Temporal Realm Research Articles

The Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISK): an assessment of current operations

ABSTRACT The rise of the Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISK) from 2015 to the present began largely unnoticed as an insurgency in Afghanistan and has recently been observed as a growing terrorist threat around the globe. This assessment examines the historical precedent, evolution, and strategic objectives of ISK by way of delving into its origins in the jihadist extremist template, and into its operations by area, which increasingly are those outside of its immediate provincial boundaries, expanding into regional and beyond. Tied to its kinetic operations is a robust and modern media capability and strategy that is serving to elevate the status of the group, enable it a global networked capacity, and draw recruits and other resources. While remaining tied to the hierarchy of IS central, ISK is free to perpetuate extremist ideology and brutal tactics as envisioned by early IS originator Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The upward cycle of, and battlefield momentum gained by ISK in both the physical world and online presents both a challenge and an urgent necessity for counter-terrorism strategies in both temporal realms.

Providence and Science in a World of Contingency: Thomas Aquinas’ Metaphysics of Divine Action

Providence and Science in a World of Contingency: Thomas Aquinas’ Metaphysics of Divine Action

Providence and Science in a World of Contingency: Thomas Aquinas’ Metaphysics of Divine Action

Providence and Science in a World of Contingency: Thomas Aquinas’ Metaphysics of Divine Action

Estimating the temporal scale of lagged responses in species abundance and occurrence

AbstractUnderstanding drivers of species distributions is a central theme in ecology, and species are known to respond to drivers at multiple spatiotemporal scales. Yet, little attention has been paid to the temporal dimensions of predictors of species abundance or occurrence. Studies considering lagged responses typically contrast few points in time, rather than integrating multiple temporal scales. Here, I transfer an approach developed for the integration of predictors across spatial scales into the temporal realm. In this approach, a weighted mean predictor is used in a generalized linear model for abundance or occurrence; weights are estimated for each temporal scale based on a parametric function, and the parameters defining the function are estimated within the model. In a simulation study using a half‐normal declining weight function, I show that the scale parameter σ (measuring temporal scale of response) and effect strength of the predictor, , can be estimated accurately in abundance models with and without imperfect detection for a range of sample sizes and input values of σ and . Accuracy for both parameters was lower in occurrence‐based models. Estimates of σ improved in accuracy with increasing , and precision of both estimates tended to be lower in models with imperfect detection. A higher resolution time series of predictor values improved estimates of both parameters, and lower detection probability most strongly increased bias in in occurrence models. The approach can be viewed as a more parsimonious but less flexible case of memory models or distributed lag models. It is easily incorporated into standard methods used to model animal abundance and occurrence and therefore hopefully will open up avenues for future research into lagged responses in wildlife distribution to environmental conditions.

Gestural Temporality in Sciarrino’s Recitativo oscuro

Sciarrino’s writings describe a compositional philosophy that prizes multidimensionality and spatiotemporal discontinuity (1998, 2004). Yet his simultaneous allegiance to teleology, holism, and fractal hierarchies reveals an underlying unifying organicism with which these qualities may initially seem to conflict. I take Sciarrino’s 1999 piano concerto Recitativo oscuro as a case study for examining the composer’s gestural organicism and its various contradictions and double meanings. First, close analysis of the opening piano solo demonstrates how seemingly contradictory aesthetic priorities—organic unity and temporal multiplicity—co-exist within a single passage. Drawing from Kramer’s (1988) concept of “gestural time,” Hatten’s (2004) theory of gesture, segmentation theories, and scholarship on intensity and temporal function, I show how temporal multiplicity in the piano solo arises through conflict between gestural energetics and contextual segmentation. I then expand my analysis to the full concerto, arguing that the orchestra’s cyclic and naturalistic sonic ecosystem causes the piano gestures to take on representative functions in addition to their energetic syntax, creating what Sciarrino (2001) calls “dimensional intermittence” as they reference distant temporal realms both within and beyond the concerto. I conclude by arguing that while the intensity profile of the earliest gestures and phrases is eventually reproduced across the form of the entire work, the concerto’s form nevertheless resists reductive understanding. Instead, listeners are invited to hear form through the complex mechanics and idiosyncrasies of “gestural behavior” (Sciarrino 1998).

