Opportune Moments Research Articles

The challenger advantage – how challenger parties disrupt mainstream party dominance in the European Parliament

ABSTRACT Under what conditions can challenger parties disrupt mainstream party dominance in democratic institutions? While extant work describes the cultural and economic developments that benefit challengers and parties’ programmatic responses to these, I demonstrate when and how challengers exploit these conditions in their political communication. Theoretically, I posit that challenger parties have relatively stronger vote-seeking incentives than mainstream parties. These collective incentives affect individual parliamentarians’ cost–benefit calculations. Challenger parliamentarians will engage in anti-establishment rhetoric and issue-entrepreneurship when these signals are more likely to reach the voting public and pay-off electorally. I test this theory by analysing parliamentary debates from the European Parliament (1999–2016) through a novel combination of word embeddings and bespoke dictionaries. I find that challenger parties indeed pursue different communication strategies than mainstream parties. Challenger parliamentarians engage in anti-establishment rhetoric in the run-up to elections and issue-entrepreneurship during crises. This is because these factors make speeches more likely to be transmitted to voters. These results demonstrate that challengers adjust their political communication in opportune moments giving them a competitive advantage over less flexible mainstream parties.

Towards Reducing Continuous Emotion Annotation Effort During Video Consumption: A Physiological Response Profiling Approach

Emotion-aware video applications (e.g., gaming, online meetings, online tutoring) strive to moderate the content presentations for a more engaging and improved user experience. These services typically deploy a machine-learning model that continuously infers the user's emotion (based on different physiological signals, facial expressions, etc.) to adapt the content delivery. Therefore, to train such models, the emotion ground truth labels also need to be collected continuously. Typically, those are collated as emotion self-reports from users in a continuous manner (using an auxiliary device such as a joystick) when they watch some videos. This process of continuous emotion annotation not only increases the cognitive load and survey fatigue but also significantly deteriorates the viewing experience. To address this problem, we propose a framework, PResUP that probes a user for emotion self-reports opportunistically based on the physiological response variations of the user. Specifically, the framework implements a sequence of phases - (a) user profile construction based on physiological responses, (b) similar user clustering based on the user profile, and (c) training a parameterized activation-guided LSTM (Long short-term memory) model by sharing data among similar users to detect the opportune self-report collection moments. All these steps together help to reduce the continuous emotion annotation overhead by probing at the opportune moments without compromising the annotation quality. We evaluated PResUP by conducting a user study (N=36) during which the participants watched eight videos, and their physiological responses and continuous emotion self-reports were recorded. The key results from this evaluation reveal that PResUP reduces the annotation overhead by reducing the probing rate by an average of 34.80% and detects the opportune probing moments with an average TPR of 80.07% without compromising the annotation quality. Motivated by these findings, we deployed PResUP by performing a follow-up user study (N=18). In this deployment scenario, we also obtained similar performance in terms of the probing rate reduction (average reduction of 38.05%), and opportune moment detection performance (average TPR of 82.26%). These findings underscore the utility of PResUP in reducing the continuous emotion annotation effort during video consumption.

John Rechy and the Novel of Opportunity

ABSTRACT This article argues that the career of queer Mexican American author John Rechy has been shaped by the epistemological limits of twentieth-century publishing—that is, what presses will and will not print. Because his early efforts to publish as an intersectional subject met continual rejection, Rechy leaned into the “sexual outlaw” reputation curated for him by Grove Press. Thus, the critical reception surrounding Rechy failed to acknowledge his status as a Latino author and Chicano subject until the mid-1980s. By comparing Rechy’s first, long-unpublished novel Pablo! to The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, his first novel to be explicitly marketed as Latinx, this article suggests that the horizon of publishable Latinidad has structured his legacy as an artist. Rechy’s career in publishing echoes his larger status as hustler and “sexual outlaw” in that he deployed publishers’ sensationalist characterizations of his identity against them, playing up different aspects of his marginalized subjectivity at opportune moments.

