scholarly journals Rethinking the time’s arrow: Beginnings and the sociology of the future

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 966-989
Author(s):  
Filipe Carreira da Silva ◽  
Mónica Brito Vieira

This article asks: What is, sociologically speaking, a beginning? And why has sociology so relatively little to say about beginnings, that point of discontinuity between past meaning and future meaning? We answer these questions in four successive steps. First, we suggest that the existing literature on beginnings can be organized in light of Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between the irreversible time of social practices and the reversible time of analytic models. We use this distinction in the next two sections as we review existing approaches on beginnings. The next section discuss works that have studied beginnings from the perspective of irreversible time. The following section analyses approaches that centre on the perspective of the reversible time of the observer, that collapse the two, or that distinguish them in purely methodological grounds. Building upon the foregoing, we advance a sociological conception of beginnings as a future-oriented duration involving a non-linear succession of temporalities.

Author(s):  
Lionel Manin ◽  
Jarir Mahfoudh ◽  
Matthieu Richard ◽  
David Jauffres

Sports and mountaineering activities are becoming more and more popular. Equipment constructors seek to develop products and devices that are easy to use and that take into account all safety recommendations. PETZL and INSA have collaborated to develop a model for the simulation of displacements and efforts involved during the fall of a climber in the “safety chain”. The model is based on the classical equations of motion, in which climber and belayer are considered as rigid masses, while the rope is considered as a series of non-linear stiffness passing through several devices as brakes and runners. The main goal is to predict the forces in the rope and on the return anchor at the first rebound of the fall. Experiments were first performed in order to observe and determine the dynamic characteristics of the rope, and then to validate results stemming from simulations. Several fall configurations are simulated, and the model performs satisfactorily. It also provides a close approximation of the phenomena observed experimentally. The model enables the assessment of the existing equipments and the improved design of the future one.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Maier

One of the most fundamental insights into the nature of our subjective perception of the world around us is that it is not veridical. In other words, we tend to not perceive information about the world around us accurately. Instead, our brains interpret new information through a host of innate and learned mechanisms that can introduce bias and distortions One of the best studied mechanisms that guide – and distort – our perception is the psychophysical Weber-Fechner law. According to this empirically derived, mathematically formulated law we tend to put more emphasis on smaller deviations in size while underestimating larger changes. The original formulation of the Weber-Fechner law takes the shape of a logarithmic function and is commonly applied to somatosensory perception such as the weight of an object. However, later work showed that the Weber-Fechner law can be generalized and describe a large variety of perceived changes in magnitude that even go beyond the sensory domain. Here we investigate the hypothesis that our perception of data associated with the spread of COVID-19 and similar pandemics is governed by the same psychophysical laws. Based on several recently published studies, we demonstrate that the Weber-Fechner law can be shown to directly affect the decision-making of officials in response to this global crisis as well as the greater public at large. We discuss how heightened awareness of the non-linear nature of subjective perception could help alleviate problematic judgements in similar situations in the future.


1963 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. J. Hancock

SummaryThe validity and applicability of the static margin (stick fixed) Kn,where as defined by Gates and Lyon is shown to be restricted to the conventional flexible aircraft. Alternative suggestions for the definition of static margin are put forward which can be equally applied to the conventional flexible aircraft of the past and the integrated flexible aircraft of the future. Calculations have been carried out on simple slender plate models with both linear and non-linear aerodynamic forces to assess their static stability characteristics.


BioEssays ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (10) ◽  
pp. 821-822
Author(s):  
Andrew Moore
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1150-1164
Author(s):  
Swapnali Barman ◽  
Rajib Kumar Bhattacharjya

Abstract The River Subansiri, one of the largest tributaries of the Brahmaputra, makes a significant contribution towards the discharge at its confluence with the Brahmaputra. This study aims to investigate an appropriate model to predict the future flow scenario of the river Subansiri. Two models have been developed. The first model is an artificial neural network (ANN)-based rainfall-runoff model where rainfall has been considered as the input. The future rainfall of the basin is calculated using a multiple non-linear regression-based statistical downscaling technique. The proposed second model is a hybrid model developed using ANN and the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) curve number (CN) method. In this model, both rainfall and land use/land cover have been incorporated as the inputs. The ANN models were run using time series analysis and the method selected is the non-linear autoregressive model with exogenous inputs. Using Sen's slope values, the future trend of rainfall and runoff over the basin have been analyzed. The results showed that the hybrid model outperformed the simple ANN model. The ANN-SCS-based hybrid model has been run for different land use/land cover scenarios to study the future flow scenario of the River Subansiri.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (01) ◽  
pp. 1950002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deepali Y. Dube ◽  
Hiren G. Patel