Harmony and Devotion: Exploring the Socio-Cultural Fabric of Chishti Khanqahs

This paper comprehensively analyses the historical significance of Chishti Khanqahs, particularly during the 13th and 14th centuries in the Indian subcontinent. It focuses on their profound impact in shaping the spiritual and religious landscape of the Indian subcontinent. Exploring various facets that contributed to the appeal of Chishti abodes, the study critically examines their multifaceted roles. The research investigates the pivotal role of Chishti Khanqahs in training and educating disciples. These centers were more than places of faith; they transformed individuals by instilling values of humility, compassion, and devotion under the guidance of Shaikh. The paper also highlights the symbolic importance of the Langar Khana (free kitchen) in Chishti Khanqahs, embodying their commitment to equality and selflessness across societal strata. Addressing the interplay between Sufis and local communities, the paper discusses how these spiritual enclaves acted as bridges between the spiritual and temporal realms, shaping the socio-political landscape. Cultural enrichment through Chishti Khanqahs is another aspect explored, where diverse faiths, cultures, and backgrounds converged, promoting mutual understanding and coexistence. The paper acknowledges Khanqahs' transformation into centers of learning, fostering knowledge dissemination and intellectual growth. Lastly, the research highlights the humanitarian dimension of Chishti Khanqahs, providing sanctuary to the marginalized. This compassionate outreach underscores their commitment to societal welfare.

Perspectivalism about temporal reality

It is usually agreed that reality is temporal in the sense of containing entities that exist in time, but some philosophers, roughly those who have been traditionally called A-theorists, hold that reality is temporal in a far more profound sense than what is implied by the mere existence of such entities. This hypothesis of deep temporality typically involves two ideas: that reality is temporally compartmentalised into distinct present, past, and future ‘realms’, and that this compartmentalisation is temporally dynamic in the sense that the boundaries of those temporal realms change from one moment to the next. The truth of something like this hypothesis is commonly thought to require that at least some of the facts that fundamentally constitute reality be tensed. While this seems plausible, realism about fundamental tensed facts does not seem to entail deep temporality. Nor is it clear exactly what realism about tense amounts to, given that no informative answer has been given to the question of what it is for a fact to be tensed. In this paper, I introduce a novel approach, perspectivalism about temporal reality, that seeks to vindicate the hypothesis of deep temporality by ascribing to reality a certain kind of temporally perspectival structure, which also provides a straightforward answer to the question of what the tensedness of facts consists in as well as to the question of what it is for reality to be constituted by such facts.

Regimes of the Parasite: exploring new domains inherent within media formations

Viruses are neither alive nor dead, viruses do not grow, however, viruses greatly impact the growth of systems (biological, technological, bio-technological, etc.). Ultimately, the parasite is a confounding agent for how we account for things. That said, motored by technology’s productive potential, the current discourse on media technology largely ignores the structural force of the parasite. Analysis is centered on a device’s own functionality and purpose. Alternatively, I suggest we examine how the parasite is integral to technology. However, instead of the parasitic threat somehow being crucial to a system’s future, I take the parasite’s operations as requiring new investigations into domains of and perspectives on media technology beyond those engendered by instrumentalist discourses. I propose we think media technologies as emergent within the diverse and fracturing regimes of ‘the virus.’ This means analyzing media as discrete formations that possibly deviate from functionalist explanations. More problematically, 'the virus' provokes re-conceiving the kinds of economies and temporal realms in which media takes form.

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Depth of Field: Disorienting the “Ethnographic Gaze” through Zeme Naga Realms

Depth of Field: Disorienting the “Ethnographic Gaze” through Zeme Naga Realms

Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism About Time

This paper argues that idealism can offer a new solution to the problem of relating the “static” presence of things to eternity and the “dynamic” passage of reality in the temporal realm. I first offer a presentation of this problem using the dispute between Aquinas and Scotus, then describe “ontological idealism about time,” as a smaller–scale idealism, and show how it resolves the original problem. I conclude by demonstrating that this view is consonant with the recent emphasis on the ontological dependence of things on God and that it offers a way of bringing together non–eternalist ontologies and the ontological conclusions posited by the special theory of relativity.

Policy success for whom? A framework for analysis

This article develops a heuristic framework to help analysts navigate an important but under-researched issue: ‘policy success for whom?’ It identifies different forms of policy success across the policy making, program, political and temporal realms, to assess how a specific policy can differentially benefit a variety of stakeholders, including governments, lobbyists, not-for-profits, community groups and individuals. The article identifies a three-step process to aid researchers in examining any policy initiative in order to understand the forms and extent of success experienced by any actor/stakeholder. Central to these steps is the examination of plausible assessments and counter assessments to help interrogate issues of ‘success for whom.’ The article demonstrates a practical application of the framework to a case study focused on the Fixing Houses for Better Health (FHBH) program in Australia—a time-limited Commonwealth government-funded program aimed at improving Indigenous health outcomes by fixing housing.

