Temporal Interruption Research Articles

Neural Responses to Repeated Noise Structure in Sounds Are Invariant to Temporal Interruptions

ABSTRACT The ability to extract meaning from acoustic environments requires sensitivity to repeating sound structures. Yet, how events that repeat are encoded and maintained in the brain and how the brain responds to events that reoccur at later points in time is not well understood. In two electroencephalography experiments, participants listened to a longer, ongoing white-noise sound which comprised shorter, frozen noise snippets that repeated at a regular 2-Hz rate. In several conditions, the snippet repetition discontinued for a brief period after which the noise snippet reoccurred. The experiments aimed to answer whether neural activity becomes entrained by the regular repetition of noise snippets, whether entrained neural activity self-sustains during the discontinuation period, and how the brain responds to a reoccurring noise snippet. Results show that neural activity is entrained by the snippet repetition, but there was no evidence for self-sustained neural activity during the discontinuation period. However, the auditory cortex responded with similar magnitude to a noise snippet reoccurring after a brief discontinuation as it responded to a noise snippet for which the snippet repetition had not been discontinued. This response invariance was observed for different onset times of the reoccurring noise snippet relative to the previously established regularity. The results thus demonstrate that the auditory cortex sensitively responds to, and thus maintains a memory trace of, previously learned acoustic noise independent of temporal interruptions.

AsQM: Audio Streaming Quality Metric Based on Network Impairments and User Preferences

Audio streaming services have many users because the proliferation of cloud-based audio streaming services for different content. The complex networks that support these services do not always guarantee an acceptable quality on the end-user side. In this paper, the impact of temporal interruptions on the audio streaming reproduction and the user’s preference in relation to audio content are studied. In order to determine the key parameters in the audio streaming service, subjective tests are conducted, and their results show that a user’s quality-of-experience (QoE) is highly correlated with the following application parameters: the number of temporal interruptions or stalls, its frequency and length, and the temporal location where they occur. However, most important, the experimental results demonstrate that users’ preference for audio content plays an important role in users’ QoE. Thus, a preference factor (PF) function is defined and considered in the formulation of the proposed metric named audio streaming quality metric (AsQM). Considering that multimedia service providers are based on web servers, a framework to obtain user information is proposed. Furthermore, the results show that the AsQM implemented in the audio player of an end user’s device has a low impact on energy, processing and memory consumption.

Historical visit attendance as predictor of treatment interruption in South African HIV patients: Extension of a validated machine learning model.

Retention of antiretroviral (ART) patients is a priority for achieving HIV epidemic control in South Africa. While machine-learning methods are being increasingly utilised to identify high risk populations for suboptimal HIV service utilisation, they are limited in terms of explaining relationships between predictors. To further understand these relationships, we implemented machine learning methods optimised for predictive power and traditional statistical methods. We used routinely collected electronic medical record (EMR) data to evaluate longitudinal predictors of lost-to-follow up (LTFU) and temporal interruptions in treatment (IIT) in the first two years of treatment for ART patients in the Gauteng and North West provinces of South Africa. Of the 191,162 ART patients and 1,833,248 visits analysed, 49% experienced at least one IIT and 85% of those returned for a subsequent clinical visit. Patients iteratively transition in and out of treatment indicating that ART retention in South Africa is likely underestimated. Historical visit attendance is shown to be predictive of IIT using machine learning, log binomial regression and survival analyses. Using a previously developed categorical boosting (CatBoost) algorithm, we demonstrate that historical visit attendance alone is able to predict almost half of next missed visits. With the addition of baseline demographic and clinical features, this model is able to predict up to 60% of next missed ART visits with a sensitivity of 61.9% (95% CI: 61.5-62.3%), specificity of 66.5% (95% CI: 66.4-66.7%), and positive predictive value of 19.7% (95% CI: 19.5-19.9%). While the full usage of this model is relevant for settings where infrastructure exists to extract EMR data and run computations in real-time, historical visits attendance alone can be used to identify those at risk of disengaging from HIV care in the absence of other behavioural or observable risk factors.

Openings after the Last Sky

Openings after the Last Sky

Project RADIUS – Railway digitalisation using drones

Railway signalling assets monitoring is based on three alternative methods: a) human maintenance; b) wired solutions; c) monitoring trains. These methods impose severe limitations in terms of safety issues, initial investment and complexity, operating costs, limited set of the diagnostic data processed, and track occupation. The direct result of these limitations is that the maintenance activities of railway lines are suboptimal, resulting in preventable failures that require expensive and disruptive reparations that imply the temporal interruption of the service in the affected tracks. RADIUS proposes to use Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) or drones to execute a large part of the inspection and maintenance tasks of signalling assets that improve on the current methods but require compliance with aviation standards and regulation besides those existing in the railway environment.