Handling protracted crises: Communication challenges, constraints and opportunities

AbstractRecent research on crisis communication has focused on the challenges of complex and protracted crises. In this essay, it is argued that such crises must be handled communicatively by putting the communication challenges, constraints and opportunities at the centre. To this end, the combination of the notions of the rhetorical situation and kairos is suggested as a keystone that provides a bottom‐up, context‐sensitive approach needed to cope with the fluid and changing situations of such crisis. Importantly, the life cycle of a protracted crisis can not only be understood in terms of physical factors (e.g., infection rates in a pandemic) but is also formed through the public's perceptions and the communicative choices of crisis communicators calling for action to mitigate or end a crisis. The rhetorical situation and kairos highlight the importance of spatial temporality, the uniqueness of the situations and the constitutive dimension of communication in a crisis. This implies the identification of the opportune moments to present a response and recognising the important ‘spaces’ between typical crisis situations.

Evaluation of Code Generation for Simulating Participant Behavior in Experience Sampling Method by Iterative In-Context Learning of a Large Language Model

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) is commonly used to understand behaviors, thoughts, and feelings in the wild by collecting self-reports. Sustaining sufficient response rates, especially in long-running studies remains challenging. To avoid low response rates and dropouts, experimenters rely on their experience, proposed methodologies from earlier studies, trial and error, or the scarcely available participant behavior data from previous ESM protocols. This approach often fails in finding the acceptable study parameters, resulting in redesigning the protocol and repeating the experiment. Research has shown the potential of machine learning to personalize ESM protocols such that ESM prompts are delivered at opportune moments, leading to higher response rates. The corresponding training process is hindered due to the scarcity of open data in the ESM domain, causing a cold start, which could be mitigated by simulating participant behavior. Such simulations provide training data and insights for the experimenters to update their study design choices. Creating this simulation requires behavioral science, psychology, and programming expertise. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as facilitators for information inquiry and programming, albeit random and occasionally unreliable. We aspire to assess the readiness of LLMs in an ESM use case. We conducted research using GPT-3.5 turbo-16k to tackle an ESM simulation problem. We explored several prompt design alternatives to generate ESM simulation programs, evaluated the output code in terms of semantics and syntax, and interviewed ESM practitioners. We found that engineering LLM-enabled ESM simulations have the potential to facilitate data generation, but they perpetuate trust and reliability challenges.

Flexible minimalist self-tracking to support individual reflection

Self-tracking technology can help users develop new knowledge about themselves, supporting their health and general wellbeing. Most of these devices inform users about their lives by autonomously generating data about highly constrained topics. Recent research has started to explore more flexible, manual self-tracking systems, which allow users to express themselves through their data and learn by engaging with their experiences in-the-moment. This paper describes a field trial using the Chromatize app, designed to explore the value of minimalism and flexibility – including in data histories – in personal tracking systems. Our data indicates that low-burden experience logging systems which focus on the creation of symbolically-rich, self-defined data can support self-awareness, reflection and regulation at opportune moments. The analysis also contributes a formulation of reflection in the context of self-tracking technologies that is more meaningful than the loose use of ‘reflection’ used in much of the literature.

Call to Action: Investigating Interaction Delay in Smartphone Notifications.

Notifications are an essential part of the user experience on smart mobile devices. While some apps have to notify users immediately after an event occurs, others can schedule notifications strategically to notify them only on opportune moments. This tailoring allows apps to shorten the users' interaction delay. In this paper, we present the results of a comprehensive study that identified the factors that influence users' interaction delay to their smartphone notifications. We analyzed almost 10 million notifications collected in-the-wild from 922 users and computed their response times with regard to their demographics, their Big Five personality trait scores and the device's charging state. Depending on the app category, the following tendencies can be identified over the course of the day: Most notifications were logged in late morning and late afternoon. This number decreases in the evening, between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m., and at the same time exhibits the lowest average interaction delays at daytime. We also found that the user's sex and age is significantly associated with the response time. Based on the results of our study, we encourage developers to incorporate more information on the user and the executing device in their notification strategy to notify users more effectively.

