Journal articles on the topic 'Escapement mechanisms'

This paper addresses the nature of noise in machines. As a concrete example, we examine the dynamics of clock escapements from experimental, historical and analytical points of view. Experiments on two escapement mechanisms from the Reuleaux kinematic collection at Cornell University are used to illustrate chaotic-like noise in clocks. These vibrations coexist with the periodic dynamics of the balance wheel or pendulum. A mathematical model is presented that shows how self-generated chaos in clocks can break the dry friction in the gear train. This model is shown to exhibit a strange attractor in the structural vibration of the clock. The internal feedback between the oscillator and the escapement structure is similar to anti-control of chaos models.

This article discusses how kinematic mechanisms created by Franz Reuleaux are now being made available by Cornell University for students and researchers. The university’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering owns the largest set of cast iron and brass models of machines designed by Reuleaux more than 130 years ago. Cornell librarians have helped develop the Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library, or K-MODDL, to allow Internet users to view the models close up. The Cornell Reuleaux Collection contains numerous kinematic mechanisms for rotary and reciprocating engines using both steam and internal combustion. It also includes a dozen working clock escapement mechanisms, from the early verge and foliot escapement to the gravity escapement employed in London’s famous Big Ben. K-MODDL will make the collection available to educators, researchers, and students well beyond the Cornell campus. Those with access to a 3-D printer will be able to build a reproduction of the real thing to see up close how the mechanism works.

As a device for time-delay, clock mechanism is widely used in fuze safety and arming device, whose core component is the runaway escapement. With the development of artillery systems, the dynamic environment during the projectile becomes more and more complicated. Recently, some shots misfire or premature explode during shooting process because runaway escapements’ miswork. This paper utilizes gear system’s research results applied in other fields, discusses clock mechanism’s dynamics problem, and uses ADAMS to analyze runaway escapement’s rigid-flexible coupling model. From comparing the simulation results of multi-rigid model and rigid-flexible coupling model, we find that elastic deformation will affect runaway escapement’s movement, even can cause the whole device to work abnormally.

The paper shows mechanisms of influence of organic matter of marine origin entering the Bolshaya River basin with spawning escapement of Pacific salmon on the quality of freshwater macrozoobenthos. It has been found out that larvae of amphibiotic insects can receive marine nutrients through direct consumption of benthos in summer-autumn period and indirectly through trophic chains for a long time (till spring of the next year). The effect of Pacific salmon spawning escapements on such invertebrate characteristics as body weight, content of lipids and fatty acid-markers of food sources (phytoplankton, bacterioplankton or detritus) has been established. It is concluded that the trophic conditions of macrozoobenthos organisms, the food items of juvenile fish, have improved due to the intake of more marine nutrients.

The tower clocks designed and built in Europe starting from the end of the 13th century employed the “verge and foliot escapement” mechanism. This mechanism provided a relatively low accuracy of time measurement. The introduction of the pendulum into the clock mechanism by Christiaan Huygens in 1658–1673 improved the accuracy by about 30 times. The improvement is attributed to the isochronicity of small linear vibrations of a mathematical pendulum. We develop a mathematical model of both mechanisms. Using scaling arguments, we show that the introduction of the pendulum resulted in accuracy improvement by approximately π/μ ≈ 30 times, where μ ≈ 0.1 is the coefficient of friction. Several historic clocks are discussed, as well as the implications of both mechanisms to the history of science and technology.

Cyclic fluctuations in year-class abundance have been recorded for several fish populations. Historical patterns are generally consistent with several hypotheses about underlying mechanisms, which involve (a) strong density dependence or (b) environmental forcing. Optimal harvesting policies differ depending on which hypothesis is deemed true. Not only does the harvesting policy affect the amount of catch taken, but it can strongly affect our ability to discriminate between alternative hypotheses. Fully-adaptive feedback policies, which explicitly account for the information content of harvest controls, were computed with dynamic progamming for some model prototypes of the problem. Results indicate that deliberate experimentation with escapement levels, oriented to reduce the uncertainty, may be worthwhile under some conditions. In most cases, however, optimal passive policies (in which learning occurs passively) were a good approximation to actively adaptive policies. The optimal passive controls for maximizing a risk-neutral objective, such as total catch, were generally very informative. Although passive and active controls markedly differed in some cases, expected discounted yields under the two types of policies were very similar (differences less than 2%). The extreme risk-averse presciption of managing a stock according to the more pessimistic recruitment model may lead to considerable yield losses.

