Liminal technologies: Exploring the temporalities and struggles in efforts to develop a Belgrade metro

The sociology of technology needs more nuanced conceptualizations of the temporal aspects of sociotechnical change. In this article, we propose liminality as a useful analytical entry-point to study technologies that seemingly remain in a ‘no man’s land’ – what we call liminal technologies. Drawing on anthropological accounts and technology studies literature, we propose a framework to be used as a sensitizing device that includes four ways of understanding liminal technologies: (1) technologies in shielded transition, (2) technologies under construction through negotiation, (3) technologies that are morphing between worlds, and (4) technologies remaining in an in-between space. We use the Belgrade metro effort – an infrastructure project that has been in development for almost a century – as an extreme case through which to explore the achievements of this framework. The analysis shows that the liminality of the metro was characterized by a combination of spiral, multi-linear and halted temporality. Despite severely dis-aligned expectations, liminality persisted due to a shared belief that a metro would benefit Belgrade. We conclude that using liminal technology as a sensitizing device may in particular be relevant to technologies with prolonged liminality because it highlights temporal patterns that may prevent technological development from being either completed or terminated.

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Præventive potentialer – Populærkulturens overvejelser om overvågning

Slagmark - Tidsskrift for idéhistorie ◽

10.7146/sl.v0i58.104714 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 99-112

Author(s):

Lone Koefoed Hansen ◽

Christopher Gad

Keyword(s):

Popular Culture ◽

Technological Development ◽

Entry Point ◽

Surveillance Systems ◽

Research Project ◽

Intelligent Surveillance ◽

Technological Research ◽

The Future ◽

Minority Report ◽

Basic Level

This article uses the movie Minority Report (2002) as an entry point for discussing conceptions of surveillance technologies and their preventive capacities. The technological research project Intelligent Surveillance Systems located in Belfast shares a vision with MR: that it is possible to construct surveillance systems that are able to foresee criminal acts and thus to prevent them from happening. We argue that the movie exemplifies that technological development and popular culture share dreams, ideas and visions and that on a very basic level, popular culture informs technological development and vice versa. The article explores this relation and argues that popular culture provides analytic insight on important discussions about surveillance and the (future) capacities of technology.

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Screening for dementia: Fluidity and the Mini Mental State Examination in India

Transcultural Psychiatry ◽

10.1177/1363461511413005 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 48 (5) ◽

pp. 604-623 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Bianca Brijnath

Keyword(s):

Mental State ◽

Science And Technology Studies ◽

Mini Mental State Examination ◽

Science And Technology ◽

Screening Instrument ◽

Entry Point ◽

Technology Studies ◽

Institutional Resources ◽

Ethnographic Data ◽

State Examination

The Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) is a popular screening instrument for dementia. Drawing on ethnographic data from India, three vignettes are presented to examine how the MMSE is operationalised by interviewers and respondents. Using the concept of ‘fluidity’ from Science and Technology Studies, it will be demonstrated that the MMSE is fluid and changes according to individual norms, institutional resources, and cultural settings. In some environments, the scores are discounted in order to count; in others, the scale is perceived as an invitation to talk; and finally, the MMSE can also operate as an entry-point to seek treatment for other psychological concerns.

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Temporal Perspectives in Event Processing

Principles and Applications of Distributed Event-Based Systems - Advances in Systems Analysis, Software Engineering, and High Performance Computing ◽

10.4018/978-1-60566-697-6.ch004 ◽

2010 ◽

pp. 75-89 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Opher Etzion

Keyword(s):

Temporal Patterns ◽

Strong Relationship ◽

Temporal Context ◽

Event Processing ◽

Processing Maps ◽

Temporal Aspects ◽

Temporal Dimensions ◽

Event Order ◽

Processing Network

One of the major characteristics of event processing is its strong relationship to the notion of time, yet some of the temporal aspects of event processing still issue challenges to the implementations of event processing tools. This paper provides an overview of the notion of “event processing network” as the underlying model behind event processing; maps the temporal aspects, and discuss each of them. The temporal aspects that are discussed are: temporal dimensions of events, time granularities, temporal context, temporal patterns, event order, and retrospective and proactive operations.

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Characteristics of time-transgressive Holocene Optimum in the East Asian monsoon region

Earth Sciences Research Journal ◽

10.15446/esrj.v23n3.72188 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 23 (3) ◽

pp. 259-263 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ren Weihe ◽

Guitian Yi

Keyword(s):

Asian Monsoon ◽

East Asian Monsoon ◽

Technological Development ◽

East Asian ◽

Temporal Patterns ◽

The Tibetan Plateau ◽

Monsoon Region ◽

Spatial And Temporal Patterns ◽

Asian Monsoon Region ◽

The Holocene

The Holocene Optimum (HO) defines a relatively warm and wet period during the Holocene, the initial and termination ages of which have been extensively reported for East Asia; however, debates still focus on underlying spatial and temporal patterns. Here, latest paleoclimate records from the East Asian monsoon region and arid central Asia are synthesized to evaluate the spatial and temporal patterns of the HO. The results of this synthesis indicate that the latitude and both the initial and termination ages of the HO follow a strong relationship, which is an expansion and northward retreat of the HO except for records around the Tibetan Plateau and several other highlands. Both the HO and technological development are also suggested to have shaped the historic boom of the Neolithic human demography. This study provides a window toward an improved understanding of the characteristics of time-transgressive HO and allows to make predictions for the initial and termination ages of the HO at different geographical locations of the East Asian monsoon region.