Copulation record of Tropidurus imbituba (Squamata: Tropiduridae)

Tropidurus imbituba is a lizard with endemic distribution. Data on the species are scarce as it is a new species and has the only known habitat to date. Understanding reproductive aspects is important for their conservation. Thus, the present study presents the first records of the courtship and copulation behavior of T. imbituba. Sampling was carried out in spring 2022 and summer 2023, between September 24, 2022 and March 19, 2023. Monitoring was adapted from the Squamata Reptile Monitoring Protocol in Federal Conservation Units of the Caatinga Biome, following the active search method without time limitation (BANLT), in order to register T. imbituba individuals without any type of physical restraint. The individuals viewed had their coordinates taken with GPS, photographed with a DSLR camera – 65x zoom with a 21 mm ultra-wide angle lens. Viewing was done with the naked eye and with the aid of 8x40 binoculars. In areas with a concentration of lizards, the fixed point methodology was also used for five to 10 minutes, to observe the animals and other important data, where, at opportune moments, filming and photographs of courtship or copulation behavior were recorded.

Finding Creativity in Predictability: Seizing Kairos in Chronos Through Temporal Work in Complex Innovation Processes

Managing temporal complexity is a fundamental challenge in complex innovation processes, yet the temporal work whereby actors seize opportune moments (kairos) in an environment dominated by clock-time structures (chronos) remains elusive. Temporal tensions can partly be resolved through entrainment, that is, by aligning activities with dominant temporal structures. However, although entrainment ensures the exploitation of a predefined path, it is unable to harness unexpected developments as opportunities for exploration. Thus, navigating the competing temporal demands of chronos and kairos requires not just ambidextrous but also ambitemporal organizing. Collecting and analyzing in-depth interview and observational data from pharmaceutical drug discovery and development, we find that actors sometimes resolve temporal tensions through entrainment to ensure coordination and predictability. In other instances, however, actors abductively transform temporal tensions into novel interpretations and new courses of action. As such, temporal tensions become more than a bothersome deviation from the planned schedule, but an opportunity for creative agency. This understanding of kairos—as a process unfolding through temporal work—relies not only on detraining from chronos (i.e., momentarily detaching from the dominant temporal structure to question underlying assumptions), but also on its reframing and reconfiguration. We contribute to the literature on complex innovation and temporality by theorizing a transformative perspective on ambitemporal organizing, which relies less on paradoxical notions and instead emphasizes how kairos is enacted and seized within and from chronos. Funding: This work was supported by German Research Foundation (DFG) funding for the Research Unit “Organized Creativity” [Grant FOR 2161] as well as by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [10.55776/I4884].

Theorising Scenarios for Resumption of Indo-China Border Talks

Border issues between India and China are complex and fundamental in nature. There were negotiations immediately after independence, but, still led to 1962 War between the two countries. Historically efforts to negotiate Borders were held 45 times from 1981 to 219 in various formats as JWG and SR talks. Further WMCC at Jt Secy level est in 2012 and met 26 times and Corps Commander level talks post Galwan met 21 times till Feb 2024. Clearly China does not wish to negotiate borders and plans to use it as a leverage at opportune moments. There is a typical stalemate since China feels that borders is a settled issue, while India’s stand is to resolve border issues before normalisation of relations. The idea of this article is to theorise scenarios is original, based on open source material and attempt to visualise contingencies that could lead towards breaking this stalemate in border talks. Currently there are no journals or books written on this subject by scholars, though, some of them are writing open source articles and discussing on these lines in some seminars. The endeavour is to connect the dots and link them to resumption of talks forstabilisation of borders between India and China.

Stock Price Prediction for Technology Company

Individuals aim to develop accurate models for stock prices to make informed decisions as investors, so they can determine opportune moments to purchase and sell stocks for maximizing profits. This paper select Apple stock from yahoo finance range from Aug 1st 2013 to Aug 1st 2023, and then forecasting its future 30 days stock price. This study contain four models, which are XGboost, linear regression, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Those models are all fit the train and test data and then draw a visualization plot. For selecting the best model, this paper use root mean squared error(RMSE) metrics and mean absolute percentage error(MAPE) and got the best model are Linear Regression and LSTM. Depending on the mechanism of four models, LSTM can treated as the best one to predict future stock price. In future study, researchers can use LSTM model more to predict stock price for other companies in order to get the best result.

