A Historian in Hong Kong: Living in the Future-Looking at the Past

Histor

Living in the past, present, and future: measuring temporal orientation with language

OBJECTIVE: Temporal orientation refers to individual differences in the relative emphasis one places on the past, present, or future, and is related to academic, financial, and health outcomes. We propose and evaluate a method for automatically measuring temporal orientation through language expressed on social media. METHOD: Judges rated the temporal orientation of 4,302 social media messages. We trained a classifier based on these ratings, which could accurately predict the temporal orientation of new messages in a separate validation set (accuracy/mean sensitivity = .72; mean specificity = .77). We used the classifier to automatically classify 1.3 million messages written by 5,372 participants (50% female, aged 13-48). Finally, we tested whether individual differences in past, present, and future orientation differentially related to gender, age, Big Five personality, satisfaction with life, and depressive symptoms. RESULTS: Temporal orientations exhibit several expected correlations with age, gender, and Big Five personality. More future-oriented people were older, more likely to be female, more conscientious, less impulsive, less depressed, and more satisfied with life; present orientation showed the opposite pattern. CONCLUSION: Language-based assessments can complement and extend existing measures of temporal orientation, providing an alternative approach and additional insights into language and personality relationships. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.Support for this article was provided by grant #63597 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (M. E. P. Seligman, PI) and by a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust (M.E.P. Seligman, H. A. Schwartz, L. H. Ungar, co-PIs)

Four-dimensional understanding of quantum mechanics and Bell violation

While our natural intuition suggests us that we live in 3D space evolving in time, modern physics presents fundamentally different picture: 4D spacetime, Einstein's block universe, in which we travel in thermodynamically emphasized direction: arrow of time. Suggestions for such nonintuitive and nonlocal living in kind of "4D jello" come among others from: Lagrangian mechanics we use from QFT to GR saying that history between fixed past and future situation is the one optimizing action, special relativity saying that different velocity observers have different present 3D hypersurface and time direction, general relativity deforming shape of the entire spacetime up to switching time and space below the black hole event horizon, or the CPT theorem concluding fundamental symmetry between past and future. Accepting this nonintuitive living in 4D spacetime: with present moment being in equilibrium between past and future - minimizing tension as action of Lagrangian, leads to crucial surprising differences from intuitive "evolving 3D" picture, in which we for example conclude satisfaction of Bell inequalities - violated by the real physics. Specifically, particle in spacetime becomes own trajectory: 1D submanifold of 4D, making that statistical physics should consider ensembles like Boltzmann distribution among entire paths, what leads to quantum behavior as we know from Feynman's Euclidean path integrals or similar Maximal Entropy Random Walk (MERW). It results for example in Anderson localization, or the Born rule with squares - allowing for violation of Bell inequalities. Specifically, quantum amplitude turns out to describe probability at the end of half-spacetime from a given moment toward past or future, to randomly get some value of measurement we need to "draw it" from both time directions, getting the squares of Born rules.Comment: 13 pages, 18 figure

The United Methodist Church at 40: What Can We Hope For?

The necessity we face for the future of Methodism is the re-invention of traditions. To re-invent traditions is to re-visit the past with all of its richness; to discern what in our tradition is most central to Christian faith; to analyze those parts of our past that continue to give life; to discern and build upon what is of value in the newly emerging tradition; and to reflect on those aspects of the neglected and rejected past that challenge our present perspectives and practices. To re-invent traditions is to develop new perspectives and practices from the building blocks of the past and from the fresh movements of the Spirit in the present. To do so is to recognize that Christianity in general, and Methodism in particular, is marked by traditions that have continually been passed on, critiqued, eliminated, created, and re-invented for the sake of a living Christian witness. What we can hope for is that God is there in the future already, pulling us toward God’s own New Creation

Complex action suggests future-included theory

In quantum theory its action is usually taken to be real, but we can consider another theory whose action is complex. In addition, in the Feynman path integral, the time integration is usually performed over the period between the initial time $T_A$ and some specific time, say, the present time $t$. Besides such a future-not-included theory, we can consider the future-included theory, in which not only the past state $| A(T_A) \rangle$ at the initial time $T_A$ but also the future state $| B(T_B) \rangle$ at the final time $T_B$ is given at first, and the time integration is performed over the whole period from the past to the future. Thus quantum theory can be classified into four types, according to whether its action is real or not, and whether the future is included or not. We argue that, if a theory is described with a complex action, then such a theory is suggested to be the future-included theory, rather than the future-not-included theory. Otherwise persons living at different times would see different histories of the universe.Comment: Latex 12 pages, 3 figures, typo corrected, presentation improved, the final version to appear in Prog.Theor.Exp.Phy

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’

This whakataukī or ‘proverb’ speaks to Māori perspectives of time, where the past, the present and the future are viewed as intertwined, and life as a continuous cosmic process. Within this continuous cosmic movement, time has no restrictions – it is both past and present. The past is central to and shapes both present and future identity. From this perspective, the individual carries their past into the future. The strength of carrying one’s past into the future is that ancestors are ever present, existing both within the spiritual realm and in the physical, alongside the living as well as within the living. This article explores Māori perspectives of the past and the models and inspiration they offer. In this way, it provides a critique of the practices in early childhood education, highlighting the importance of cultural concepts and practices, and discusses implications for both teaching and academic practice

About lost futures or the political heart of history

The consideration that our era lives under the sign of memory and that this has become the main concern of culture in western societies is a commonplace. This shift to the past has been described as a “memory boom”,2 a “surfeit of memory”,3 a “world (that is) being musealised”4 and as a “desire to commemorate”.5 This “obses sion with recalls” has been interpreted in many studies: on local, cultural or “from below” mem ories, on ways of keeping memories (from me morials and monuments to files, movies, biog raphies and commemorations, etc), on ways of understanding a historiography that looks back to the recent past, about politics of memory and past uses, among other issues. These studies have multiplied in the most varied disciplines, including, sociology, social psychology, history, psychoanalysis, neurobiology, culture sociolo gy, philosophy, etc. The diagnosis seems to be unanimous: we are living in a period in which the present lives off the past, in a kind of “a present past”,6 with the result that we lapse into what Hartog calls “presentism”. This past that lives in the present has been called “traumatic”,7 “sub lime”,8 “espectral”,9 among others. We are expe riencing a “new order of time”: “D’un coté ... un passé qui n’est pas aboli ni oublié, mais un passé duquel ne pouvons à peu prés rien tirer qui nous oriente dans le present et nous donne à imagi ner le future. De l’autre, un avenir sans la moin dre figure.”10 An order of time which casts doubts on the future understood as progress. It puts in question the modern regime of temporality; “in stead of being oriented towards the future, it is oriented towards the past”Fil: Mudrovcic, Maria Ines. Universidad Nacional del Comahue; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Economic growth : past trends and future prospects of advanced economies

The main purpose of this article is to consider the future prospects for economic growth in advanced economies, including the UK and Scotland, in the light of recent past trends. In general, the data used throughout this article is shown in terms of GDP per capita (in constant price terms). Both academic economists (eg. Nick Crafts1) and economic institutions (eg. OECD2) consider that changes in GDP per capita are more relevant than simple GDP growth, in terms of judging the shifts in real living standards. However, in most of the following discussion, the same general conclusions would also be valid in a GDP growth context. Part One looks at how slow any bounce-back in economic growth has been, following the latest recession, especially in comparison to other recessions. Part Two looks at changes to economic growth rates over the past four decades for advanced economies and what this might imply for future growth rates. Part Three looks at sources of economic growth and what areas of economic policy need to re-considered in order to improve future prospects. Part Four provides a brief summary