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LEARNING WORD RELATEDNESS OVER TIME FOR TEMPORAL RANKING

Jurnal Ilmu Komputer dan Informasi ◽

10.21609/jiki.v12i2.745 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 91

Author(s):

Dinda Sigmawaty ◽

Mirna Adriani

Keyword(s):

Temporal Patterns ◽

Word Embeddings ◽

Average Precision ◽

Temporal Aspects ◽

Word Relatedness ◽

Temporal Model ◽

Different Characteristics ◽

Significant Attention ◽

Bahasa Indonesia ◽

Over Time

Queries and ranking with temporal aspects gain significant attention in field of Information Retrieval. While searching for articles published over time, the relevant documents usually occur in certain temporal patterns. Given a query that is implicitly time sensitive, we develop a temporal ranking using the important times of query by drawing from the distribution of query trend relatedness over time. We also combine the model with Dual Embedding Space Model (DESM) in the temporal model according to document timestamp. We apply our model using three temporal word embeddings algorithms to learn relatedness of words from news archive in Bahasa Indonesia: (1) QT-W2V-Rank using Word2Vec (2) QT-OW2V-Rank using OrthoTrans-Word2Vec (3) QT-DBE-Rank using Dynamic Bernoulli Embeddings. The highest score was achieved with static word embeddings learned separately over time, called QT-W2V-Rank, which is 66% in average precision and 68% in early precision. Furthermore, studies of different characteristics of temporal topics showed that QT-W2V-Rank is also more effective in capturing temporal patterns such as spikes, periodicity, and seasonality than the baselines.

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A Magnetic Spectrometer for a Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100052195 ◽

1974 ◽

Vol 32 ◽

pp. 436-437

Author(s):

A. Kosiara ◽

J. W. Wiggins ◽

M. Beer

Keyword(s):

Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope ◽

Magnetic Spectrometer ◽

Fringe Field ◽

Curvature Radius ◽

Magnetic Pole ◽

Quadrupole Field ◽

Transmission Electron ◽

Scanning Transmission ◽

Under Construction ◽

Image Position

A magnetic spectrometer to be attached to the Johns Hopkins S. T. E. M. is under construction. Its main purpose will be to investigate electron interactions with biological molecules in the energy range of 40 KeV to 100 KeV. The spectrometer is of the type described by Kerwin and by Crewe Its magnetic pole boundary is given by the equationwhere R is the electron curvature radius. In our case, R = 15 cm. The electron beam will be deflected by an angle of 90°. The distance between the electron source and the pole boundary will be 30 cm. A linear fringe field will be generated by a quadrupole field arrangement. This is accomplished by a grounded mirror plate and a 45° taper of the magnetic pole.

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Radiation Damage Studies with the HVEM

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100096655 ◽

1972 ◽

Vol 30 ◽

pp. 680-681

Author(s):

J. J. Laidler ◽

B. Mastel

Keyword(s):

Radiation Damage ◽

Stainless Steels ◽

Volume Expansion ◽

Austenitic Stainless Steels ◽

Test Facility ◽

Fast Breeder Reactors ◽

Breeder Reactors ◽

Under Construction ◽

Development Laboratory ◽

Insight Into

One of the major materials problems encountered in the development of fast breeder reactors for commercial power generation is the phenomenon of swelling in core structural components and fuel cladding. This volume expansion, which is due to the retention of lattice vacancies by agglomeration into large polyhedral clusters (voids), may amount to ten percent or greater at goal fluences in some austenitic stainless steels. From a design standpoint, this is an undesirable situation, and it is necessary to obtain experimental confirmation that such excessive volume expansion will not occur in materials selected for core applications in the Fast Flux Test Facility, the prototypic LMFBR now under construction at the Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory (HEDL). The HEDL JEM-1000 1 MeV electron microscope is being used to provide an insight into trends of radiation damage accumulation in stainless steels, since it is possible to produce atom displacements at an accelerated rate with 1 MeV electrons, while the specimen is under continuous observation.

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Description of a New High Resolution Scanning Transmission EM

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100095340 ◽

1972 ◽

Vol 30 ◽

pp. 418-419

Author(s):

Michael Beer ◽

J. W. Wiggins ◽

David Woodruff ◽

Jon Zubin

Keyword(s):

High Resolution ◽

Field Emission ◽

Energy Dispersive Spectrometer ◽

Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope ◽

Objective Lens ◽

Condenser Lens ◽

Transmission Electron ◽

Pattern Size ◽

Scanning Transmission ◽

Under Construction

A high resolution scanning transmission electron microscope of the type developed by A. V. Crewe is under construction in this laboratory. The basic design is completed and construction is under way with completion expected by the end of this year.The optical column of the microscope will consist of a field emission electron source, an accelerating lens, condenser lens, objective lens, diffraction lens, an energy dispersive spectrometer, and three electron detectors. For any accelerating voltage the condenser lens function to provide a parallel beam at the entrance of the objective lens. The diffraction lens is weak and its current will be controlled by the objective lens current to give an electron diffraction pattern size which is independent of small changes in the objective lens current made to achieve focus at the specimen. The objective lens demagnifies the image of the field emission source so that its Gaussian size is small compared to the aberration limit.

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