Temporal Referents Research Articles

Rethinking the Coloniality of Race: Blood Purity and the Politics of Periodization

The coloniality of power stands as a major framework for theorizing race within the context of Latin America, providing an influential account of the origin of race in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Without abandoning the task of theorizing the ways in which race functions in Latin America, this article asks: what is obscured by an insistence on 1492 as the moment when race emerged, and what different understandings of race can be made available by connecting the colonization of the Americas to a different set of temporal and spatial referents? Specifically, I develop a “prismatic” approach to analyze the impact of fifteenth-century Iberian blood purity statutes on the development of race without positing these as the new, singular origin of race. This article thus suggests an alternative genealogy of racialization while providing a critical engagement with the coloniality of power’s account of race.

Reading with the Grain: The Ecologies of The Lowland

Contemporary US literature is as twisted as the genome of a white whale. The vocabularies of postmodernism and its various iterations have done their work, while writers on the cutting edge of their discipline (and often oblivious to, or dismissive of, narrow pigeonholes) reshape its contours only later to be assimilated by the critical establishment. When Rachel Adams speaks of an emergent “American literary globalism,” she breaks open calcified norms to understand contemporary writing in the United States as being more fluid and inclusive than in the past (even if such a theoretical gesture is not without limiting constraints). Largely diasporic and including practitioners that might write from anywhere and about anything, such work is often elastic and reactive in ways that correspond to a more global sensibility. “Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-American modernism or the politics of the Cold War,” such work “reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents” (Adams 251).

Familiarwhen-relatives and peculiarwhen-relatives in English

Typical headed relatives in English include a relative pronoun which takes the head as its antecedent. However, some modifyingwhen-clauses in this language are peculiar relatives in that their heads are not the antecedent ofwhenand they do not even have temporal referents. In view of the peculiarity of this type of relative clause, a novel account of the syntactic generation and interpretation of temporalwhen-clauses is pro- posed. Under this account four lexical entries ofwhen, which have different semantic and syntactic properties, are recognized. The semantics of variouswhens are analyzed based on existing work, while the syntactic properties of differentwhens in non-interrogative sentences are characterized in the form of lexical information, which is implemented in the framework of Dynamic Syntax. The work in this article enriches the description of the diversity of relatives and suggests that the analysis of relatives can be unified semantically but not syntactically.

Instrumental responses and Pavlovian stimuli as temporal referents in a peak procedure.

Three experiments investigated whether the nature of the temporal referent affects timing behaviour in rats. We used a peak procedure and assessed timing of food well activity as a function of whether the referent was an instrumental response (a lever press that resulted in the withdrawal of the lever) or a conditioned stimulus (CS) that was 2 s in Experiment 1, 500 ms in Experiment 2, and 800 ms in Experiment 3. In all experiments, the interval between the offset of the temporal referent and food was 5 s. The curve fits for each experiment revealed no differences in peak time, but magazine responding immediately following the CS was higher than following a lever press. This pattern of results was interpreted as reflecting a combination of (a) ambiguity in which component of the 500 ms-2-s auditory stimulus was serving as the referent and (b) response competition between lever pressing and magazine activity. Critically, these results suggest that peak timing in rats is unaffected by whether a lever press or CS serves as the referent. This conclusion is consistent with theoretical models of timing behaviour, but not with evidence from humans showing that the subjective perception of time is affected by whether the cause of an outcome was self-generated or not.

