimensions that reflect the human experience of health and illness manifested in the expression and management of symptoms.

Random-matrix theory of parametric correlations in the spectra of disordered metals and chaotic billiards

A random-matrix theory is developed for the adiabatic response to an external perturbation of the energy spectrum of a mesoscopic system. The basic assumption is that spectral correlations are governed by level repulsion. Following Dyson, the dependence of the energy levels on the perturbation parameter is modeled by a Brownian-motion process in a fictitious viscous fluid. A Fokker-Planck equation for the evolution of the distribution function is solved to yield the correlation of level densities at different energies and different parameter values. An approximate solution is obtained by asymptotic expansion and an exact solution by mapping onto a free-fermion model. A generalization to multiple parameters is also considered, corresponding to Brownian motion in a fictitious world with multiple temporal dimensions. Complete agreement is obtained with microscopic theory.