3D Tensor Based Nonlocal Low Rank Approximation in Dynamic PET Reconstruction.

Reconstructing images from multi-view projections is a crucial task both in the computer vision community and in the medical imaging community, and dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) is no exception. Unfortunately, image quality is inevitably degraded by the limitations of photon emissions and the trade-off between temporal and spatial resolution. In this paper, we develop a novel tensor based nonlocal low-rank framework for dynamic PET reconstruction. Spatial structures are effectively enhanced not only by nonlocal and sparse features, but momentarily by tensor-formed low-rank approximations in the temporal realm. Moreover, the total variation is well regularized as a complementation for denoising. These regularizations are efficiently combined into a Poisson PET model and jointly solved by distributed optimization. The experiments demonstrated in this paper validate the excellent performance of the proposed method in dynamic PET.

Borges and Ge Fei: Transfiguring the poetics of atemporal labyrinth

This article examines, from a comparative perspective, how Jorge Louis Borges configures his archetypal textual labyrinth in “The Garden of Forking Paths” and to what extent the Chinese avant-gardist Ge Fei is inspired to absorb, concoct and transfigure Borges’ aesthetics of maze into his own labyrinth poetics of fiction through a representation of lacunae, negation, repetition, memories, and particularly time and space. In this essay, Ge Fei’s fiction “The Mystified Boat” is analyzed under the notions of Bakhtin’s “chronotope” and Foucault’s “heterotopia” and discussed in depth in close relation to Borges’ metafictional story in the convoluted reconfiguration of narrative maze in a web of distorted historical times and spaces. Instilling Borgesian fictional inspiration into his own work of art, Ge Fei is adept at utilizing labyrinths and omissions to metaphorically project the world and the mind as mazes through the nonlinear concept of chronology and the deconstruction of habitualization. With the theoretical frame of reference for his fiction, it is revealed that Ge Fei aptly converts Borges’ labyrinthine inspirations and influences into his own poetics of atemporal labyrinth to metaphorically represent in his stories the chaos of the universe and the mystery of the mind, fabricates the disorienting spatial–temporal realms that dissolve the nexus between fiction and reality, and reconfigures the diverse mechanisms of atemporal labyrinths between the inner and outer worlds.

Centymetr Reymonta. Wielokropki specjalne w Chłopach

In The Peasants Reymont uses unusual suspension points, which run across the whole length of a line. His precision in applying them reveals that this particular punctuation mark plays an important part in the book’s structure. Reymont inserts these long suspension points at moments when his characters pray, or when they stare at the sky, awaiting the reviving rays of the sun (invigorating also for the soul); he often puts them to mark the boundaries between the light (dawn) and the dark (night) – the visible and invisible worlds; he uses them to end scenes laden with the narrative and emotional climax. Reymont also writes his suspension points when his characters suffer poignantly (Hanka, Jagna). They accompany Kuba and later old Boryna as they pass away. Reymont’s suspension points do not merely function as a separating device in the novel’s narrative, but above all they point to the close ties between man and a space distinct from the temporal realm. They allow him to transcend the earthly time. An analysis of the existing manuscript fragments of The Peasants (1901 and 1902) demonstrates that Reymont valued these suspension points from the artistic perspective: they appear only in the second draft of the autograph text. Published editions of the texts ought, therefore, to respect Reymont’s editorial conventions. By neglecting this feature of the text, especially at the very beginning of the novel, the editors of The Peasants (from the Gebethner and Wolff original to the recent Ossolineum edition) deprive it of a meaningful compositional characteristic and can even lead to a wrong interpretation of The Peasants .