Scanning or Simply Unengaged in Reading? Opportune Moments for Pushed News Notifications and Their Relationship with Smartphone Users' Choice of News-reading Modes

News notifications on smartphones provide a convenient way to stay informed, but their delivery timing can influence user engagement. Despite this, research on the impact of notification timing on reading behavior remains limited. Therefore, we developed NewsMoment, a news aggregation app that monitors user reading patterns and sends news notifications. Our experience sampling study with 46 NewsMoment users revealed four distinct reading modes: typical, comprehensive, scanning, and unengaged. Deep reading, encompassing typical and comprehensive modes, more often occurred during self-initiated browsing rather than through pushed news. Interestingly, shallow reading modes - unengaged and scanning - showed varying prevalence, associated triggers, and engagement, despite their similarities. Importantly, unengaged reading persisted regardless of users' perceived moment opportuneness, whereas scanning reading was more common during inopportune moments. These findings suggest that identifying opportune moments for news reading may primarily reduce scanning reading, without substantially impacting unengaged reading.

Technology to Automatically Record Eating Behavior in Real Life: A Systematic Review.

To monitor adherence to diets and to design and evaluate nutritional interventions, it is essential to obtain objective knowledge about eating behavior. In most research, measures of eating behavior are based on self-reporting, such as 24-h recalls, food records (food diaries) and food frequency questionnaires. Self-reporting is prone to inaccuracies due to inaccurate and subjective recall and other biases. Recording behavior using nonobtrusive technology in daily life would overcome this. Here, we provide an up-to-date systematic overview encompassing all (close-to) publicly or commercially available technologies to automatically record eating behavior in real-life settings. A total of 1328 studies were screened and, after applying defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, 122 studies were included for in-depth evaluation. Technologies in these studies were categorized by what type of eating behavior they measure and which type of sensor technology they use. In general, we found that relatively simple sensors are often used. Depending on the purpose, these are mainly motion sensors, microphones, weight sensors and photo cameras. While several of these technologies are commercially available, there is still a lack of publicly available algorithms that are needed to process and interpret the resulting data. We argue that future work should focus on developing robust algorithms and validating these technologies in real-life settings. Combining technologies (e.g., prompting individuals for self-reports at sensed, opportune moments) is a promising route toward ecologically valid studies of eating behavior.

How do industrialization and agricultural land use affect urban population in Turkey? Policy implications in the context of SDGs

Urban population growth in Turkey has been increasing rapidly since the middle of the 20th century. The escalating population, particularly in urban regions, has emerged as a critical challenge in achieving sustainable urban management. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2, 9, and 11 present various avenues for governments to adress this predicament. This study employs the framework of multiple stream model, offering a valuable lens through which policies can identify opportune moments for policy implementation. The study examines the impact of industrialization and agricultural land use on the country's urban population while identifying potential opportunities for enhancing sustainable urban management in alignment with the SDGs. Subsequently, it critically examines the asymmetrical effects of these two significant factors on the urban population, formulating policy recommendations based on the empirical findings. The study concludes by stressing the significance of prioritizing sustainable, long-term agricultural and industrialization policies outlined in national policy documents rather than relying on short-term and temporary solutions.

Temporality and the cooperative infrastructure of human communication: Noticings to delay and to accelerate onward movement in mobile interaction

This article examines how mobile participants, at interactionally delicate moments, deploy noticings to invite joint attention on objects in the speaker's vicinity. Complementing recent accounts of environmentally occasioned noticings, the focus of this study is on noticings as a practice to delay and, by contrast, to accelerate joint onward movement through museum spaces. It is argued that the interactional function of these noticings is, first, to draw the co-participant's attention to objects that they treat as noteworthy, and second, to request movement towards the speaker in order to jointly orient to the noticeable. The analysis shows that participants may launch noticings at opportune moments to serve their own spatiotemporal trajectory, either by detaining or by prompting co-participants on. The analysis draws on the methodology of Multimodal Conversation Analysis and a corpus of naturally occurring mobile interactions recorded with external cameras and eye-tracking glasses. Our observations on the double function of noticings in the local context may shed light on different ways in which we enact and draw on the cooperative infrastructure of human communication in social interaction.

