Temporal Axis Research Articles

A configuração dos espaços ficcionais em O outro pé da sereia, de Mia Couto

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo consiste em analisar a construção dos espaços nos dois eixos temporais que estruturam a obra O outro pé da sereia (2006). O percurso investigativo adotado desenvolve-se a partir da análise dos recursos empregados na composição dos espaços que estruturam o romance e revelam os diferentes tempos históricos encenados. As contribuições teóricas de Luiz Alberto Brandão (2013), Osman Lins (1976) e Ozíris Borges Filho (2007) fornecem elementos para a compreensão da dinamicidade de que se reveste a categorial espacial na narrativa. Em O outro pé da sereia (2006), a construção dos espaços ficcionais desvela poder e opressão no passado, desolação e reconstrução no presente.

The Construction of Ideology in Political Discourse: A Deictic Analysis

This research is conducted on political discourse of a high profile Pakistani politician and a former famous cricketer Imran Khan in the context of Pakistani politics. It aims to understand the ideological process and project of creating a New Pakistan (Naya Pakistan), and that how this project influences the way Imran Khan shapes the political reality during his speeches. The analysis reveals that Imran Khan indexes more often his personal identity as a strong leader of the Tahreek-e-Insaaf party rather than the common or national identity. The results assert this point because the transformation of the country may seem to be only possible under his identity as a leader of Tahreek-e-Insaaf. From the spatial deixes analysis, it manifests that Imran Khan wants to reach to the ideological space or destination of New Pakistan where everyone will have equal rights. This projection of New Pakistan is presented like a utopian world where all things would be right and there would be justice, cooperation and peace. The deixes such as ‘here’, ‘now’ and ‘today’ represent Old Pakistan (Purana Pakistan) which is its present state. But the future along the temporal axes is full of hope that reflects the vision of the founding father of Pakistan ‘Quaid-e-Azam’ in the form of New Pakistan. A comparative study of various other politicians may bring forth further elicitation of political discourse in Pakistani context in future.

Improve Temporal Fourier Transform Profilometry for Complex Dynamic Three-Dimensional Shape Measurement.

The high-speed three-dimensional (3-D) shape measurement technique has become more and more popular recently, because of the strong demand for dynamic scene measurement. The single-shot nature of Fourier Transform Profilometry (FTP) makes it highly suitable for the 3-D shape measurement of dynamic scenes. However, due to the band-pass filter, FTP method has limitations for measuring objects with sharp edges, abrupt change or non-uniform reflectivity. In this paper, an improved Temporal Fourier Transform Profilometry (TFTP) algorithm combined with the 3-D phase unwrapping algorithm based on a reference plane is presented, and the measurement of one deformed fringe pattern producing a new 3-D shape of an isolated abrupt objects has been achieved. Improved TFTP method avoids band-pass filter in spatial domain and unwraps 3-D phase distribution along the temporal axis based on the reference plane. The high-frequency information of the measured object can be well preserved, and each pixel is processed separately. Experiments verify that our method can be well applied to a dynamic 3-D shape measurement with isolated, sharp edges or abrupt change. A high-speed and low-cost structured light pattern sequence projection has also been presented, it is capable of projection frequencies in the kHz level. Using the proposed 3-D shape measurement algorithm with the self-made mechanical projector, we demonstrated dynamic 3-D reconstruction with a rate of 297 Hz, which is mainly limited by the speed of the camera.

Gait recognition using histograms of temporal gradients

In this paper, we present a gait recognition method using convolutional features and histograms of temporal gradients. The method comprises three stages, namely the convolutional stage, temporal gradient stage and classification stage. In the convolutional stage, the video frames are convolved with a set of pre-learned filters. This is followed by the temporal gradient stage. In this stage, the gradient of each convolved frame in time axis is calculated. Unlike histograms of oriented gradients that accumulate the gradients in the spatial domain, the proposed histogram of temporal gradients encodes the gradients in the spatial and temporal domain. The histogram of temporal gradients captures the gradient patterns of every pixel over the temporal axis throughout the video sequence. By doing so, the feature encodes both spatial and temporal information in the gait cycle. Finally, in the classification stage, a majority voting classification with Euclidean distance is performed for gait recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Online Tensor Sparsifying Transform based on Temporal Superpixels from Compressive Spectral Video Measurements.

