Time Travel Research Articles

Racial Biases in AIs and Gemini's Inability to Write Narratives About Black People

This article addresses the racism that emerges in artificial intelligence based on an experiment carried out in Gemini, Google's text-generative tool that uses natural language. In an attempt to observe possible racial biases in the chatbot's responses, commands reproduced for the binary matrices man/woman and white/black were submitted in order to compare the responses, but Gemini, despite having text production as its primary function, was unable to generate narratives that involved black people. This empirical experimentation was analyzed according to a bibliographical review of authors who deal with racial themes, mainly considering the view of Denise Ferreira da Silva in relation to the idea of a transparent subjectivity, the temporal displacement of the black body discussed by Bhabha and the overlap between technology and race brought by Noble and Faustino and Lippold. This erasure of minoritized racial groups is not restricted to the tool or the algorithmic means, but is a symptom of other exclusionary practices observed in society.

Laparoscopic distal gastrectomy skill evaluation from video: a new artificial intelligence-based instrument identification system

The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based object detection technology has made identification of position coordinates of surgical instruments from videos possible. This study aimed to find kinematic differences by surgical skill level. An AI algorithm was developed to identify X and Y coordinates of surgical instrument tips accurately from video. Kinematic analysis including fluctuation analysis was performed on 18 laparoscopic distal gastrectomy videos from three expert and three novice surgeons (3 videos/surgeon, 11.6 h, 1,254,010 frames). Analysis showed the expert surgeon cohort moved more efficiently and regularly, with significantly less operation time and total travel distance. Instrument tip movement did not differ in velocity, acceleration, or jerk between skill levels. The evaluation index of fluctuation β was significantly higher in experts. ROC curve cutoff value at 1.4 determined sensitivity and specificity of 77.8% for experts and novices. Despite the small sample, this study suggests AI-based object detection with fluctuation analysis is promising because skill evaluation can be calculated in real time with potential for peri-operational evaluation.

Influence of a Pair of Unequal Rotational Fluxes on Entrained Gaseous Filament

Abstract Efforts are made to elucidate a comprehensive analysis of entrainment dynamics triggered by a couple of unequal rotational fluxes within a viscous pool. Cylindrical rollers are employed to establish the rotational field. The top drum is equally submerged in both phases and also it provides a constant rotational inertia. Concomitantly, the bottom roller is completely submerged in the viscous bath, and it provides an unequal rotational strength in reference to top roller. The average rotational strength of both rollers is measured using average Capillary number (Caavg). The entrainment phenomenon is strongly influenced by both Caavg and gap between the rollers (W/D). Characterization of entrained filament is elucidated by predicting the horizontal distance (L*), radial distance (r*), temporal vertical displacement (Y*), maximum vertical displacement (Ymax*), width (H*), and location of V-shaped diversion (Øs*). Characterization of liquid tip is performed by measuring the travel rate (γ*) along periphery of drum from receding to advancing junction. Air mass ejection from filament tip is analyzed by estimating the first bubble ejection time (t1st*), volume of accumulated of ejected gaseous masses (v*), and ejection frequency (f). Furthermore, the effect of gravitational pull (specified by Archimedes number, Ar) and viscous drag (measured by Morton number, Mo) on the pattern of entrained air filament is described. Lastly, an analytical framework is established to determine the width of the V-junction by balancing the important influencing forces, which are strongly affecting the filament. Analytical observations show a satisfactory agreement with numerical findings.

Modeling rehabilitation dataset to implement effective AI assistive systems

The demand for automated systems monitoring and supporting patients in their home-based recovery programs is substantial. While emerging technologies have been proposed as potential solutions to enhance at-home patient care, limited systems are in place due to their challenges in offering real-time monitoring and corrective feedback. Most proposed methodologies provide an overall measure or score for the executed movement. The proposed work involves the adaptation of an existing published dataset to cater to the needs of a system capable of remotely assisting patients, effectively acting as a virtual physical therapist able to provide corrective feedback. A dataset containing a set of three simple exercises for shoulder rehabilitation was processed. Each movement was meticulously annotated for temporal and categorical motion domains to monitor exercise execution in terms of the range of motion completeness and to evaluate compensatory movement patterns. This work carries substantial significance by offering a standardized and easily accessible model for human movement data, thus fostering the advancement of digital assistive systems designed to support home-based rehabilitation programs.