Towards optimizing the measurement of self‐perceived cognitive functioning: Examination of harmonized subjective cognitive items

AbstractBackgroundFor the item analysis project of the Subjective Cognitive Decline Initiative (SCD‐I) Working Group, we have pooled item level data from North American, European, and Australian cognitive aging studies. As a step toward developing a questionnaire that can be used across settings and studies, we examined similarly worded groups of items and compared their psychometric quality.MethodItem‐level subjective cognitive data were combined from 21 studies (>18,000 participants). Unidimensional models consistent with item response theory captured a general subjective cognition factor using ADNI as the reference sample. Other studies were calibrated by using parameter constraints on common items. We characterized the measurement properties of 648 items from 35 measures utilized in the contributing studies. Next, we identified 20 groups of items (median items per group=6) with overlapping content from our previous study (Rabin et al., 2015), and plotted their item information curves, reflecting the items’ ability to discriminate between trait scores at different levels of the subjective cognition factor score. We then considered items with the highest peak information across groupings and identified commonalities in key features such as terminology of item stems, temporal referents, and response options.ResultWe present instrument characteristics (Table 1) and item information curves for 6 groupings (Figure 1). For items with the greatest information, we observed trends for the following features: clarity and directness of language of stem, utilization of current as opposed to other time referents, assessment of ability/level of difficulty rather than change over time or frequency of problem (Table 2).ConclusionWe identified key linguistic/structural features of subjective cognitive functioning items with the greatest contributions to measurement precision. We next plan to analyze all item groupings in our test bank to facilitate construction of a measure with high quality items from cognitive domains of interest (e.g., memory, language, executive functioning). Ultimately, we hope to derive a subjective cognitive screening tool that enables reliable identification of subtle cognitive changes in clinically normal individuals.

From Categories to Connections in the Archaeology of Eastern North America

A renewed adoption of relational perspectives by archaeologists working in eastern North America has created an opportunity to move beyond categorical approaches, those reliant on the top-down implementation of essentialist models or “types.” Instead, emerging approaches, concerned with highlighting the agential power of relationships between individuals, communities, and institutions, and, more generally, with simply moving beyond categories, are allowing archaeologists to move from the bottom-up, focusing instead on the relationships that underlie, and indeed constitute, social, political, and economic phenomena. In this paper, I synthesize recent archaeological work from across eastern North America in which archaeologists have productively moved beyond a reliance on categorical perspectives. I explicitly focus on the potential for relational perspectives to recalibrate our social and temporal referents in crafting archaeological narratives.

Visions of the Life Course: Risks, Resources, and Vulnerability

Life course studies have ushered in unprecedented scientific interest not only in specific periods of human lives but also in the long-term processes associated with growing older. Theories and conceptual frameworks have emerged to help scholars splice pieces of the life course together, but the need for conceptual clarity remains. Concepts such as vulnerability and disadvantage are important but used in many different ways by researchers. We pose questions to enhance clarity of these and related terms and call for greater attention to temporal referents in studying the life course.

The Archaeology of the Colonial—Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth

The Archaeology of the Colonial—Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth Michael Wutz (bio) We need to stop assuming a one-to-one correspondence between the geographic origins of a text and its evolving radius of literary action. We need to stop thinking of national literatures as the linguistic equivalents of territorial maps. Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet”1 Since the publication of her Pulitzer prize-winning debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri has come to be seen as a preeminent interpreter of the postcolonial condition of the Indian diaspora. By chronicling the lives of, mostly, privileged Bengalis transitioning into the West, she has mapped the anxieties of a population caught in the dual allegiance of transcontinental citizenship. At the same time, critics have ascribed the appeal of her work, in the United States and abroad, to her skillful portrayal of dislocation and generational crises, which has been judged to carry the universalizing qualities of serious, ambitious fiction. As the editors of Naming Jhumpa Lahiri observe, Lahiri’s work “sheds light on both universal dimensions of human experience and more specific Bengali, postcolonial, Indian diasporic, South Asian American, and Asian American politics.”2 Exceeding this concentric reach, Lahiri has also been grouped with a cadre of contemporary writers that has slid out of—or rather, beyond—the loose mesh of the postmodern vocabulary. Rachel Adams has recently identified Lahiri as an avatar of a newly emergent “American literary globalism,” which she understands as a generalized [End Page 243] feeling of social simultaneity across national borders, boundaries, and oceans, and which succeeds the more narrowly-Western aesthetic imperatives of the postmodern: “Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-American modernism or the politics of the Cold War, their fiction reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents.”3 This configuration of referents—from genealogy and geography to time, especially the vast temporalities of geologic time—is indeed fully evident in Lahiri’s work and provides the framework for a sustained eco-critical reading of Lahiri’s collection of stories and novellas, Unaccustomed Earth (2008). While Adams is primarily interested in mapping a global sensibility in American fiction that is operative in the present, I want to extend those terms, both historically and geologically, into the past and future by combining them with the thematic foci Lahiri’s work has, so far almost exclusively, been identified with: postcoloniality and immigration. Those twin themes provide the narrative spark for the stories in Maladies, but don’t extend into historical or temporal reflection. The intergenerational vector of The Namesake (2003), Lahiri’s first novel, is driven by time and change, but historical or geological ruptures are largely absent from its texture. The Lowland (2013), Lahiri’s most recent novel, is rich with a colonial and ecological sensibility that suggests centuries of human intervention and biological niche-building, but doesn’t explore them against planetary and geological time. Only with Unaccustomed Earth does Lahiri locate the story of migration and resettlement within the immensities of a transhistorical scale;4 and only Unaccustomed Earth—as its earth-bound title already suggests—carries the imprint of a deeply felt environmental and ecological sensibility in its texture. The presence of natural history within a typically more narrow human history; an awareness of the agency of natural or nonhuman forces; a sense of human accountability for its impact on the earth; and an understanding of the dynamic processes of the natural world—Lawrence Buell’s criteria for the identification of literary texts as being properly imbued with environmental and ecological concerns are all fully realized in Lahiri’s collection.5 It is against this geological, geographical, and ecological background that I want to offer a reading of Unaccustomed Earth that revolves around the figurative axis of its title: the earth. I submit that Lahiri articulates a multi-leveled theory of postcoloniality through the trope of the earth itself, the terrific and terrifying terrain having offered humans habitation for millenia. As a layering of tensional plate tectonics, the imbricated strata of the earth’s crust become a figure for...

Leisure mobility styles in Swiss conurbations: construction and empirical analysis

Leisure travel is the most difficult travel purpose to analyse due to the lack of fixed spatial and temporal referents and the consequent flexibility in patterns. This paper addresses lifestyles, social influence, and the travellers’ social networks, issues that have proved valuable for travel behaviour research in confronting the complexity of leisure travel. An approach for constructing leisure mobility styles, based on orientations towards leisure and mobility, will be presented first and then the hypotheses that transport behaviour can be better explained through analysis of leisure mobility styles will be tested. Multivariate analysis reveals that the leisure mobility style group makes a significant contribution towards clarifying variance for the activities ‘Visiting friends and relatives’, ‘Travel participation’, ‘Mode choice’, and ‘Travel distance for leisure’. The use of leisure mobility styles is most useful for developing practical intervention pointers where the in-group homogeneity of lifestyle should be addressed in greater detail.

Flexibility of temporal expectations for triple subdivision of a beat

When tapping in synchrony with an isochronous sequence of beats, participants respond automatically to an unexpectedly early or late beat by shifting their next tap; this is termed the phase correction response (PCR). A PCR has also been observed in response to unexpected perturbations of metrical subdivisions of a beat, which suggests that participants have temporal expectancies for subdivisions to occur at particular time points. It has been demonstrated that a latent temporal expectancy at 1/2 of the inter-beat interval (IBI) exists even in the absence of explicit duple subdivision in previous IBIs of a sequence. The present study asked whether latent expectancies at 1/3 and 2/3 of the IBI can be induced by a global experimental context of triple subdivision, and whether a local context of consistently phase-shifted triple subdivisions can induce different expectancies. Using the PCR as the dependent variable, we find weak evidence for latent expectancies but strong evidence for context-induced shifts in expectancies. These results suggest that temporal referents between beats, which typically are linked to simple ratios of time spans, are flexible and context-dependent. In addition, we show that the PCR, a response to expectancy violation, is independent of and sometimes contrary to the simultaneous phase adaptation required by a change in subdivision timing.