Spectral videos contain highly redundant information across spatial, spectral and temporal axes which can be exploited through a temporal-data-learned sparsifying basis. However, in compressive spectral video acquisition, tackling dictionary learning is time-consuming since it increases the computational complexity and presents drawbacks for realtime processing, where offline learning is required. This paper introduces a tensor-decomposition learning (TenDL) framework for simultaneous online sparsifying and recovering the spatialspectral- temporal information of a spectral video performed on several temporal superpixels (TSP-TenDL) for time processing reduction. The framework is composed of two main stages: preprocessing and joint estimation. The preprocessing stage includes a strategy for a grayscale approximation of the video to provide a suitable initialization of the sparsifying basis to be learned. To fully exploit the high signal correlation, a set of temporal superpixels is estimated from the grayscale approximation, reducing the reconstruction time of the large-scale data. Then, the outcome of the first stage is used to estimate the basis and the signal coefficients, where an optimization problem is solved to learn and reconstruct the basis and the signal, respectively, following a block-descent coordinate strategy. The proposed approach is compared from simulations with an offline-learned based method, traditional matrix-based recovery algorithms and the tensor-based recovery, the two latter using a fixed basis, where TSP-TenDL exhibits higher image quality results and lower computation time. Specifically, our methodology gains up to 7dB in terms of PSNR and a speedup of up to 6.6× compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.

Adaptive Distance-Based Pooling in Convolutional Neural Networks for Audio Event Classification

In the last years, deep convolutional neural networks have become a standard for the development of state-of-the-art audio classification systems, taking the lead over traditional approaches based on feature engineering. While they are capable of achieving human performance under certain scenarios, it has been shown that their accuracy is severely degraded when the systems are tested over noisy or weakly segmented events. Although better generalization could be obtained by increasing the size of the training dataset, e.g. by applying data augmentation techniques, this also leads to longer and more complex training procedures. In this article, we propose a new type of pooling layer aimed at compensating non-relevant information of audio events by applying an adaptive transformation of the convolutional feature maps in the temporal axis. The proposed layer performs a non-linear temporal transformation that follows a uniform distance subsampling criterion on the learned feature space. The experiments conducted over different datasets show significant performance improvements when the proposed layer is added to baseline models, resulting in systems that generalize better to mismatching test conditions and learn more robustly from weakly labeled data.

On Clinical Event Prediction in Patient Treatment Trajectory Using Longitudinal Electronic Health Records.

Healthcare process leaves patient treatment trajectory (PTT), described as a sequence of interdependent clinical events affiliated with a large volume of longitudinal therapy and treatment information. Predicting the future clinical event in PTT, as a vital and essential task for providing insights into the entire treatment trajectory, can serve as an efficient and proactive altering service for health service delivery. However, it is challenging because there are long-term dependencies between clinical events, which are irregularly distributed along the temporal axis with varying time intervals. This characteristic inevitably impedes the performance of clinical event prediction (CEP) using the existing approaches. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to learn representative and discriminative PTT features for CEP. In detail, multivariate Hawkes process (HP) is adopted to uncover the mutual excitation intensities between clinical event pairs in an interpretable manner. Thereafter, the captured spontaneous and interactional intensities of events are incorporated into recurrent neural networks (RNN) to encode PTT in latent representations, while jointly performing the CEP task based on the extracted trajectory representations. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on a real clinical dataset consisting of 13,545 visits of 2,102 heart failure patients. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our best model achieves 6.4% and 4.1% AUC performance gains on three-months and one-year CEP tasks, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models in CEP, and can be profitably exploited as a basis for PTT analysis and optimization.

A New Taxonomy of Affect-A Spatiotemporal Framework: Constructing the Elephant.