Duration of Things and Duration of Culture

This article discusses the relation between temporal existence of things and the persistence of culture. The material and the immaterial aspects of culture are quite different in relation to time. According to philosopher Karl R. Popper, meanings, senses and ideas belong to a separate non- -temporal realm of being. They come about in time but henceforth they exist non-temporarily. Their existence, unlike that of physical objects, does not depend on keeping a delicate balance between the change and identity − it is not based on struggle against time. But on the other hand, their seemingly non-temporal subsistence is strictly connected to the temporal existence of things. The latter do not carry meaning in virtue of sheer convention, but rather by means of subtle connection between their material structure and the properties of sentient and intelligent beings. Books hold a very special place in this framework. Physical properties of books are intertwined with their content very strongly albeit mysteriously. It is safe to say that reducing books to their content − by conveying the content to digital carriers alone − would result in a serious impoverishing of culture. In reference to early journalist works by the poet Zbigniew Herbert, three functions of preserving and studying artefacts are distinguished: reconstruction, preserving and learning. In studying artefacts there is always a quest for originals and considerable efforts are made in order to distinguish them from copies and derivatives. The article gives a brief account of recent debate concerning the value of these pursuits. Finally, a discussion with Michel Foucault is presented, concerning the role of things in self-formation.

States of Wait: The Death Penalty in Contemporary Egypt

This paper is an exploration of the daily encounters of “political” prisoners on death row ward with figures of the state. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and theories around states, bodies, terrorism, law, and fantasies, the paper problematizes the contemporary state discourse on “terrorism.” Instead, it proposes an understanding of the state’s creation of gendered “terrorist” bodies, which it deems killable in the process. Meanwhile, it identifies the state as heterogeneous, and acknowledges the multifaceted manifestations of the contemporary Egyptian state in the everyday encounters with death row inmates and their families. It also explores the inevitable wait for the state in every process, thereby taking seriously the realm of temporality on death row, and what it then means to refuse to wait.

Expressing i think that in Polish

Abstract The paper investigates how four Polish mental predicates, signalling the subject’s of conception thinking process and representing the i think that conceptualisation, differ in usage and what motivates the difference. The verbs’ first person singular present tense forms, in an objective way, signal the speaker’s, i.e. the subject’s of conception, thoughts about the (ir)reality stored in their mind, whereas the content of clause complementation subjectively reveals the object of conception, namely the realm of one’s thoughts. A quantitative corpus-driven analysis implemented in the study presents how formal, semantic and extra-linguistic ‘usage features’ of the complementation interact with the verbs. The findings suggest that the i think that conceptualisation shows linguistic variation in Polish dependent on the temporal realm of the situation described in the complementation, the topic of discourse, and the evaluation of the event described.

The temporal pocket: 1990s Beijing artist colonies

ABSTRACTIn recent years, a small but growing body of scholarship has emerged on the category of the Chinese art district, particularly its institutionalisation amidst twenty-first century creative industries polices. Such research presents important stories of Chinese artists’ negotiations with urban and political authority, thus nuancing paradigms for the comprehension of political work within contemporary China. This current article contributes to this growing research area by considering the spatial conditions for these socio-spatial categories’ emergence, namely, the urban structures in which they first took shape in 1990s Beijing. First occupying traditional villages (cunzi) and later ex-socialist work units (danwei), these arts colonies appropriated existing communal architecture, and turned their designs and physical buildings to their own communal ends. Importantly, these sites were made available by the dramatic reconstruction of the city, and in this sense these occupations were limited to the temporal realm. To describe the nature of occupations, and their eventual impact upon the shape of the city, this paper proposes the category of “the temporal pocket”: a cellular and temporary inhabitance, defined by the shared investments of its participants, and one that is both discrete (in the sense of its spaces) and discreet (in the sense that this can be understood as a non-oppositional politics). The article is informed by spatial and cultural theory, literature on Chinese urban planning and art history, as well as primary documents (such as documentaries, art works and archival material) and interviews conducted by the researcher in Beijing.

Every House on Langland Road – the production of archival, architectural and artistic spaces

This article describes an Arts Council England project, undertaken by the author and a photographer, to examine spatial and temporal relations between an art project, its subject and its audience. The project explored and documented the architecture of a modernist 1970s housing estate, Netherfield, designed by a group of four architects for the new city of Milton Keynes. The estate has not aged well and the visual remnants of what had been an ambitious and idiosyncratic housing scheme were to be photographed and juxtaposed with the original architectural drawings. The photographic process contributed to a more complex series of perspectives which included the archival history of the estate and its surrounding new city, the people who live there and my own reflections on a council estate childhood. In turn, these perspectives are set out in this article in terms of the spatial and temporal realms in which they are, and continue to be, produced. Loosely conceived in terms of Lefebvre’s production of space triad, these realms are traced through the estate’s historical narrative from plans to buildings which then converge in the eventual art work. The gallery is seen as an assemblage of multiple connections drawn between various productions of archival, architectural and artistic spaces.