Slower Than Time Itself

This paper is combined with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, Slower Than Time Itself. There is a significant discontinuity between how duration is measured by clocks and how it is perceived by the individual. This discontinuity generates pressure both on the individual and the environment. The concept of dualism constructs a dichotomy between people and nature, devaluing that which can not be measured. In Slower Than Time Itself the thesis, sculptural and video works aims to dissolve this dichotomy not by rejecting technology but by embracing it. Can one use clocks to escape time itself? I investigate the works of artists Christian Marclay, Tatsuo Miyajima, Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Janet Cardiff, Francis Alys, Werner Herzog and Chantal Akerman who use technology to explore duration as an artistic medium. I also explore Lutz Koepnick’s concept of aesthetic slowness to engage in multiplicity without prioritizing the timescapes sympathetic to human cadence

Symbolization-based analysis of engineering time series

Data symbolization, derived from the study of symbolic dynamics, involves discretization of measurement data to aid in observing and characterizing temporal patterns. In this study, symbolization-based methods are developed for analysis of time series from experimental engineering systems to test hypotheses concerning stationarity, temporal reversibility, and synchronization. Stationarity is examined in the context of process control and dynamical state matching; temporal reversibility, in the context of model discrimination and selection of control schemes (linear versus nonlinear); and synchronization, in the context of modes of interactions between system components. Statistical significance is estimated using the method of surrogate data with Monte Carlo probabilities

Rediscovering urban design through walkability : an assessment of the contribution of Jan Gehl

Urban design is being rediscovered. For most of the past 50 years it has lacked the concrete theory necessary to guide praxis. As a field it has related only sporadically and selectively to experiential knowledge and was essentially still entrenched within formulistic Modernist approaches. This has limited urban design as practiced to a design profession focused on aesthetics and individual projects without being part of the mainstream city-shaping process. The vacuum in city politics has been filled by modernist traffic engineering and car-based planning. This has limited urban design’s ability as a field to respond to the need for sustainable, vibrant and inclusive urban environments. In particular, it has failed to address the force and power of car-based planning. However, there is scope for a profession of urban design that considers a city holistically and is an advocate for the needs of pedestrians. In particular, there is scope for an urban design practice that is able to challenge the pre-eminence of the auto-focused shaping of cities. These determinations necessitate a different approach to designing our cities. Through work in over 40 cities, Danish urban designer Jan Gehl has begun to demonstrate a new theory and practice of urban design that rediscovers it potency through an emphasis on walkability.This study considers the theory and practice of urban design from a walkability perspective in order to facilitate a more effective, sustainable, humanistic and responsive approach, developing an evaluation framework based on Jon Lang’s (1994) call for a more encompassing urban design approach. This framework is then applied to the work of Gehl, as a case study of an urban designer who has constantly focused on the needs of people within city design, asking what is the significance of Gehl’s work and theory to urban design?Fundamentally urban design is concluded to be about creating cities, or improving existing ones, to be vibrant and sustainable places that relate to people’s use and needs—especially pedestrians—using the skills and theories of various disciplines and depending to a large degree on the public and political process to define the values and priorities. It is about creating hopeful resilient places that are able to adapt and respond to varying social, environmental and economic needs and about creating positive changes in urban environments. The study concludes that there is scope for urban design to move beyond its current limitations to work from a base of experiential knowledge about the city and its use that is focused on a reflective and experiential approach, building on solid practice based theory and on planning for pedestrians.Gehl’s work, both in theory and practice, is explicitly humanist, offering normative urban design theories based on substantive research, is part of organic urban theory and is embedded in ideas of pedestrian based transport planning. As a practitioner, Gehl’s methods enable experiential knowledge to come to the forefront of urban design concerns. Building from Gehl’s focus on the need to overcome formulistic and automobile-dominated urban planning would enable urban design’s aesthetic and prescriptive based theories to have a new and deeper meaning: sustainable urban design is at its heart planning and designing for walkability. This thesis determines that a core component of urban design theory and practice is advocating for the needs of pedestrians

New Foundation in the Sciences: Physics without sweeping infinities under the rug

It is widely known among the Frontiers of physics, that “sweeping under the rug” practice has been quite the norm rather than exception. In other words, the leading paradigms have strong tendency to be hailed as the only game in town. For example, renormalization group theory was hailed as cure in order to solve infinity problem in QED theory. For instance, a quote from Richard Feynman goes as follows: “What the three Nobel Prize winners did, in the words of Feynman, was to get rid of the infinities in the calculations. The infinities are still there, but now they can be skirted around . . . We have designed a method for sweeping them under the rug. [1] And Paul Dirac himself also wrote with similar tune: “Hence most physicists are very satisfied with the situation. They say: Quantum electrodynamics is a good theory, and we do not have to worry about it any more. I must say that I am very dissatisfied with the situation, because this so-called good theory does involve neglecting infinities which appear in its equations, neglecting them in an arbitrary way. This is just not sensible mathematics. Sensible mathematics involves neglecting a quantity when it turns out to be small—not neglecting it just because it is infinitely great and you do not want it!”[2] Similarly, dark matter and dark energy were elevated as plausible way to solve the crisis in prevalent Big Bang cosmology. That is why we choose a theme here: New Foundations in the Sciences, in order to emphasize the necessity to introduce a new set of approaches in the Sciences, be it Physics, Cosmology, Consciousness etc