The holy grail of emotion theory is arguably still the discovery of a taxonomy, but one that is predicated on first establishing a corresponding structure of affect. Plans for the construction of a taxonomy are presented, based on the emotions and supported with the tripartite mind. A two-axis circumplex-like framework forms the proposed structure. The fundamental orthogonal axes are a temporal vertical axis and a spatial horizontal axis, which subsume another five essential opposing and complementary properties that underpin affect. These dimensions create four basic states that categorize affect and account for the differences and similarities between emotions within categories. A binomial labeling method posits the view that the valence of emotions is determined by the valence of the category they emanate from. The Euclidian spaces created account for mixed emotions and conditions and show how basic emotions from different categories create complex emotions and conditions. This model will also explore why some emotions like shame-embarrassment and contempt-disgust are often seen as synonyms due to a categorical error. It also provides an exposition of the function of reactive and self-reflective emotions and anxiety.

Diáspora, integración social y arraigo de migrantes en Santiago de Chile: imaginarios de futuro en la comunidad venezolana

El presente artículo tiene como propósito comprender los procesos de integración, arraigo y desarraigo de migrantes venezolanos residentes en Santiago de Chile, los que han llegado crecientemente durante los últimos cinco años, producto de la crisis económico-política que vive Venezuela. Buscamos ampliar los conocimientos sobre la movilidad Sur-Sur y en particular en América Latina. Presentamos resultados de una investigación cualitativa realizada en 2017 y 2018, a partir de tres ejes temporales: éxodo y decisión de migrar hacia Chile; asentamiento y trayectorias; y evaluación e imaginarios de futuro. Se concluye que hay una positiva integración social, siendo relevante tanto la percepción de lograr éxito laboral como la experiencia de participar en un paulatino proceso de mestizaje cultural, aportando a la construcción de convivencia intercultural en Santiago. Estas condiciones y situaciones están generando arraigo, al menos en el corto plazo.

A Specific Study on the Impacts of PM2.5 on Urban Heat Islands with Detailed In Situ Data and Satellite Images

Rapid urbanization often results in serious urban heat islands (UHI) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration. Previous studies found it was hard to evaluate the haze contribution to the UHI quantitatively, because of the complex properties of the atmosphere aloft and the irregular alteration of PM2.5 loads. Taking Beijing as the study site, where detailed in situ PM2.5 concentration data, canopy thermal data and MODIS land surface temperature (LST) products were all available in 2015, this study investigated the impacts of PM2.5 on both surface UHI intensity (SUHII) and canopy UHI intensity (CUHII) at daytime and night. The results reveal that the CUHII are almost unchanged throughout the year, while SUHII varies greatly in both temporal axis and spatial distribution. PM2.5 concentration has significant negative impacts on mean SUHII (r = −0.6115) and daytime SUHII (r = −0.6164), and less significant negative impact on CUHII (r = −0.51999). However, the contribution of PM2.5 concentration to nighttime SUHI is not significant. This specific study checked and improved previous works on this topic, with detailed in situ data and satellite images. The results of this work can enhance our understanding of the dynamics and driving mechanism of urban thermal environment.

Re-Examining Johannine Arrangements of Time: Shifting the Temporal Axis from Death to Resurrection of Jesus in John 19:42-20:31

Re-Examining Johannine Arrangements of Time: Shifting the Temporal Axis from Death to Resurrection of Jesus in John 19:42-20:31