Using a combination of theory, experiment, and simulation, we revisit the dynamics of two coupled metronomes on a moving platform. Our experiments show that the platform’s motion is damped by a dry friction force of Coulomb type, not the viscous linear friction force that has often been assumed in the past. Prompted by this result, we develop a new mathematical model that builds on previously introduced models but departs from them in its treatment of friction on the platform. We analyze the model by a two-timescale analysis and derive the slow-flow equations that determine its long-term dynamics. The derivation of the slow flow is challenging due to the stick-slip motion of the platform in some parameter regimes. Simulations of the slow flow reveal various kinds of long-term behavior including in-phase and antiphase synchronization of identical metronomes, phase locking and phase drift of non-identical metronomes, and metronome suppression and death. In these latter two states, one or both of the metronomes come to swing at such low amplitude that they no longer engage their escapement mechanisms. We find good agreement between our theory, simulations, and experiments, but stress that our exploration is far from exhaustive. Indeed, much still remains to be learned about the dynamics of coupled metronomes, despite their simplicity and familiarity.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine a particular aspect of the history of the watchmaking industry during the eighteenth century. Attention is drawn to overlooked ideas and inventions and how years later they may become profitable business opportunities for entrepreneurs. The approach adopted allows examination of the development and commercialisation of a watch escapement mechanism, the rack lever, within the context of the development of other escapements. The rack lever was an escapement which was initially overlooked in the early part of the eighteenth century but which many decades later was reinvented and became a commercial success in the early nineteenth century. Design/methodology/approach Reference is made to the literature on entrepreneurship and acquisition of knowledge in the eighteenth century and the nature of watchmaking in the same epoch. The literature on entrepreneurship produces a framework for examining the actions that were taken to bring the rack lever escapement to market. The historical context within which the innovations occurred was examined to establish the events and circumstances surrounding the times when commercialisation took place. An account of the commercialisation of the rack lever escapement is presented. Findings The entrepreneurial opportunity examined in this article relates to a need to satisfy consumers with a reasonably accurate and reliable portable time piece. The historical context within which commercialisation took place was found to be significant. Attention to the escapement mechanism in watches was identified as the key to improving performance, and the focus of the paper is placed upon how this opportunity was satisfied through the means provided by the rack lever escapement. Alertness to the potential of already discovered but undeveloped ideas appears to be an additional feature behind the entrepreneurial activity. The paper shows that innovation can be a discontinuous process. It also indicates the relevance of modern-day knowledge brokers in facilitating the process of new product innovation. Originality/value Entrepreneurship and innovation along with research and development are all intrinsically linked in producing goods and services to satisfy customer wants and needs. Together, they represent a cornerstone which helps to establish a business and maintain its continued survival. Importantly, the development of new products is a key contributor to this end and innovation and entrepreneurship play their part in bringing this about. The paper suggests that new ideas can occur which may be deemed unsuitable for commercialisation at one period in time but which can at a future time be considered a temporary solution to meet an unfulfilled need in the market place. It argues for the case for reserving judgement on new ideas that are not commercialised and ensuring that knowledge of them is kept for posterity and made accessible to future generations.

The escapement mechanism in a mechanical watch movement plays a critical role. Its purpose is to maintain and count the oscillations of the balance wheel. The timekeeping accuracy is therefore regulated. The motion of the escapement mechanism is highly complicated and no in-depth study on its kinematics has been done by now. This paper investigates the kinematics of the Swiss lever escapement which is used in almost all mechanical watches. One half cycle of the motion is described in different phases. Mathematical models for each key component are developed. Simulation result shows that the model is precise in describing and predicting the motion of the escapement. This method is essential for improving and optimizing the design.

