Temporal inabilities and decision-making capacity in depression

We report on an interview-based study of decision-making capacity in two classes of patients suffering from depression. Developing a method of second-person hermeneutic phenomenology, we articulate the distinctive combination of temporal agility and temporal inability characteristic of the experience of severely depressed patients. We argue that a cluster of decision-specific temporal abilities is a critical element of decision-making capacity, and we show that loss of these abilities is a risk factor distinguishing severely depressed patients from mildly/moderately depressed patients. We explore the legal and clinical consequences of this result

Grounding Synchronous Deterministic Concurrency in Sequential Programming

In this report, we introduce an abstract interval domain I(D; P) and associated fixed point semantics for reasoning about concurrent and sequential variable accesses within a synchronous cycle-based model of computation. The interval domain captures must (lower bound) and cannot (upper bound) information to approximate the synchronisation status of variables consisting of a value status D and an init status P. We use this domain for a new behavioural definition of Berry’s causality analysis for Esterel. This gives a compact and uniform understanding of Esterel-style constructiveness for shared-memory multi-threaded programs. Using this new domain-theoretic characterisation we show that Berry’s constructive semantics is a conservative approximation of the recently proposed sequentially constructive (SC) model of computation. We prove that every Berry-constructive program is sequentially constructive, i.e., deterministic and deadlock-free under sequentially admissible scheduling. This gives, for the first time, a natural interpretation of Berry-constructiveness for main-stream imperative programming in terms of scheduling, where previous results were cast in terms of synchronous circuits. It also opens the door to a direct mapping of Esterel’s signal mechanism into boolean variables that can be set and reset arbitrarily within a tick. We illustrate the practical usefulness of this mapping by discussing how signal reincarnation is handled efficiently by this transformation, which is of complexity that is linear in progra

Interactive Model-Based Compilation: A Modeller-Driven Development Approach

There is a growing tendency for using domain-specific languages, which help domain experts to stay focussed on abstract problem solutions. It is important to carefully design these languages and tools, which fundamentally perform model-to-model transformations. The quality of both usually decides the effectiveness of the subsequent development and therefore the quality of the final applications. However, as the complexity and safety requirements of modern systems grow, it becomes increasingly burdensome to create highly customized languages and difficult to provide reasonable overviews within these tools. This thesis introduces a new interactive model-based compilation methodology. Compilations for arbitrary model-to-model transformations are themselves described as models. They can be instantiated for particular inputs, e. g. a program, to create concrete compilation runs, which return the result of that compilation. The compilation instance is interactively observable. Intermediate results serve as new inputs and as documentation. They can be used to create highly customized views and facilitate understandability. This methodology guides modellers from the start of the compilation to the final result so that they can interactively refine their models. The methodology has been implemented and validated as the KIELER Compiler (KiCo) and is available as part of the KIELER open-source project. It is used to implement the current reference compiler for the SCCharts language, a statecharts dialect designed for specifying safety-critical reactive systems based on a synchronous model of computation. The interactive model-based compilation approach was key to the rapid prototyping of three different compilation strategies, as well as new language extensions, variations and closely related languages. The results are verified with benchmarks, which are again modelled using the same approach and technology. The usability of the SCCharts language and the KiCo tooling is documented with long-term surveys and real-life industrial, academic and teaching examples

Sleep across the psychosis continuum and its relationship to paranoid thinking

Background: The present thesis sought to explore the relationship between sleep and paranoia, and investigate what factors mediate this relationship. The research was conducted at different levels, and in different groups including healthy members of the general population, people with a diagnosis of psychosis and clinicians. Method: in chapter 3, a cross-sectional study was conducted online to examine the relationships between sleep and paranoia in a non-clinical sample. Following this, chapter 4 outlines a systematic review that aimed to further understand how sleep has been investigated in clinical samples of people with psychosis. Next, chapter 5 examined the relationship between sleep disturbance and paranoia in a clinical sample using novel experience sampling methodologies. Finally, chapter 6 explored clinician perceptions of sleep problems in people with psychosis. Results: chapter 3 found evidence for a mediation model whereby sleep predicted paranoia, and this relationship was mediated by negative emotions, alexithymia and perceptual anomalies. Chapter 4 revealed that there is a range of methodologies used to assess and measure sleep and identified areas of bias. Chapter 5 found no relationship between sleep and paranoia in a clinical sample of people with psychosis. Finally, chapter 6 found that clinicians are fully aware of the range and types of sleep problems in people with psychosis but lack the training and skills to treat sleep problems. Discussion: Overall, the relationship between sleep and paranoia is inconsistent. Sleep disturbances are common and should be treated in people with psychosis. More work is required to develop effective intervention strategies to address the range and type of sleep disturbances found in people with psychosis

Timing and Time Perception: Procedures, Measures, and Applications

Timing and Time Perception: Procedures, Measures, and Applications is a one-of-a-kind, collective effort to present the most utilized and known methods on timing and time perception. Specifically, it covers methods and analysis on circadian timing, synchrony perception, reaction/response time, time estimation, and alternative methods for clinical/developmental research. The book includes experimental protocols, programming code, and sample results and the content ranges from very introductory to more advanced so as to cover the needs of both junior and senior researchers. We hope that this will be the first step in future efforts to document experimental methods and analysis both in a theoretical and in a practical manner

The Times of Deleuze: An Analysis of Deleuze's Concept of Temporality Through Reference to Ontology, Aesthetics, and Political Philosophy

I analyze Deleuze’s concept of temporality in terms of its ontology and axiological (political and aesthetic) aspects. For Deleuze, the concept of temporality is non-monolithic, in the senses that it is modified throughout his works — the monographs, lectures, and those works that were co-authored with Félix Guattari — and that it is developed through reference to a dizzying array of concepts, thinkers, artistic works, and social phenomena. I observe that Deleuze’s concept of temporality involves a complex ontology of difference, which I elaborate through reference to Deleuze’s analyses of Ancient Greek and Stoic conceptualizations of time. From Plato through to Chrysippus, temporality gradually comes to be identified as a form that comprehends the variation of particulars. Deleuze modifies the ancients’ concept of time to suggest that time obtains as a form of ceaseless ontological variation. Through reference to Deleuze’s reading of Gilbert Simondon, I further suggest that Deleuze tends to conceive of temporality as an ontogenetic force which participates in the complex process of individuation. A standout feature of this dissertation involves an analysis of how Deleuze’s concept of temporality is modified in his works on cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, temporality comes to be characterized as something other than the measure of the movement of existents. In his detailed analyses of Bergson — in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and Bergsonism — Deleuze suggests that time involves an actualization of aspects of a virtual past as contemporaneous with the lived present. While not an outright denial of the relation of temporal succession, Deleuze’s claim implies a diminishment of this relation’s significance in an adequate elaboration of the nature of temporality. Further, I observe —through reference to Deleuze’s readings of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza — that (the explicitly temporal) change of societal forms of economic organization is non-reducible to that suggested by linear evolution. The claim is that putatively discrete modes of economic organization do not enjoy temporal displacement with respect to one another. This suggests that linear evolutionary models of societal development are inadequate. This further implies that temporality is non-reducible to the relation of temporal succession. In concrete terms, societal change is characterized as immanent temporal variation. Taken together, these analyses yield the conclusion that Deleuze tends to conceive of the nature of temporality as involving the ongoing realization of multiple — non-identical, sometimes contrary — aspects of a stochastic process of creation that is expressed in ontogenetic circumstances, social evolution, literary works, and filmic works