Feeling Coded Time: Temporal Interruptions in Videogames

Feeling Coded Time: Temporal Interruptions in Videogames

Estimating abundance with interruptions in data collection using open population spatial capture–recapture models

AbstractThe estimation of population size remains one of the primary goals and challenges in ecology and provides a basis for debate and policy in wildlife management. Despite the development of efficient noninvasive sampling methods and robust statistical tools to estimate abundance, the maintenance of field sampling is still subject to economic and logistic constraints. These can result in intentional or unintentional interruptions in sampling and cause gaps in data time series, posing a challenge to abundance estimation, and ultimately conservation and management decisions. We applied an open population spatial capture–recapture (OPSCR) model to simulations and a real‐life case study to test the reliability of abundance inference to interruptions in data collection. Using individual detections occurring over consecutive sampling occasions, OPSCR models allow the estimation of abundance while accounting for lack of demographic and geographic closure between occasions. First, we simulated sampling data with interruptions in field sampling of different lengths and timing and checked the performance of an OPSCR model in deriving abundance for species with slow and intermediate life‐history strategies. Next, we introduced artificial sampling interruptions of various magnitudes and timing to a five‐year noninvasive monitoring data set of wolverines (Gulo gulo) in Norway and quantified the consequences for OPSCR model predictions. Inferences from OPSCR models were reliable even with temporal interruptions in monitoring. Interruption did not cause systematic bias, but increased uncertainty. Interruptions occurring at occasions near the beginning and the end of the sampling period caused higher uncertainty. The loss in precision was more severe for species with a faster life‐history strategy. OPSCR allows monitoring studies to provide contiguous abundance estimates to managers, stakeholders, and policy makers even when data are noncontiguous. OPSCR models do not only help cope with unintentional interruptions during sampling but also offer opportunities for using intentional sampling interruptions during the design of cost‐effective population surveys.

Les archives à l’épreuve du temps : les recadrements temporels des courts métrages de la sérieSouvenir

This article examines how “colonial time” is called into question in two short films of the National Film Board of Canada’s series Souvenir, from 2015. The question of time lies at the heart of this series, for which the NFB commissioned contemporary Indigenous filmmakers to take up their archives of visual material on Indigenous peoples. The colonial temporal framework is at work in the vast archives of ethnographic and documentary film and photography on Indigenous peoples dating back to the early twentieth century, in which Indigenous people are often represented as part of “vanishing” cultures. Thus, in this article, I underscore the temporal interruptions that occur when ethnographic visual material of Indigenous peoples is put into the hands of contemporary Indigenous artists. I focus first on what it means to repurpose dehumanizing colonial archives and ask whether visual sovereignty is in fact possible within the archives. By analyzing the reappropriation of archival footage in the short films Mobilize by Caroline Monnet and Etlinisigu’niet ( Bleed Down) by Jeff Barnaby, I elucidate how the filmmakers break with modes of colonial time through what I propose to call “reframings” that offer alternative ways of conceiving of time. By rehabilitating ethnographic images, these filmmakers refuse to project the material into the distant past and complicate the readability of Indigenous images in the archives, revealing how the reappropriation of old images can be just as powerful as the production of new ones.

The basis of report-difference superiority in delayed perceptual comparison tasks.

A major role for visual short-term memory (VSTM) is to mediate perceptual comparisons of visual information across successive glances and brief temporal interruptions. Research that has focused on the comparison process has noted a marked tendency for performance to be better when participants are required to report a difference between the displays rather than report the absence of a difference (i.e. a sameness). We refer to this performance asymmetry as report-difference superiority (RDS). It has been suggested that RDS reflects the operation of a reflexive mechanism that generates a mismatch signal during the comparison of visual input with information maintained in VSTM. This bottom-up mechanism therefore gives evidence for the presence of a feature change but not for the absence of such a change; consequently, a sameness is harder to detect than a difference between two displays. We test this explanation, and determine whether by itself it is a sufficient explanation of the RDS. In a delayed comparison task we find the RDS effect is most prevalent when items retain the same display locations; however, the effect does persist even when compared item locations were scrambled across memory and test arrays. However, with a conjunction task this scrambling of locations was effective in wholly abolishing the RDS effect. We consider that the RDS effect is a consequence of local comparisons of features, as well as global statistical comparisons.