19th Conference of The Associations of Christians In The Mathematical Sciences

Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences 19th Biennial Conference Proceedings, May 29 - June 1, 2011, Bethel University

The Unbearable Lightness of International Relations : Technological Innovations, Creative Destruction and Assemblages

How could one oversee the monumental modern landscape that has been created by over 250 years of continuous technological innovations? Notwithstanding a few students of international relations who have insisted in taking notice, technology has remained an exotic subject matter in International Relations theory (IR). While the interest in technologies is recently growing most IR scholarship remains silent: the fact that we live in a fully integrated and interconnected technological world is absent from textbooks and introductions to IR. Neither exists theoretical approaches and paradigmatic debates that are concerned with technologies; nor a specific intra-disciplinary subfield. Against this background, this book explores how technological innovations could be theorized and integrated into IR theories. Revisiting the inroads of theoretical approaches to technologies, it highlights the lightness of IR scholarship. I argue that the general framework of IR is untenable because it looks at the world as if there were no materials or rather, as if the pervasive presence of artifacts and infrastructures would have no theoretical relevance for conceptualizing and examining world politics. Drawing on ontological and epistemological understandings from anthropology, innovation economics, and science and technology studies, I take issue with the philosophical foundations of the discipline. The notions, concepts and practices, which ultimately sustain and legitimize this lightness, are interrogated. It is shown that the neglect of technological innovation does not merely result from coincidental intellectual moves. It is rather the result of the “Cartesian complex” – the foundational commitment that renders IR a purely social science that deliberately excludes non-humans and hybrid material modes of agency. A radical refashioning is therefore required to the extent to which IR theory aims to accommodate the highly complex and elusive subject matter of technological innovations. This conceptual catharsis does not primarily touch upon epistemological concerns. What is at stake is the limitation of ontological parameters that sustain IR theories. To make sense of the messy technological landscapes, the material agency, and the technologically mediated practices, the prevailing logocentric wisdom needs to be transcended. Against premature metaphysical closure, this book thus contributes to the task of ontological expansion. Firstly, it develops an alternative meta-theoretical foundation coined “explorative realism”. A new meta-theoretical matrix is proposed that renders wider ontological parameters intelligible. Especially, the “double-mixed” zone encourages ontological expansion via notions of heterogeneous agency and process philosophy. This implies that IR scholars avoid treating time, space, knowledge, artificial objects, and built environments as constants but as always croproduced. A coproductive commitment opens up new empirical issues and concerns as well as radically different theoretical puzzles. It also implies overcoming Cartesian dualism, abandoning intentionality-based notions of agency, and forgetting the “level of analysis” assumption. Secondly, this book advances a theoretical toolbox consisting of the interrelated concepts of “assemblages” and “creative destruction”. The former term signifies actor-networks entailing both humans and non-humans. The latter captures the ways in which technological innovations alter or destabilize assemblages across all levels through a process of translation. This theoretical vocabulary also reconceptualizes the meaning of “power”, “authority” with reference to technological innovations. Three open-ended classifications and three models of creative destruction enable the mapping of magnitudes of translations, the changing size and topologies of assemblages and the shifting power and authority. These efforts to theorize technological innovations, then, support empirical research on global transformations and processes of emergence with a set of conceptual tools that allows locating and systematizing cases, puzzles, and scales in relation to assemblages. The study of technological innovations is productive and challenging. It leads to the discovery of novel empirical landscapes and inspires a creative questioning of IR’s foundations. As such, while responding to the stunning absence of theoretical approaches in IR that make sense of technological innovations, this study contributes to the articulation of both a post-international and post-Cartesian version of IR

Programming Languages and Systems

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 28th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2019, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2019, held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019

Reason and the nonrational in Lovejoy, Montague, and Tsanoff

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University.Reason as the instrument of philosophy is under attack at the present from the standpoint of psychology, critical philosophy, the experience of evil, science, and existentialism. Rationalism as deduction no longer is an adequate concept of reason. This dissertation investigates the nonrationalistic content of reason required to supplement deductive rationalism in order to develop a coherent and synoptic view of reason as the instrument of philosophy in current times. Mind is defined as the sum total of consciousness, with emphasis upon the unity of the self. [TRUNCATED

Reports to the President

A compilation of annual reports for the 1989-1990 academic year, including a report from the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as reports from the academic and administrative units of the Institute. The reports outline the year's goals, accomplishments, honors and awards, and future plans