Digital technology, work extension and the acceleration society

This essay is based on a keynote speech given at the Organizational Working Time Regimes conference on 30 March 2017 at the University of Graz, Austria. It challenged the widespread assumption that digital technologies are radically altering our perception of time: as if we are mere hostages to the accelerating drive of machines. Digital devices are sold to us as time-saving tools that promote a busy, exciting action-packed lifestyle. But all technologies are inherently social: they bear the imprint of the people and social context from which they emerge. Time is lived at the intersection of an array of social differences in which some people’s time and labour is valued more highly than others’, and where some groups gain speed and efficiency at the expense of others. Overall, then, the talk argued that while there is no temporal logic inherent in technologies, artefacts do play a central role in the constitution of time regimes. The design of technologies matters for how we work, live and communicate, which in turn sets the tempo and texture of social time. So, it is striking that the people who design our technology and decide what is made are unrepresentative of society. The most powerful companies in the world today are basically engineering companies and employ few women, minorities and people over 40. To control our time, we must not only contest the imperative of speed and workaholism, but also democratise the making of engineering. Only then can we harness our inventiveness to fashion an alternative politics of time.

The Folly of Wit and Masquerade in Love’s Labour’s Lost

This chapter examines Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. It argues that the most striking thing about the play is how little Shakespeare used exciting action, story, or conflict; how far he went in the direction of making the piece a set exhibition of pastimes and games. The play is a strikingly fresh start, a more complete break with what he had been doing earlier in his career. The change goes with the fact that there are no theatrical or literary sources, so far as anyone has been able to discover, for what story there is in the play—Shakespeare, here and in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and nowhere else, makes up everything himself, because he is making up action on the model of games and pastimes.

Analyzing Animated Movie Contents for Automatic Video Indexing

In this chapter the authors tackle the analysis and characterization of the artistic animated movies in view of constituting an automatic content-based retrieval system. First, they deal with temporal segmentation, and propose cut, fade and dissolve detection methods adapted to the constraints of this domain. Further, they discuss a fuzzy linguistic approach for automatic symbolic/semantic content annotation in terms of color techniques and action content and we test its potential in automatic video classification. The browsing issue is dealt by providing methods for both, static and dynamic video abstraction. For a quick browse of the movie’s visual content the authors create a storyboard-like summary, while for a “sneak peak” of the movie’s exciting action content they propose a trailer-like video skim. Finally, the authors discuss the architecture of a prototype client-server 3D virtual environment for interactive video retrieval. Several experimental results are presented.

How to consider the celiac nerves, confused or exclusively inhibitory, for the movements of the small intestines

The question of whether the celiac nerves are exclusively inhibitory for the movements of thin whales or they also have an exciting action, that is, the ability to cause or enhance movements, must be considered as yet completely unresolved. Some authors, dealing with this issue, came to the conclusion that exclusively inhibitory function is inherent in the celiac nerve, while others believe that, as far as their influence on intestinal activity is concerned, they are not exclusively inhibitory, but they also recognize motor function. The question is, on whose side is the truth?