Further reflections on theory as time travel: a response to Morgan

ABSTRACT In his review essay on World Statehood, Morgan poses three questions, namely: does my conceptualization imply conflation of agency and structure; is the realist processual account of time contradictory; and have we humans already reached the limit of the possible? I address each question briefly one at a time, arguing that the concept of self-transformative capacity of contexts does not imply conflation; that various processes with different durations can exhibit patterns that can be reasonably discussed and assessed and, with caution, also used in anticipations; and that there is no cosmic law or limit that inevitably hinders humanity's further progress.

Theory as time travel: Patomäki, World Statehood and possible futures

ABSTRACT In this review essay, I set explore Heikki Patomäki's seventh sole-authored book in English, World Statehood. I set out the thematic structure and chapter order and then address whether the concept of ‘self-transformative capacity of contexts’ implies a central conflation and what is assumed if one argues that there is a tendential form of civilizational progress. I conclude with discussion of a causal process theory of time.

The Rhetorical Possibilities of Communicative Time Travel

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, provides a unique opportunity to reexamine how affect, memory, authenticity, embodiment, and authorship are conceptualized and discussed in rhetorical scholarship. This is particularly significant as affective experiences resulting from communication with AI are increasingly normative due to the public-facing nature of many large language model chatbots. Drawing first on a recent case wherein an AI user produced a chatbot facsimile of her childhood self, this article suggests that affective changes facilitated by AI represent not only new avenues for exploring affect, but also how time itself is experienced.

Position-Aware Indoor Human Activity Recognition Using Multisensors Embedded in Smartphones.

Composite indoor human activity recognition is very important in elderly health monitoring and is more difficult than identifying individual human movements. This article proposes a sensor-based human indoor activity recognition method that integrates indoor positioning. Convolutional neural networks are used to extract spatial information contained in geomagnetic sensors and ambient light sensors, while transform encoders are used to extract temporal motion features collected by gyroscopes and accelerometers. We established an indoor activity recognition model with a multimodal feature fusion structure. In order to explore the possibility of using only smartphones to complete the above tasks, we collected and established a multisensor indoor activity dataset. Extensive experiments verified the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with algorithms that do not consider the location information, our method has a 13.65% improvement in recognition accuracy.

The Face of the Future: An Affective Mental Time Traveler in Saul Bellow’s “A Father-to-Be”

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a future-oriented Janus face portrayed in Saul Bellow’s short story “A Father-to-Be,” arguing that it builds an exceptional prospective fictional mind in Bellow’s writing with a great emphasis on emotion. Drawing on the “Janus hypothesis,” the article examines how the protagonist’s emotional and imaginative mind interprets the past and processes the present based on a gloomy anticipation of the future, while some previous literary studies on the memory-imagination cognition emphasize the imaginativeness of memory. Affective narratology is largely involved as the supportive explanatory framework in the analysis of the narrative style. The authors approach the structure of the entire story by regarding it as an emotion story and attempt to reveal the aesthetic value of its core narrative by taking emotion both as the force of character forming and as rhetoric.

대학생들의 노인자서전 쓰기 프로그램 참여 경험에 관한 질적 사례연구

Objectives This study sought to find out what experiences five college students had through an autobiography writing program for the elderly called 『Seniors Making Books』, which was planned and implemented directly for six elderly people, and what the meaning of that experience was. Methods This study plans and conducts a 7-session elderly autobiography writing program at a senior welfare center in City B from September 2 to December 20, 2023, and examines the meaning of the process and experi-ence of creating an autobiography as the final result and participating in the program through an exhibition. This is a qualitative case study in which data was collected and analyzed through in-depth interviews about the mean-ing of the experience. Results As a result of the study, the autobiography writing program conducted by college students for the elderly was, first, experienced a ‘change in prejudice and perception of the elderly’ that had been held against the elderly, and second, ‘a new challenge’ while planning and implementing the program with friends in the same major. The result was ‘improved confidence through’ and thirdly, although it was a short period of time, it gave the meaning of ‘the importance of relationships through meeting’. Conclusions In conclusion, the autobiography writing program for the elderly allowed the university students and the elderly participants to realize the meaning of time travel where they were happy together, not alone, through time travel to the past, present, and future.