Sociedade, cultura, matemática e seu ensino

Uma dos efeitos da sociedade globalizada é uma forte tendência para eliminar diferenças, promovendo uma cultura planetária. Particularmente afetados são os sistemas educacionais, que passam por forte pressão dos estudos e avaliações internacionais, inevitavelmente comparativas e, lamentavelmente, competitivas. Como resultado, nota-se a paulatina eliminação de componentes culturais na definição dos sistemas educacionais. Fica evidente a formação de novos imaginários sociais, desprovidos de referentes históricos, geográficos e temporais, caracterizados por uma forte presença da cultura da imagem. Os critérios classificatórios estabelecem um referencial inidôneo, que tem como conseqüência definir práticas e mesmo sistemas educacionais. Por outro lado, ativam-se mecanismos, muitas vezes inconscientes, de resistência, que buscam preservar e recuperar os traços identificadores de uma cultura, tais como as tradições, a culinária, os idiomas, manifestações artísticas em geral, e, desse modo, contribuir para a diversidade cultural, fator essencial para estimular a criatividade. Neste artigo examinam-se as bases socioculturais da matemática e de seu ensino e também as conseqüências da globalização e seus reflexos na educação multicultural. Discutem-se o conceito de cultura e as questões ligadas à dinâmica cultural, propondo-se uma teoria de conhecimento transdisciplinar e transcultural. Sobre essa base, o Programa Etnomatemática é apresentado. É também feita uma crítica ao currículo atualmente praticado, que é, em sua concepção e detalhamento, obsoleto, desinteressante e pouco útil. Um outro conceito de currículo, baseado nos instrumentos comunicativos (literacia), analíticos (materacia) e materiais (tecnoracia), é proposto.

Noms de temps et opérations de partition : le problème de Il est arrivé au mois de juin de la même année vs *Il est arrivé au mois de juin de l’année

This paper deals with the linguistic explicitation of the relations of partition existing among the temporal referents. The referents of the names année/mois/ jour... are indeed connected by relations of order and inclusion (semaine can be described as a part of mois, just like volant is a part of voiture). Therefore, those names should satisfy the test-frame N de N. However, if it is possible to find the structure le volant de la voiture, it is odd to say les semaines du mois or en juin de l'année. The aim of this article is to put in evidence the lexical features of the temporal nouns and some constraints governing the linguistic translation of the whole-and-part relationship between the temporal referents.