A Study on the Problem of Vacancy and Disconnection in Archaeology

고고학에서 공백과 단절의 문제는 단순히 편년만으로 해결될 것이 아니라 고고학 방법론과도 연결된 거대 담론이므로 한국고고학에서 반드시 다루어야 할 중요한 과제 중의 하나인 것이다. 이 문제를 다루기에 앞서 필자는 각 지역에서 논의되고 있는 초기철기시대와 원삼국시대의 공백문제를 검토해 보았다. 특히 호남지역에서의 논란은 공백을 극복하기 위하여 고고학 편년을 수정하여야 한다는 입장과 기존의 편년관으로 연속적인 문화양상을 설명하려는 입장 사이에서 생긴 것이다. 고고학에서 공백인 이유로는 우선 고고학 자료의 부재와 유적의 미조사로 볼 수 있다. 즉 사람들이 살지 않았거나 다른 지역으로 이동하였기 때문에 유적이 확인되지 않은 경우와 유적이 파괴되거나 미조사로 인하여 고고학 자료가 없는 경우가 있다. 다른 이유로는 고고학 연구자의 인식 틀인 연구방법 론에도 문제가 있을 수 있다. 즉 형식분류를 바탕으로 하는 편년법과 고고학 자료를 해석하는 과정에 서도 나타날 수 있다. 이러한 공백과 단절을 극복하기 위해서 고고학 연구자들은 이 문제를 방치할 것이 아니라 좀 더 적극적으로 해결하려는 문제의식을 가져야 할 것이다. 이를 위해서는 시간축인 편년과 공간축에 대한 연구를 기반으로 합리적인 문화해석이 시도되어야 한다. 고고학 연구자들은 과거 문화를 연구할 수 있는 충분한 고고학 자료를 현재는 물론 미래에도 제공받지 못할 것이다. 그럼에도 불구하고 고고학 연구자들은 과거 문화의 편년적 양상뿐 아니라 문화 변천을 비롯한 다양한 측면을 설명할 수 있어야 한다.The problem of vacancy and disconnection in archaeology is not solved by the archaeological chronology alone, but it is a huge discourse connected with archaeological methodology, so it is one of the important tasks that Korean archaeology must deal with. Before dealing with this problem, I examined the vacancy during the early Iron Age and the proto-Three Kingdoms period discussed in each region. In particular, the controversy in Honam area arises between the position that the archaeological chronology should be revised to overcome the gap and the position to explain the continuous cultural aspect with the existing chronology. The reasons for the vacancy in archaeology can be seen as the absence of archaeological data and the unexcavated sites. In other words, there are cases where the sites are not confirmed because people did not live or moved to other areas, and there are no archaeological materials due to destruction or unexcavated. Other reasons may be problems with the methodology as the recognition of archaeologists, that is, it may appear in the process of chronology based on the typology of artifacts and interpreting on the archaeological data. To overcome this vacancy and disconnection, archaeologists should not neglect this problem but have a sense of problem to solve it more actively. For this, rational cultural interpretation should be attempted based on the studies of the chronology as the temporal axis and the spatial axis. Archaeologists have not received enough archaeological data to study past cultures at present and in the future. Nevertheless, archaeologists should be able to explain not only the chronological aspects of past culture but also various aspects including cultural process.

Programmability projections in “The Ancient Kiev Frescoes” by A. Stashevsky for the button accordion

Programmability projections in “The Ancient Kiev Frescoes” by A. Stashevsky for the button accordion

Spatial and temporal axes impact ecology of the gut microbiome in juvenile European lobster (Homarus gammarus)

Microbial communities within the gut can markedly impact host health and fitness. To what extent environmental influences affect the differential distribution of these microbial populations may therefore significantly impact the successful farming of the host. Using a sea-based container culture (SBCC) system for the on-growing of European lobster (Homarus gammarus), we tracked the bacterial gut microbiota over a 1-year period. We compared these communities with lobsters of the same cohort, retained in a land-based culture (LBC) system to assess the effects of the culture environment on gut bacterial assemblage and describe the phylogenetic structure of the microbiota to compare deterministic and stochastic assembly across both environments. Bacterial gut communities from SBCCs were generally more phylogenetically clustered, and therefore deterministically assembled, compared to those reared in land-based systems. Lobsters in SBCCs displayed significantly more species-rich and species-diverse gut microbiota compared to those retained in LBC. A reduction in the bacterial diversity of the gut was also associated with higher infection prevalence of the enteric viral pathogen Homarus gammarus nudivirus (HgNV). SBCCs may therefore benefit the overall health of the host by promoting the assembly of a more diverse gut bacterial community and reducing the susceptibility to disease.

Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 2 The Birth of the Century: China and the Conditions of Spatial Revolution

This article situates the birth of the twentieth century within the conditions of a spatial revolution. Proceeding from the dimension of horizontal temporality, it analyses anew the problem of “origins” as well as the era’s “politics of displacement” and “politics of self-negation.” A salient phenomenon of cultural politics in the twentieth century was the horizontal movement of concepts, a formulation of how historical content from different temporal axes was transformed, within a synchronic framework, into that which can be expressed in a single discourse. Yet the political content of such discourse and concepts cannot be defined from its European origins, including ideas such as nation, sovereignty, people, class, citizen, and so on. Whenever these alien concepts are used under historical conditions totally distinct from the conditions that originally produced them, this not only leads to the birth of new consciousness, values, and movements, but it also produces a new political logic. For this reason, it would be difficult to explain the meaning of China’s twentieth century if we leave behind the perspectives internal to its revolution. This article therefore takes up the cases of Lu Xun’s “literature of resistance to despair” and Mao Zedong’s “philosophy of victory,” in which one “moves from victory to victory,” in order to once again examine twentieth-century China’s despairs and hopes, its failures and successes.

Do Activity Patterns and the Degree of Foraging Specialization Enable Niche Partitioning in Nectarivorous Bats?

Niche partitioning is a strategy that favors the coexistence of sympatric species and prevents resource competition. Resource partitioning not only occurs along a temporal and spatial axis, but also within the niche breadth. The lesser long-nosed (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) and the Pallas's long-tongued (Glossophaga soricina) bats are sympatric throughout much of their distribution range. Both species can be found in the Mexican tropical dry forest and co-occur during the winter in the pacific coast of Michoacan. These bats have similar requirements but differ in morphological characteristics associated with their particular methods for obtaining food. We evaluate whether these species exhibit niche partitioning in diet and activity patterns during their period of coexistence. Bats were sampled each month from April 2016 to March 2017, and mist-nets were set up at ground level from 19:00 to 03:00 h in Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan. Diet was determined by taking pollen samples from bat fur and feces, and patterns of daily activity were analyzed. We found greater abundance of bats during November to January, which corresponds to the dry season. This abundance may be associated with a greater availability of floral resources in the study area. Bats fed on nectar from plants of the families Bombacaeae, Fabaceae, Convolvulaceae, Apocynaceae, Cactaceae and Rosaseae. We found no evidence that the diet of the species changes in relation to the presence of potential competitors. However, we found niche partitioning in daily activity patterns of G. soricina related to a high density of L. yerbabuenae.

High Speed 3D Shape Measurement with Temporal Fourier Transform Profilometry

A novel high-speed 3D shape measurement technology called temporal Fourier transform profilometry (TFTP for short) is proposed by combining the merits of Fourier transform profilometry (FTP) and phase-measuring profilometry (PMP). Instead of using the digital light projector, a mechanical projector is employed to generate multi-period phase-shifting fringe patterns sequentially. During the reconstruction process, the phase value of each pixel is calculated independently along the temporal axis and no spectrum filtering operation is performed in a spatial domain. Therefore, high-frequency components containing the detailed information of the measured object effectively remain. The proposed method is suitable for measuring isolated dynamic objects. Only one frame of deformed fringe pattern is required to retrieve one 3D shape of the measured object, so it has the obvious advantage if measuring the dynamic scene at a high speed. A low-cost self-made mechanical projector with fast projection speed is developed to execute the principle-proof experiments, whose results demonstrate the feasibility of measuring isolated dynamic objects.

Role of socio-economic status in the relationship between air pollution and health