Learning to Listen

Sometime in 2017, I moved from Melbourne, Australia to Dublin, Ireland. I’d studied and exhibited art in Australia, and in becoming an immigrant, I risked leaving my life and community behind to start somewhere else as a stranger. My work in Australia had centred around the connections between science, space and storytelling. It had also been, as all art is, a portrait of myself, albeit a heavily buried and obscured one. The move disrupted that work, and in my Dublin studio, I began making friends and exploring ways to make art that felt new and relevant. The dislocation that goes hand in hand with moving to the other side of the world crept into my practice. Listening to music felt like a way to time travel. I had an inkling that I wanted to write about music, but I stopped myself because it seemed so far away from the artwork that I’d previously made. Another reason that I didn’t, though, is purely that it didn’t fit at the time. Now it does, and the idea I had in 2019 is back:

Born again

Born’s original 1933 theory of nonlinear electrodynamics (in contrast to the later Born-Infeld theory) is acausal for strong fields. We explore the issue of strong-field causality violation in families of theories containing Born and/or Born-Infeld, and many variants that have been previously proposed in contexts that include cosmology and black hole physics. Many of these variants are acausal and hence unphysical. A notable exception is the modified Born-Infeld theory with ModMax as its conformal weak-field limit.

Revisiting the Recommended Duration of Interviews Conducted by Mobile Phone in Low- and Middle-income Countries: A Randomized Trial in Malawi

Guidelines for conducting surveys by mobile phone calls in low- and middle-income countries suggest keeping interviews short (<20 minutes). The evidence supporting this recommendation is scant, even though limiting interview duration might reduce the amount of data generated by such surveys. We recruited nearly 2,500 mobile phone users in Malawi and randomly allocated them to 10-, 20-, or 30-minute phone interviews, all ending with questions on parental survival. Cooperation was high in all groups, and differences in completion rates were minimal. The extent of item nonresponse, age heaping, and temporal displacement of deaths in data on parental survival generally did not vary between study groups, but reports of maternal age at death were more reliable in longer interviews. Recommendations about the duration of mobile phone interviews might be too restrictive. They should not preclude additional modules, including ones on mortality, in mobile phone surveys conducted in LMICs.

Reflections on the Experience and the Effect of Nostalgia Seen through Andrei Tarkovsky's Film Nostalghia (1983)

The aim of this research is the cultural, temporal, and spatial displacement of an individual from their native country as a trigger for nostalgia. Consequently, the material for this analysis is drawn from the artistic film Nostalghia (1983), the first work of Soviet/Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, shot outside the USSR. As this is a work with autobiographical elements, I approach it as a form of emotional expression. Focusing on the experience of nostalgia, Tarkovsky posits the thesis that it is a burdensome, melancholic, and, in its ultimate reaches, deadly experience. In an attempt to find answers to the question why nostalgia is imagined, experienced, or lived in a particular way, I am guided by the basic assumption that it is not only the ambivalent nature of nostalgia itself, but also its effect of being stuck, which makes it an unbearable burden. Being stuck is not devoid of movement, but it lacks action in terms of efficacy and effectiveness. In interpreting the material concerning the experience of nostalgia, its temporal dimension, and its effectiveness, I will rely on the theoretical-methodological concept framework of the anthropology of emotions and migration, as well as Davis's sociology of nostalgia. This analysis indicates that the burden of this emotion, even its potential deadly outcome, lies in the nostalgic experience as a state of being stuck.

Desirable Futures: Write Me a Letter

<p>In this special issue, we propose the letter as a form with geographic potential. Building on prior work on letters in geography, Black feminism, and Indigenous studies, we draw on a collection of sixteen letters in the section to build a case for letters as time travel, anticolonial epistemology, feminist geographic method, and worldmaking praxis. We bring together letter writers who speak to their ancestors known and unknown, to future generations, to ideas, to activists, to places, and to strangers—and weave them into a messy and generative conversation on the kinds of spaces that letters make between and among us. Our intention is to build on recent work in geography to experiment with what the letter makes possible for us as geographers.</p><p> </p>

Space and time joint optimization for vertical takeoff and landing aircraft in dense obstacles and interference environments

ABSTRACT The Vertical Takeoff and Landing Aircraft (VTOL) is capable of both low-speed hovering and high-speed flight. This paper proposes an autonomous motion planning and anti-wind disturbance control algorithm for the VTOL, implemented spatial and temporal joint motion planning for VTOL, under the limitation of maximum flight speed of the aircraft, VTOL can achieve fully autonomous flight in complex environments, which can realize the autonomous flight of a single aircraft in a complex and dense environment, achieve real-time perception and avoidance of static and dynamic obstacles. The information generated by motion planning includes the position, velocity, and acceleration information of the aircraft, and proposes a wind disturbance estimation and active control strategy in a wind disturbance environment, accurate estimation of wind disturbance is achieved through a state observer, and the wind disturbance was suppressed through nonlinear error feedback control law, implemented wind disturbance estimation and suppression for aircraft in wind disturbance environments, and achieved complete autonomous motion planning and trajectory tracking of VTOL in a complex and wind disturbance environment. Our work can provide a basis for the collaborative control of multiple UAVs.