Curiously Familiar: Art and Curio Stores in Los Angeles' Chinatown

INTRODUCTION The letters that spell out ICG. Louie are veined with neon, and at night they illuminate front of one of remaining art and curio stores in central plaza of Los Angeles' Chinatown. Inside, rows of tea sets, fans, chopsticks, and miniature lanterns clutter long tables. On upper shelves along walls, webs of twine anchor together old vases and statuettes against unpredictable jolts of earthquakes. Across street in plaza of Chinatown West, proprietor of another store, Fong's Works of Art, has recently reduced his overhead by consolidating contents of his two storerooms into one. An orange lantern with gold characters hangs from corner of exterior sign, which is painted in sloping Roman letters that mimic calligraphic strokes of Chinese writing. Like a number of other art and curio stores in two plazas, K.G. Louie Co. and Fong's are run by American-born children of original Chinese business community. Stores such as these have operated in Los Angeles since at least end of nineteenth century. Responding to particular social and economic exigencies, early storeowners catered to popular curiosities about the Orient, refracting Western stereotypical representations of Chinese culture into commercial identities. In this article, I review development of art and curio stores from early 1900s and highlight their legacy in contemporary practices of two stores introduced above. I explore how arrangement and display of objects in these stores constitute symbolic ecologies, which mediate social interactions of proprietors. Just as subjective principles of inclusion and organization inform presentation of culture in museums and ethnographies, so too have storeowners selectively curated a version of Chinese and Chinese American culture. I suggest that over time central organizing principle of these stores has shifted. This shift roughly corresponds with transition of proprietorship from immigrant parents to their American-born children, and it involves a refraining of temporal and geographic referents of material environments of stores. DEVELOPMENT OF CHINATOWN The representation of Chinese culture in Los Angeles' early Chinatown grew out of a long history of Orient as a subject of Western collecting fads and ethnographic attention. In 1500s, European cabinets of curiosity, those precursors to natural history museums, often contained objects such as porcelain, wooden implements, and clothing from East Asia. In 1600s and 1700s, upper class Europeans developed connoiseurship of domestically produced cabinets and porcelains suggestive of an exotic Orient. In late 1800s, European and American art and design movements looked for inspiration from Asian decorative arts (e.g. Art Nouveau, Aesthetic Movement; typeface designers), and new trade agreements between American, European and Asian countries gave rise to popular collection of Oriental objects such as fans and cheap pottery. During this same period, display of Chinese people in museums, circuses, and world's fairs established a framework within which general public became familiar with viewing Chinese; a framework that highlighted their exoticness or oddity. Thus, even before Los Angeles had developed a distinguishable area known as Chinatown, Chinese or Oriental culture had been domesticated for American consumption and wonderment into a repertoire of easily recognizable forms, objects, and styles. The Chinese first showed up in Los Angeles census in 1850. By 1870s, there was a recognizable area of Chinese residential concentration specifically identified as Chinatown. At turn of century, Americans tended to regard Chinatowns in general with both condemnation and curiosity. Chinatowns were maligned as dirty, crime-infested, corrupt, and sinister ghettos. …

Global risk, local values?: ‘Risk society’ and the greenhouse issue in Newcastle, Australia

Global environmental issues have permeated many disciplines over the last decade. Within the social sciences they have sparked a debate about the extent to which any ‘ecological crisis’ can be seen as symptomatic of deeper changes within modernity. The strength of such an explanation is examined in this paper with reference to the ‘risk society’ thesis advanced by Ulrich Beck and its applicability to the case of the greenhouse issue in Australia. Australia has received much international criticism for its ‘differentiated’ approach to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process. This paper examines how this approach has gained widespread currency within ‘official’ policy spheres through defining greenhouse risks in terms of the spatial and temporal referents of modernity: the individual; the nation‐state; political and investment timetables. The possibility of alternative public understandings of greenhouse risks and responsibilities is examined through recent work undertaken in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. It is argued that these may represent very different interpretations of the greenhouse issue from those encountered within the ‘official’ policy sphere. However, without a greater recognition on the part of policy elites of the need to address an issue like greenhouse at a local scale and through public involvement, and institutions through which to do so, these interpretations will have little impact on the ‘global’ process of negotiating greenhouse outcomes.

Children's Analog and Digital Clock Knowledge

FRIEDMAN, WILLIAM J., and LAYCOCK, FRANK. Children's Analog and Digital Clock Knowledge. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1989, 60, 357-371. Understanding the clock system requires knowledge of several distinct components, including reading displays, transforming times, and understanding their temporal referents. 2 experiments were conducted to determine the ages at which children can read and transform times given in analog and digital displays, can link times to activities, and can judge the order of hours in the day. Altogether, 240 children from first to fifth grades were tested. Digital time reading was well developed by the first grade. Analog time reading was equivalent only for whole-hour problems, with some other times proving difficult even for the oldest children. However, there was no overall digital advantage for tasks requiring the addition of 30 min, and the relative difficulty of analog and digital displays varied by problem type. Reported methods indicated that children used a number of different processes in solving the problems. In spite of the gradual development of reading and transformation skills, even the youngest children knew the times of many activities and understood the order in which daily activities occur. However, clock times were not incorporated in the earliest representations of the order of daily events.