Más allá del dinero: redes familiares, amicales e institucionales y su relación con las trayectorias educativas postsecundarias de jóvenes peruanos

La educación superior moldea las probabilidades de movilidad social de los individuos. La literatura pone el énfasis en la influencia de la clase social en las trayectorias educativas post secundarias, pero descuida el estudio de las formas en las cuales las relaciones sociales y su funcionamiento afectan estos itinerarios. En este contexto, este artículo analiza la influencia de las redes familiares, personales e institucionales en las trayectorias educativas post secundarias de jóvenes peruanos de diferentes orígenes sociales. El diseño metodológico consistió en un estudio longitudinal cuantitativo (sociométrico) y cualitativo. Se encontraron cuatro tipos de inserción en la educación superior: transición, inserción con estabilidad, inserción con movimiento continuo e inserción con interrupción temporal. Asimismo, existe una retroalimentación compleja entre las trayectorias e hitos biográficos, los cambios en los espacios en los que se mueve el joven, los cambios en las redes sociales, los cambios en la agencia del actor, la trayectoria socio-económica de la familia y el papel de las instituciones. Con respecto al papel de las redes sociales, estas tienen consecuencias diversas y ambivalentes, positivas y negativas, según las circunstancias, contextos y momentos del ciclo vital de la persona.

Scott’s Momentaneousness

Luke Terlaak Poot, “Scott’s Momentaneousness: Bad Timing in The Bride of Lammermoor” (pp. 283–310) This essay takes up the debate at the beginning of Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), noting that critics have generally treated one figure in this debate—Dick Tinto, the painter who advises our narrator to use less dialogue and more descriptive language—as a strawman. Critics have mostly overlooked the extent to which Tinto articulates the dynamics of “momentaneousness,” an aesthetic principle drawn from Scott’s contemporary, Henry Fuseli. Fuseli defined a momentaneous painting as one that represents a moment with a clear past and future. For Fuseli, paintings ought to select pregnant moments for representation, moments from which whole narrative sequences can be intuited. Implicit in this notion is the belief that some moments are particularly suited to representation because they are qualitatively different from others—more fully narrative, because more indicative of larger processes of change. Turning to Scott’s novel, I show how this assumption features prominently in The Bride of Lammermoor, where it repeatedly produces unforeseen, calamitous consequences. The moment’s disruptive potential culminates in an aptly novelistic take on momentaneousness: the cliffhanger. The cliffhanger draws the act of reading into a circuit of temporal interruption and delay, reproducing the bad timing endemic to the novel’s plot. When read as an instance of momentaneous representation, The Bride’s climactic cliffhanger can be said to incorporate the reader’s own interpretive activity into the bewildering experience of historical time that the novel depicts. This technique, I argue, helps to account for The Bride’s peculiar place in the Waverley canon—its pessimistic historical vision and fatalistic narrative logic.

Festival heterotopias: Spatial and temporal transformations in two small-scale settlements

This paper reports the findings of research undertaken at two festivals which take place in small-scale settlements: one in a village set in rural western Ireland, the other in a small coastal town set within a largely rural Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in southern England. It uses Foucault's concept of heterotopia as an analytical tool to further understandings of how the spatial and temporal interruptions caused by festivals temporarily transform the prevailing social order. The findings attest to the manner in which festivals juxtapose several incompatible spaces, creating a diverse array of social alterations in consequence, and highlight the accumulative effect produced through the transformation of multiple discrete spaces. They empirically illustrate the well-established argument that heterotopias disrupt traditional concepts of time and further support their temporal layering effect: that is, the sense of past festivals intertwining with and informing the social actors' experience of current festivals. While the findings illustrate how festivals can require certain acts or rituals to gain entry, importantly, they show how maintaining these rituals during the festival is critical to social actors' continued immersion in this temporary world. The study concludes by offering a modified set of principles of heterotopia specifically tailored to apply to festivals within the context of rural settlements.

Video Quality Metric for Streaming Service Using DASH Standard

Currently, dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard is used to change the video resolution according to the network capacity of the end user’s. However, if the video resolution changes frequently, the attention of the users can be affected decreasing their quality-of-experience (QoE). In this context, this paper proposes a no-reference video quality metric that takes three impairment factors into account, initial buffering delay, temporal interruptions or pauses, and video resolution changes during a video transmission. Also, the temporal locations of pauses and resolution changes are considered. In order to perform this task, extensive subjective tests were conducted. Experimental results show that the evaluators’ QoE is highly correlated with the frequency of pauses, video resolution changes and initial delay. Based on these results a video streaming quality metric for DASH services (VsQM $_{\text {DASH}}$ ) is formulated and implemented on PC and mobile hand-held devices. Finally, the performance of VsQM $_{\text {DASH}}$ is validated with additional subjective tests reaching a person correlation coefficient of 0.99. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrated that the proposed metric has low complexity because it is based on application level parameters and its energy consumption is negligible in relation to the energy consumed by the video player; therefore, can be easily implemented in consumer electronic devices.