Among various non-smooth dynamic systems, the periodically forced oscillation system with impact is perhaps the most common in engineering applications. The dynamical study becomes complicated due to the impact. This paper presents a systematic study on the periodically forced oscillation system with impact. A simplified model of the escapement mechanism is introduced. Impulsive differential equation and Poincare map are applied to describe the model and study the stability of the system. Numerical examples are given and the results show that the model is highly accurate in describing/predicting their dynamics.

The tower circular escape apparatus based on the principle of escapement mechanism is introduced in the paper. The emergency evacuation device for fire trapped workers can be used in the place of frequent fire, hotels, office buildings, high-rise residential and stores, etc. The velocity of the principal axis can be controlled automatically by the escapement mechanism. The driving force of the escape apparatus comes from the gravity of the trapped workers. The experiment results show that the velocity of the device can be controlled on the operating range. The symmetrical structure can make more persons with different weight escape alternately and the velocity of descend approximate. In the research, the virtual prototype technology was used to analyse the kinematic characteristics of the mechanical system. The feasibility of the scheme design of mechanical system was proved with the simulation analysis results. The equipment has advantages of the structure is compact, safe and reliable, easy to use. The research of tower circular escape apparatus based on the principle of escapement mechanism can be regarded as the reference of the related research.

SUMMARYThe ‘clockwork cricket’ model for cricket sound production suggests that the catch-and-release of the file of one forewing by the plectrum on the opposite wing act as an ‘escapement’ to provide the phasic impulses that initiate and sustain the vibration of the resonant regions of the wings from which the sounds are produced. The action of the escapement produces the familiar ticking sound of clocks.The higher-frequency components of the songs of twelve species of cricket were analysed after removing the dominant low-frequency components and amplifying the remaining higher-frequency components. In normal song pulses of all species, the higher-frequency components showed a close phase-locking to the waveform of the dominant frequency, but the amplitude of the higher-frequency components did not correlate with that at the dominant frequency.Anomalous pulses occurred spontaneously in the songs of several species: multimodal, interrupted or curtailed pulses are described. In all of these, the anomalous pulse envelope was associated with changes in the amplitude and/or instantaneous frequency of the higher-frequency components of the sound.A model of the escapement suggests that the frequency of the residual components of the song depends on the symmetry of action of the plectrum on the teeth of the file.

ABSTRACTJohn Lawrence Geib has remained an often-cited but poorly known builder of keyboard instruments since the eighteenth century. Although historians have noted his patent for an escapement mechanism used on early English square pianos after 1787, little has been written about him, and much of that has now proven to be incomplete or untrue. A letter written by Geib to Benjamin Franklin has recently been made public. It outlines his early years in London and provides the foundation for further research into the remaining records and extant instruments. This information allows one to draw a more complete and historically correct picture of Geib and to place him in perspective with the other builders operating at the time. This article gives new details about his principal invention – the escapement mechanism – and the nature of his business during his early years in London. A full reproduction of the patent is included as an appendix.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the inferiority complex of women characters from various eras based on their stories. This study uses the id, ego, superego, and defense mechanism by Freud and inferiority complex by Heidbreder. Through the descriptive analytical method, this analyze is to help the interpretation of the women characters state of minds including their stress coping mechanism and classify their types of inferior complex. The results of this study shows that Medea had a high tendency to feel insecure as a result of her husband’s betrayal, and she mostly used projection as a defense mechanism to revenge her husband. Meanwhile, Amanda demonstrates the use of identification as a stress escapement from societal pressure, as well as her inferiority complex when faced with a guy caller. Due to the stress of high expectations in attracting gentleman caller, Laura mostly used rationalization as a defense mechanism. Keywords: Inferiority Complex, Defense Mechanism, Psychoanalysis, Oppression.