This paper concerns with the non-linear system having multiple-inputs multiple-outputs (MIMO). The plant mainly comprises: bench-top helicopter, tail and main rotor of a helicopter system. The dynamics are presented with control methodologies where a conventional strategy proves the instability of the system while the deadbeat and sliding mode control with linear matrix inequality regulates the future estimates. There have been disturbances like presence of unwanted ripples in the output of the non-linear systems (in case of stability also after 100[Formula: see text]s) and in the tracking of states accurately by updating the minimization error regularly. These problems originate mainly from the rotor section and are visited carefully by studying the dynamics of the blade, whereas, the design of filter makes the solution more appealing. The adaptive filter is capable of handling the frequency spectra of noise (reducing noise by 10[Formula: see text]dB), Euler angle deviations and travel angle accurately. Also, the stability analysis does not confirm the behavior in the case of bounded and a varying range of initial angular velocity. Hence, the problem of fluctuations is overcome by deadbeat and SMC-LMI approach which not only improved the ripples but also allowed the final response of the future states to be more exact and noiseless. As the previous research involved in position tracking (either translational or rotational) of these MIMO systems was concerned with software tools like MATLAB. This paper justifies its validation tested experimentally on OPAL RT hardware. The key findings involve the comparison of frequency spectra, the Euler deviation plot compared to CSL Helicopter and the three set-point variations providing accuracy in results in four modes — desired, actual, with controller-without filter and with controller-with filter. The use of adaptive filter with controllers have encouraged the suppression of noisy waveforms in the bench-top system very smoothly. The details regarding hardware setup are also discussed.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lizhen Lian ◽  
Chengli Huang ◽  
Jin Zhang

<p>The reprocessed time series (weekly from SLR, daily from GNSS, and 24h session-wise from VLBI) of co-located station position solutions spanning their full observation histories up to the end of 2014 are analyzed with the goal to detect nonlinear time-variable effects in station positions, such as periodic variations or discontinuities caused e.g. by instrumental changes or earthquakes. This information is then used to assess the reliability of the results about the nonlinear changes of all technique stations in each colocation site since they can be verified with each other. Next, the iterative adjustment is performed, i.e. jumping changes, post-seismic deformation and periodical signals are determined altogether for accurate estimation of station velocity. Finally, the information of the relative motion among the stations equipped with different technique instruments per colocation site is determined which can offer a reference for the necessary arrangement of local resurvey in the future.</p>


Author(s):  
Melvin J. Hinich

This article focuses on serious problems regarding the recent research agenda in political economy that are likely to continue in the future. The first problem discussed is the multidimensional political choices, followed by the lack of equilibrium in political games. This is followed by the lack of common knowledge and the complex non-linear dynamics of the political/economical system. The discussion presented in this article is within the context of electoral politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 498 (3) ◽  
pp. 3902-3913
Author(s):  
Shengqi Yang ◽  
Xiaolong Du ◽  
Andrew J Benson ◽  
Anthony R Pullen ◽  
Annika H G Peter

ABSTRACT Understanding the non-linear dynamics of satellite haloes (a.k.a. ‘sub-haloes’) is important for predicting the abundance and distribution of dark matter sub-structures and satellite galaxies, and for distinguishing among microphysical dark matter models using observations. Typically, modelling these dynamics requires large N-body simulations with high resolution. Semi-analytic models can provide a more efficient way to describe the key physical processes such as dynamical friction, tidal mass loss, and tidal heating, with only a few free parameters. In this work, we present a fast Markov chain Monte Carlo fitting approach to explore the parameter space of such a sub-halo non-linear evolution model. We use the dynamical models described in an earlier work and calibrate the models to two sets of high-resolution cold dark matter N-body simulations, ELVIS and Caterpillar. Compared to previous calibrations that used manual parameter tuning, our approach provides a more robust way to determine the best-fitting parameters and their posterior probabilities. We find that jointly fitting for the sub-halo mass and maximum velocity functions can break the degeneracy between tidal stripping and tidal heating parameters, as well as providing better constraints on the strength of dynamical friction. We show that our semi-analytic simulation can accurately reproduce N-body simulations statistics, and that the calibration results for the two sets of N-body simulations agree at 95 per cent confidence level. Dynamical models calibrated in this work will be important for future dark matter sub-structure studies.


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