‘Waiting for chronic’: Time, cannabis and counterculture in Hawai‘i

What does it mean not to wait? It is possible to live in ways which do not entail waiting? Through close examination of time and its articulations among a group of US 1960s-generation ‘hippies’ and younger ‘drop outs’ in a rural backwater of Hawai‘i, I argue in this paper that it is possible to live without waiting. Drawing on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Baba Ram Dass’ countercultural invocation to ‘remember, be here now’, I explore unexpected interruptions to anticipated temporal flows. Structured around three vignettes on failing to hitchhike, learning to do ethnographic fieldwork through stopping trying to do ethnographic fieldwork and an unexpected interruption in the supermarket, this paper builds up a picture of non-waiting in action. Located against a backdrop of waiting as temporal interruption and affective mode, I argue that this group sought to collectively disrupt the affective modes of indifference and/or frustration they grew up with in urban mainland America. Through new forms of affective engagement they became able to collectively reframe temporal interruption as existing within rather than without local temporal flows, interruptions ceased to be ruptures to temporal textures but part of their very fabric. Located within temporal flows, they did not force individuals out of a moral community of (time is money) efficient, productive citizens but reframed productivity itself in terms of producing sociality, positive affective experience and communitas. Out of a multitude of moments of not waiting, a temporal texture of American counterculture emerges.

Auditory perceptual restoration and illusory continuity correlates in the human brainstem

When noise obstructs portions of target sounds the auditory system fills in missing information, a phenomenon known as auditory restoration or induction. Previous work in animal models demonstrates that neurons in primary auditory cortex (A1) are capable of restoring occluded target signals suggesting that early auditory cortex is capable of inducing continuity in discontinuous signals (i.e., endogenous restoration). Current consensus is that the neural correlates of auditory induction and perceptual restoration emerge no earlier than A1. Moreover, the neural mechanisms supporting induction in humans are poorly understood. Here, we show that in human listeners, auditory brainstem nuclei support illusory auditory continuity well before engagement of cerebral cortex. We recorded brainstem responses to modulated target tones that did or did not promote illusory auditory percepts. Auditory continuity was manipulated by introducing masking noise or brief temporal interruptions in otherwise continuous tones. We found that auditory brainstem responses paralleled illusory continuity by tagging target sounds even when they were occluded by the auditory scene. Our results reveal (i) a pre-attentive, subcortical origin to a presumed cortical function and (ii) that brainstem signal processing helps partially cancel the negative effects of masking by restoring missing portions of auditory objects that are fragmented in the soundscape.

A model of axial heterostructure formation in III–V semiconductor nanowires

A kinetic model of the formation of axial heterostructures in nanocrystalline wires (nanowires, NWs) of III–V semiconductor compounds growing according to the vapor–liquid–solid (VLS) mechanism is proposed. A general system of nonstationary equations for effective fluxes of two elements of the same group (e.g., group III) is formulated that allows the composition profile of a heterostructure to be calculated as a function of the coordinate and epitaxial growth conditions, including the flux of a group V element. Characteristic times of the composition relaxation, which determine the sharpness of the heteroboundary (heterointerface), are determined in the linear approximation. A temporal interruption (arrest) of fluxes during the switching of elements for a period exceeding these relaxation times must increase sharpness of the heteroboundary. Model calculations of the composition profile in a double GaAs/InAs/GaAs axial heterostructure have been performed for various NW radii.

Contributions of the temporal envelope in adverse listening conditions

Amplitude modulations of the temporal envelope provide important cues for intelligibility, particularly in quiet listening environments. However, the speech understanding of listeners based on this temporal speech signal is often impaired when temporal interruptions or maskers interfere with the transmission of this important information. Performance in these adverse listening conditions is variable, based, in part, upon the properties of the interfering masker and the degree to which the modulation properties of the target speech signal are preserved. In some cases, listeners may be required to shift perceptual weighting to alternate, preserved modulation cues in order to maximize intelligibility of the speech signal. However, modulation properties of the speech signal are related to specific speech events. Therefore, different modulation properties are likely to contribute diverse information for speech understanding. The ability to access and process temporal modulation properties of the speech signal that unfold over different timescales is essential for maximizing speech intelligibility in everyday listening conditions. [Work supported by NIH/NIDCD and ASHA.]