Effect of computerized cognitive remediation therapy on mental time travel in patients with schizophrenia- a pilot randomized controlled trial.

To investigate the intervention effect of computerized cognitive remediation therapy (CCRT) on mental time travel (MTT) in patients with schizophrenia(SCZ). From August 2020 to July 2021, 60 patients with SCZ were randomly allocated to either the study or the control group. The control group was treated with conventional drugs alone. The study group received CCRT and medical therapy for 40 minutes three times a week for 4 weeks. The participants underwent the MTT test before and after the training. A total of 28 patients in the study group and 26 patients in the control group were included in the analysis. Before training, there was no significant difference in the concretization ratio of recalling past and imagining future events between the study group and the control group (P > 0.05). After 4 weeks of training, the specific event ratio of the study group was higher than that of the control group (P < 0.01). In terms of the emotional titer of the events, the concreteness of the positive events in the study group was higher than that of the neutral events and negative events (P < 0.01). The concreteness of negative events was higher than that of neutral events (P < 0.01). CCRT can improve the MTT ability of SCZ patients, which is manifested by an increase in the concretiveness of recalling past and imagining future events.

Ekphrasis of the default mode: Simulating past, future and fictional worlds

Perspectives on ekphrasis theory are advancing cognitive approaches. Despite this, the science of the brain’s default mode network rarely emerges in cognitive literary studies or ekphrasis discussion. When left unfocused, the brain in its default mode tends to ruminate on the past, speculate about the future, daydream about unlikely events and analyse the meaning of what others might say or think. The memory-imagination system, also referred to as “mental time travel”, helps us construct simulations of past, future and/or fictional events. This essay proposes an understanding of ekphrasis which engages activities of mental time travel and simulation to help render experience in the minds of readers/writers. This paper does not venture into the neuroscience debate, but rather, it explores the brain’s default mode in the contexts of ekphrasis criticism and cognitive literary studies. I refer to Jessica Au’s novella Cold Enough for Snow (2022) to illustrate examples of ekphrasis writing which – through the depiction of art, objects and images (imagined or real) – engages the systems of mental time travel and simulation to interpret complexities of the world and help render perceptual experiences in the narrative imagining.

A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Lingnan Cultural Promotional Videos on Social Media

In recent years, more and more directors of culture and tourism have taken part in the promotion of local cultural tourism resources by cross-dressing, talent shows, and pushing their limits on self-media platforms. This study investigates short videos of Lingnan culture promoted by directors general and deputy directors general of the Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism, and Sports Bureau of counties and cities in Guangdong Province on social media by the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis. The analysis of 33 videos shows that Lingnan culture is a domineering and confident culture, historical culture, graceful and elegant culture, and vibrant and active culture. Domineering and confident culture is embedded in the utterances and behaviors of the directors general or deputy directors general in the video. Historical culture is realized through the conversation with historical figures through time travel. Graceful and elegant culture is constructed in the depiction of sceneries and the depiction of characters’ manners. Vibrant and active culture is represented in the depiction of the characters’ actional process and analytical process.

Back to the Present: How Direction of Mental Time Travel Affects Similarity and Saving

Abstract Many consumers say they want to save for the future yet struggle to do so. This research examines this saving behavior problem from a persuasive messaging standpoint. With the goal of helping people take better care of their future selves, we build on a stream of research that has found that the way people view their identities over time affects the saving decisions they make. Although past research on similarity judgments across time almost exclusively starts with the present self and moves forward to the future self, such judgments could theoretically start at any point in time. Here, we explore the possibility of backward mental time travel, by asking people to start in the future and return to the present. A series of studies shows that mentally traveling from the future to the present—rather than the present to the future—increases perceived similarity between selves across time by reducing the uncertainty of the destination self. Lab studies and two large-scale experiments indicate that, as an important outcome of this novel intervention, mentally traveling from the future to the present has a small but positive impact, systematically increasing savings intentions and savings behavior.