Identity and parent-child relationship representations of Nezha: From cultural narrative to case conceptualization

Objective Based on the assumption that the cultural image at the level of experience is the collective and individual psychological reality expressed by cultural narrative and individual narrative, to study the timeless Tales of Nezha (“Natch”) in China as an experiential cultural image of child development and parent-child relationship. Method We adopted the narrative analysis method which focused on qualitative content analysis, covering religion, folklore, literature, entertainment, education and other fields. Result Our exposition articulates a cultural narrative framework of diachronic and contemporary cultural image of “Nezha”, the iconic child deity. This framework refers to our academic research discipline of describing the image characteristics, plots and interpersonal relationship, and conceptualizing the theme as psychological meaning units of personal identity and parent-child relationship. By analogizing and comparing this framework with the “Nezha” of personal narratives in consultation, we found the interactive clues of the case’s identity and parent-child relationship. We then combined these with specific elements unique and particular to each individual case in order to achieve a meaningful case conceptualization. This process enabled us to apply psychotherapeutic intervention at opportune moments during a counselling session. Conclusions The cultural image emerging from the counseling is not only a personal narrative of resource and a tool for the client to externalize the problem and identity representation, but also a cultural narrative reference point for the counselor to understand the case and to engage in further in-depth work. The personal narrative qualitative data can be obtained by referring to four dimensions: external—internal, event—image, narrative—interpretation, and experience—reflection. With the narrative identity of client, the “Nezha” of personal narrative led to the theme that parent-child relationship impedes the development of personal identity. The counselor was thereby enabled to construct a new meaning and new identity with the client by providing appropriate information and knowledge of the cultural narrative.

Patient experiences through head and neck cancer: Information delivery combatting psychological distress

As part of a larger study investigating the utility of electronic decision support tools for patients with head and neck cancer (HNC), this article describes the patient experience of receiving cancer treatment in British Columbia, Canada. It aims to give voice to the patient experience and recommend a model of psychological adjustment for clinicians and clinical service management to consider to refine patient centric care pathways for HNC. Based in phenomenology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 survivors of HNC, audio-video recorded, and thematically analyzed. Three themes were identified: (1) patients have high, though varying information needs; (2) an emotional experience; and (3) coping, strength, and resiliency. These themes arose from six concepts: (1) information needs; (2) fear of the unknown; (3) desire for personalized information; (4) varying degrees of information needs; (5) fear as a motivator versus stressor; and (6) high information needs on life after treatment. Conclusions: The patient experience must be considered through the full care trajectory and into survivorship to provide the right information to the correct patient at the optimal time. Patient journey mapping may be a novel approach to exploring the temporal relationship between information needs and the patient experience along the cancer continuum to uncover opportune moments, from the patient perspective, for knowledge and supportive care intervention. The model of psychological adjustment by Calver et al. (2019) can be considered to inform the delivery of cancer care information in a method recognizing the patient as the ultimate knowledge holder.

Adapting ecosystem restoration for sustainable development in a changing world

Adapting ecosystem restoration for sustainable development in a changing world

Toward Social Role-Based Interruptibility Management

Pervasive and ubiquitous computing facilitates immediate access to information in the sense of always-on. Information, such as news, messages, or reminders, can significantly enhance our daily routines but are rendered useless or disturbing when not being aligned with our intrinsic interruptibility preferences. Attention management systems use machine learning to identify short-term opportune moments, so that information delivery leads to fewer interruptions. Humans’ intrinsic interruptibility preferences—established for and across social roles and life domains—would complement short-term attention and interruption management approaches. In this article, we present our comprehensive results toward social role-based attention and interruptibility management. Our approach combines on-device sensing and machine learning with theories from social science to form a personalized two-stage classification model. Finally, we discuss the challenges of the current and future AI-driven attention management systems concerning privacy, ethical issues, and future directions.

“Killing nature—killing us”: “Cultural threats” as a fundamental framework for analyzing Indigenous movements against mining in Siberia and the Russian North

ABSTRACT The Shor people are protesting the ongoing mining of coal in the southern Kemerovo region of Siberia, while the Izhma Komi people are contesting the extraction of oil in the northern Komi Republic (Northwestern Federal District). The theory of “political opportunities” states that movements emerge when opportune moments create spaces for these, but we argue that in illiberal spaces, movements emerge against “threats” in an ever-decreasing political space. We argue that the extraction of coal and oil in Russia’s eastern regions poses not only structural threats – economic problems, public health/environmental decline, erosion of rights, and state repression – to its Indigenous peoples, but also cultural threats to their livelihoods and life-worlds. The various structural threats are thus intertwined with cultural threats in the case of Indigenous rights movements, and environmental decline is inextricably bound with the erosion of rights.