Management of Adverse Events Associated with Dasatinib during Early Periods of Therapy in the Treatment of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia -a Clinical Report of Daria-01 Study

AbstractBackground: Dasatinib is a novel kinase inhibitor of BCR-ABL and SRC family kinases that has shown promising anti-leukemic activity against chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). However, some patients experience treatment-related toxicity shortly after initiating dasatinib administration and are managed by drug interruption and/or dose reduction (altered treatment) which can limit the potential benefits of treatment.Methods: To determine the factors that influence compliance and the efficacy of dasatinib therapy, we conducted a phase 2 study of mid-term compliance and the effectiveness of dasatinib therapy in patients with chronic phase CML (CML-CP) (DARIA-01 Study). Treatment was administered until disease progression or intolerable toxicity, as determined by the treating physician. Dasatinib at 100 mg once daily was initially administrated. Dose interruption or reduction to 50 mg once daily was allowed after grade 2 or worse nonhematologic toxicity or grade 3 or worse hematologic toxicity. Trough plasma concentrations of dasatinib (Cmin) at steady state were assessed at 28 days of therapy.Results: In April 2014, 32 CML-CP patients were enrolled in the study, which included at least 6 months of follow-up. The median age was 53 years (range, 20–86). Twenty-four (75.0%) were previously untreated patients with CML-CP, and the remaining eight (25.0%) were switched from other tyrosine kinase inhibitors (imatinib, five patients; nilotinib, three patients) because of intolerance or resistance to these drugs. During the initial 28 days, 28 patients continued with 100 mg/day treatment, and four received doses of 50 mg/day. The incidence of altered treatment was 25% during the initial 3 months and 34% during the initial 6 months from dasatinib administration. Four patients who experienced dose reduction during the initial 3 months continued with 50 mg/day treatment thereafter at their request. Except one who experienced gastro-intestinal bleeding, all patients could continue dasatinib therapy. Age (>60 years) and Cmin divided by the given dasatinib dose (Cmin/D) were significantly correlated with a higher incidence of altered treatment during the initial 3 months (p = 0.0095) (p = 0.0083). Twenty-five (78%) patients achieved complete cytogenetic response (CCyR), and 13 (40%) achieved major molecular response at 6 months. The incidence of pleural effusion during the initial 28 days was significantly correlated with Cmin/D (p = 0.032) but was not related to the molecular response rate at 6 months (40% vs. 41%, p = 0.98).Conclusion: Current data demonstrate that patients treated with dasatinib who displayed a high Cmin/D (>1.0) value at day 28 and/or who were aged 60 and over were at a high risk for altered treatment during the early periods of therapy. Patients who experienced pleural effusion could be well managed by dose reduction and/or temporal interruption of dasatinib and could still achieve the preferable molecular response rate. Individualizing therapy by incorporating a pharmacokinetic assay would improve compliance and the efficacy of dasatinib therapy, particularly for elderly patients. DisclosuresMorita:Bristol: Honoraria.

After the Rupture

How can a collapsing world be shown to be a chance for change? The catastrophe of the earthquakes that began on September 4th 2010 continues to shake Christchurch, New Zealand, to its very foundations. Much of the city was reduced to rubble – first by nature and then by governmental and corporate machinery. The ruptures caused by the earthquakes and what came after have created openings and a sense of urgency for creative experimentation and challenges to the status quo. Canterbury Tales (October 2013) was produced by Free Theatre for the Festival of Transitional Architecture and involved: artists and academics from Christchurch, Auckland and Sydney; Christchurch Symphony Orchestra; performers from Ngai Tahu and Pacific Underground; local businesses and the general public. As a carnivalesque celebration of community in the face of natural, and man-made, disaster, Canterbury Tales featured a procession of giant puppets and masked performers that led participants in a performative exploration of the destroyed city centre.Peter Falkenberg, artistic director of the overall production, and Thea Brejzek, who led the design project, ‘Eye of the Storm’, consider how performance in an earthquake zone can spatialize the transgressive potential of social, cultural and political ruptures. This paper reflects on the dialectical negotiation underlying the project: following Bakhtin, as a natural, cyclical, temporal interruption, while also facing a catastrophe that helps us create the ‘real state of emergency’ Benjamin demands for our time. In Benjamin's words: ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’. We may be at a time in Christchurch, as everywhere, when we must confront a catastrophe that, being of our own making, is even more virulent than an earthquake.

Thinking in Butler

Thinking in Butler