OPS 60: Social factors and environmental health across the world, Room 210, Floor 2, August 27, 2019, 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM Background/aims: Inequalities in air pollution exposure and relative health impacts are a relevant aspect in epidemiological research and policy. Aim of the study was to investigate the role of deprivation in the association between air pollution and mortality in a large Italian cohort. Methods: The Supersito project analyzed the effects of aerosols on health in an Italian cohort (aged 30+) of residents in a highly polluted area of Northern Italy. Three years daily measurements (2012-2014) of PM2.5 and its components were made in 4 sites. Monitoring and modeling approach were used to assign a spatio-temporal exposure to each subject’s home address. Natural and cause-specific mortality were analyzed in relation to PM2.5 in the period 2009-2013, using Cox regression models (age of subjects as temporal axis), adjusting for education, citizenship, sex and residence area (urban, coastal, rural), and stratifying for a Deprivation Index (DI) calculated at census-block level and categorzed by quintiles of population at a regional level. Results: 6,011,667 person-years were observed. Total mortality shows an increasing trend in the crude rate related to DI quintiles. The cohort characteristics (gender, age, level of exposure to PM2.5) are homogeneous in the 5 sub-groups, with a prevalence of residence in urban area for less deprived and coastal area for most deprived. Natural mortality reported a 7% increase in risk for increases of 10 □g/m3 of PM2.5 on the whole cohort, but the increase was much higher in most compared to the least deprived [HR=1.014 (95%CI:0.93-1.10), 1.0015 (95%CI:0.93-1.10), 1.022 (95%CI:0.93-1.11), 1.08 (95%CI:1.00-1.16), 1.18 (95%CI:1.11-1.25), respectively]. Conclusions: Stratified analysis revealed increasing associations between PM2.5 and mortality for those living in most deprived small areas. Both PM2.5 and deprivation have been measured at residence, therefore we cannot disentangle if deprivation acts at the individual or context level in increasing the effect of air pollution on mortality.

Scaling of the AIS and Somatodendritic Compartments in α S RGCs.

The anatomical properties of the axon initial segment (AIS) are tailored in certain types of CNS neurons to help optimize different aspects of neuronal function. Here, we questioned whether the AISs of retinal ganglion cells (RGC) were similarly customized, and if so, whether they supported specific RGC functions. To explore this, we measured the AIS properties in alpha sustained RGCs (α S RGCs) of mouse; α S RGCs sizes vary systematically along the nasal temporal axis of the retina, making these cells an attractive population with which to study potential correlations between AIS properties and cell size. Measurements of AIS length as well as distance from the soma revealed that both were scaled to cell size, i.e., cells with large dendritic fields had long AISs that were relatively far from the soma. Within the AIS, the percentage of Nav1.6 voltage-gated sodium channels remained highly consistent, regardless of cell size or other AIS properties. Although ON RGCs were slightly larger than OFF cells at any given location of the retina, the level of scaling and relative distribution of voltage-gated sodium channels were highly similar. Computational modeling revealed that AIS scaling influenced spiking thresholds, spike rate as well as the kinetics of individual action potentials, Interestingly, the effect of individual features of the AIS varied for different neuronal functions, e.g., AIS length had a larger effect on the efficacy by which the AIS initiated spike triggered the somatic spike than it did on repetitive spiking. The polarity of the effect varied for different properties, i.e., increases to soma size increased spike threshold while increases to AIS length decreased threshold. Thus, variations in the relative level of scaling for individual components could fine tune threshold or other neuronal functions. Light responses were highly consistent across the full range of cell sizes suggesting that scaling may post-synaptically shape response stability, e.g., in addition to several well-known pre-synaptic contributors.

Competition and specialization in an African forest carnivore community.

Globally, human activities have led to the impoverishment of species assemblages and the disruption of ecosystem function. Determining whether this poses a threat to future ecosystem stability necessitates a thorough understanding of mechanisms underpinning community assembly and niche selection. Here, we tested for niche segregation within an African small carnivore community in Kibale National Park, Uganda. We used occupancy modeling based on systematic camera trap surveys and fine‐scale habitat measures, to identify opposing preferences between closely related species (cats, genets, and mongooses). We modeled diel activity patterns using kernel density functions and calculated the overlap of activity periods between related species. We also used co‐occupancy modeling and activity overlap analyses to test whether African golden cats Caracal aurata influenced the smaller carnivores along the spatial and/or temporal axes. There was some evidence that related species segregated habitat and activity patterns. Specialization was particularly strong among forest species. The cats and genets partitioned habitat, while the mongooses partitioned both habitat and activity period. We found little evidence for interference competition between African golden cats and other small carnivores, although weak interference competition was suggested by lower detection probabilities of some species at stations where African golden cats were present. This suggests that community assembly and coexistence in this ecosystem are primarily driven by more complex processes. The studied carnivore community contains several forest specialists, which are typically more prone to localized extinction. Preserving the observed community assemblage will therefore require the maintenance of a large variety of habitats, with a particular focus on those required by the more specialized carnivores.