The Temporal Indeterminacy of Nasal Gestures in Karitiana

In Karitiana, word-medial nasals occurring between oral vowels may surface as circum-oralized, post-oralized, or completely oralized consonants. For example, the word for ‘thing’ may surface as [ki.\u27dnda], [ki~.\u27nda], or [ki.\u27da]. Interestingly, this surface variation of Karitiana nasals is due to the temporal indeterminacy of nasal gestures in the language, i.e. the duration of velic aperture varies significantly across tokens. This sort of temporal indeterminacy has not been documented for any language in the literature, and similar surface variation of nasal forms in other languages has been shown to result from asynchrony between velic oscillation and oral occlusion. The author provides acoustic data that illustrate clearly the temporal indeterminacy in question. These data were recently recorded and analyzed in the field, and demonstrate conclusively that velic aperture duration is far from constant in the language. This fact contravenes expectations based on the literature, and it remains to be seen if and how it will be handled by contemporary phonological models

Time indeterminacy and spatio-temporal building transformations: an approach for architectural heritage understanding

Nowadays most digital reconstructions in architecture and archeology describe buildings heritage as awhole of static and unchangeable entities. However, historical sites can have a rich and complex history, sometimes full of evolutions, sometimes only partially known by means of documentary sources. Various aspects condition the analysis and the interpretation of cultural heritage. First of all, buildings are not inexorably constant in time: creation, destruction, union, division, annexation, partial demolition and change of function are the transformations that buildings can undergo over time. Moreover, other factors sometimes contradictory can condition the knowledge about an historical site, such as historical sources and uncertainty. On one hand, historical documentation concerning past states can be heterogeneous, dubious, incomplete and even contradictory. On the other hand, uncertainty is prevalent in cultural heritage in various forms: sometimes it is impossible to define the dating period, sometimes the building original shape or yet its spatial position. This paper proposes amodeling approach of the geometrical representation of buildings, taking into account the kind of transformations and the notion of temporal indetermination

A Sunspot Paradox

Calibrated models of the business cycle typically assume a certain frequency at which economic agents take decisions. In this paper I show that the local stability properties of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium macro models may depend on the length of a period in the model economy. This leads to the following paradoxical situation: For given parameters, and in particular those assigning values of imperfections in the economy, the economy may be driven by sunspots at some frequencies while sunspots can have no impact at other frequencies.Sunspots, Indeterminacy, High frequency, Temporal aggregation

The Time-Energy Uncertainty Relation

The time energy uncertainty relation has been a controversial issue since the advent of quantum theory, with respect to appropriate formalisation, validity and possible meanings. A comprehensive account of the development of this subject up to the 1980s is provided by a combination of the reviews of Jammer (1974), Bauer and Mello (1978), and Busch (1990). More recent reviews are concerned with different specific aspects of the subject. The purpose of this chapter is to show that different types of time energy uncertainty relation can indeed be deduced in specific contexts, but that there is no unique universal relation that could stand on equal footing with the position-momentum uncertainty relation. To this end, we will survey the various formulations of a time energy uncertainty relation, with a brief assessment of their validity, and along the way we will indicate some new developments that emerged since the 1990s.Comment: 33 pages, Latex. This expanded version (prepared for the 2nd edition of "Time in quantum mechanics") contains minor corrections, new examples and pointers to some additional relevant literatur

Indeterminacy and Architectural History: Deterritorializing Cosimo Fanzago

This article is a critique of architectural history’s tendency to overdetermine in thinking about practice and theory in general, and in thinking the relationship between architecture and spirituality in post-Tridentine ecclesiastical architecture in particular. It first demonstrates what is meant both by over-determination and resistance to interdisciplinarity within mainstream architectural history before critically exploring in relation to this how post-Tridentine architecture and spiritual life or religious devotion might be thought together, the sorts of relationships between the two that may be thought to take place, and asks where this relationship might be located. Suggesting that it might be profitable to follow Deleuze’s philosophy of the Baroque in refusing the tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (in his case the book, in ours, architecture) and a field of subjectivity (the author, the architect), and rather to adopt like him, the notion of rhizome — without beginning or end, always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo, indeterminate. The article seeks to consider Baroque architecture as rhizomatic construction, rather than the usual (and unhelpful) preoccupations with it as dichotomous, expressive, or ‘propagandistic’

Information dynamics: Temporal behavior of uncertainty measures

We carry out a systematic study of uncertainty measures that are generic to dynamical processes of varied origins, provided they induce suitable continuous probability distributions. The major technical tool are the information theory methods and inequalities satisfied by Fisher and Shannon information measures. We focus on a compatibility of these inequalities with the prescribed (deterministic, random or quantum) temporal behavior of pertinent probability densities.Comment: Incorporates cond-mat/0604538, title, abstract changed, text modified, to appear in Cent. Eur. J. Phy

"We produce under this sky": making organic wine in a material world

This thesis explores the role of living and non-living materials as active agents in the processes of making and marketising organic wines in Northern Italy. It is concerned with the ways in which the tension between human intentionality and material agency is managed and worked with in this high-risk and ethically charged context. By applying theoretical insights of actor-network and post-humanist theories to the field of agri-food production, this thesis proposes novel ways of understanding markets, ethics, and skill in the context of organic wine, and of agri-food more generally. The thesis traces and analyses the effects of materials key to the production and marketisation of organic wines: vines, yeast, and sulphur dioxide. A multi-sited, participant observation ethnography approach is used to follow these materials, and the practices in which they are implicated, at a number of wineries in Northern Italy. Two dominant modes of ordering (Law 1994) of organic winemaking practices and discourses are identified: pacification, and making spaces for nature. It is shown that the constant tension between these two modes of ordering expresses the ongoing negotiation of acceptable levels of indeterminacy (and so the acceptable limits of ‘naturalness’) in organic wine production and sales. This thesis makes a significant contribution to current debates in post-humanist and agri-food literature. It extends the existing empirical focus of post-humanist research to spaces of high-risk human-nonhuman interactions. It proposes a move beyond conceptualising agri-food ‘natures’ as economically or ethically passive, and towards relational understandings of both markets and ethics of agri-foods. It demonstrates that the times and spaces of agri-food production, and those of agri-food markets and ethics, are linked through the materialities of practice and product. This thesis thus calls for a materialist politics approach to agri-food production

Imperfect identity

Questions of identity over time are often hard to answer. A long tradition has it that such questions are somehow soft: they have no unique, determinate answer, and disagreements about them are merely verbal. I argue that this claim is not the truism it is taken to be. Depending on how it is understood, it turns out either to be false or to presuppose a highly contentious metaphysical claim