Abstract The Indonesian Criminal Code Procedure (KUHAP) provides fundamental legal basis in conducting detention, in concern that the suspect/defendant shall conduct escapement, erasure or destruction of the evidence, or shall conduct recidivism. Law Number 37 of 2004 regarding Bankruptcy and Suspension of Debt Payment Obligation also regulates regarding Detentions towards Bankrupt Debtors on the obligations as Bankrupt Debtors in providing important information/details towards the Administrators, Supervisory Judge, or the Administrators Members concerning the Debtors assets which then shall be managed and settled as bankruptcy assets; however this does not cover the mechanism for detention undertook by the Public Prosecutor evidently appointed by the Supervisory Judge. Keyword: kewenangan penahanan terhadap debitor pailit

For most of the Middle Ages, diurnal timekeeping depended on sundials, water-clocks, and occasionally flame-clocks. However, towards the end of the thirteenth century, the mechanical clock, weight driven and regulated by a verge escapement and foliot mechanism, was developed. The earliest mechanical clocks appeared in Northern Italy but rapidly spread throughout Europe. In Jacques le Goff’s words, ‘Henceforth the clock became the measure of all things’. Early clocks were neither particularly accurate nor reliable, but the machine, because it was better than anything that had preceded it, acquired the reputation for perfect regularity and dependability. This paper seeks to show how the clock came to be regarded as a model and a reference point, invoked by writers in relation to the ordering of the universe, the nature of a well-regulated society, and as an image of proper moral behaviour.

When several stocks of differing productivities are fished together and combined for stock recruitment analysis, the estimated productivity and size of the stock depends strongly on the previous exploitation history. As a mixed stock is harvested harder, it appears smaller in total size but more productive per individual. I analysed the mechanism behind this change. Passive feedback management policies perform well on mixed stocks, when starting from unexploited conditions. When starting from an overexploited condition, passive feedback management will fail to allow the less productive stocks to recover and will maintain overexploitation. This is also true in the presence of straying between stocks. Since few salmon fisheries operate on single stocks, stock recruitment analyses will usually underestimate the optimum escapement and overestimate the optimum harvest rate when mixed stocks are treated as a single stock. These conclusions will be true for any mixed stock fishery with different productivities of the stocks.

Pacific salmon ( Oncorhynchus spp.) populations transfer large quantities of nutrients from their marine habitats to their freshwater habitats, but the management implications of this nutrient import mechanism are not clear. I investigate whether the effects of these nutrient imports on salmon productivity can be detected, how well management strategies can perform if they ignore the effects of marine-derived nutrients when productivity is strongly dependent on nutrient levels, and under what circumstances nutrient-depleted stocks can recover. I find that stock-recruitment data do not usually permit the detection of the effects of nutrient imports. Some management strategies that ignore nutrient-related effects will, as they are updated, converge to policies that are similar to those that are optimal, given the nutrient effects. Constant harvest rate policies will approach optimal harvesting faster than constant escapement policies. Nutrient dependence can lead to multiple stable states for a population, so that a population subject to one harvest rate can be either maintained at high abundance or, if at low abundance and nutrient-depleted, driven to extirpation. While the importance of nutrient effects on a salmon stock may be difficult to ascertain, managers can employ harvest strategies that are robust to this possibility.

This paper is devoted to the description of the set of all singular configurations of serial robot-manipulators. For 6 degrees of freedom serial robot-manipulators we have developed a theory which allows to describe higher order singularities. By using Lie algebra properties of the screw space we give an algorithm, which determines the degree of a singularity from the knowledge of the actual configuration of axes of the robot-manipulator only. The local shape of the singular set in a neighbourhood of a singular configuration can be determined as well. We also solve the problem of escapement from a singular configuration. For serial robot-manipulators with the number of degrees of freedom different from six we show that up to certain exceptions singular configurations can be avoided by a small change of the motion of the end-effector. We also give an algorithm which allows to determine equations of the singular set for any serial robot-manipulator. We discuss some special cases and give examples of singular sets including PUMA 560.

The portfolio effect plays a critical role in population productivity and stability. Age structure of spawning salmon represents an example of portfolio effects such that the risks of experiencing unfavorable conditions are spread across time. However, the distribution of maturation ages for Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) is increasingly concentrated into fewer and younger ages, which may impact population resilience to climate change. We explored the population dynamics of Sacramento River fall-run Chinook salmon (O. tshawytscha) under different age structure scenarios using a life-cycle model and compared two mechanisms that can underlie these changes – mortality and maturation. In addition, we tested whether age structure promotes resilience to drought. We found that high age structure diversity increased the stability of population size and harvest compared with low diversity. However, mean population size responded differently depending on the underlying mechanism. Reduced mortality of adult fish ages 4-5 increased escapement whereas delayed maturation decreased escapement. Overall, high age structure diversity was able to buffer against the adverse effects of droughts by reducing the variability of population size and harvest compared with low diversity. Results suggest that age structure promotes stability of salmon in an increasingly variable climate.

Abstract The lubrication regimes of a contact pair escapement-ruby pallet of a Swiss lever escapement have been investigated combining the theory of fluid lubrication with a well-established kinematic and inverse dynamic multibody model. The kinematic analytical results have been confronted with experimental measurements. The developed model allows to easily obtain, for the three operating phases of the Swiss lever escapement, the relative speed and the contact forces and, by considering a hydrodynamic lubrication regime, the lubricant minimum film thickness and the coefficient of friction. The presented formulation allows to study the influence of crucial technical parameters in the Swiss lever escapement lubrication. The spout radii of curvature have been identified as the optimal parameters to control the lubrication regimes in the pallet/escapement contacts. In that sense, an interesting result is that the lubrication regime moves away from the boundary lubrication by increasing these radii.

Mechanistic studies of Geobacillus stearothermophilus tryptophanyl-tRNA synthetase (TrpRS) afford an unusually detailed description—the escapement mechanism—for the distinct steps coupling catalysis to domain motion, efficiently converting the free energy of ATP hydrolysis into biologically useful alternative forms of information and work. Further elucidation of the escapement mechanism requires understanding thermodynamic linkages between domain configuration and conformational stability. To that end, we compare experimental thermal melting of fully liganded and apo TrpRS with a computational simulation of the melting of its fully liganded form. The simulation also provides important structural cameos at successively higher temperatures, enabling more confident interpretation. Experimental and simulated melting both proceed through a succession of three transitions at successively higher temperature. The low-temperature transition occurs at approximately the growth temperature of the organism and so may be functionally relevant but remains too subtle to characterize structurally. Structural metrics from the simulation imply that the two higher-temperature transitions entail forming a molten globular state followed by unfolding of secondary structures. Ligands that stabilize the enzyme in a pre-transition (PreTS) state compress the temperature range over which these transitions occur and sharpen the transitions to the molten globule and fully denatured states, while broadening the low-temperature transition. The experimental enthalpy changes provide a key parameter necessary to convert changes in melting temperature of combinatorial mutants into mutationally induced conformational free energy changes. The TrpRS urzyme, an excerpted model representing an early ancestral form, containing virtually the entire catalytic apparatus, remains largely intact at the highest simulated temperatures.

Landscape descriptions provide a framework for identifying functionally significant dynamic linkages in proteins but cannot supply details. Rate measurements of combinatorial mutations can implicate dynamic linkages in catalysis. A major difficulty is filtering dynamic linkages from the vastly more numerous static interactions that stabilize domain folding. The Geobacillus stearothermophilus (TrpRS) D1 switch is such a dynamic packing motif; it links domain movement to catalysis and specificity. We describe Thermofluor and far UV circular dichroism melting curves for all 16 D1 switch variants to determine their higher-order impact on unliganded TrpRS stability. A prominent transition at intermediate temperatures in TrpRS thermal denaturation is molten globule formation. Combinatorial analysis of thermal melting transcends the protein landscape in four significant respects: (i) bioinformatic methods identify dynamic linkages from coordinates of multiple conformational states. (ii) Relative mutant melting temperatures, δTM, are proportional to free energy changes. (iii) Structural analysis of thermal melting implicates unexpected coupling between the D1 switch packing and regions of high local frustration. Those segments develop molten globular characteristics at the point of greatest complementarity to the chemical transition state and are the first TrpRS structures to melt. (iv) Residue F37 stabilizes both native and molten globular states; its higher-order interactions modify the relative intrinsic impacts of mutations to other D1 switch residues from those estimated for single point mutants. The D1 switch is a central component of an escapement mechanism essential to free energy transduction. These conclusions begin to relate the escapement mechanism to differential TrpRS conformational stabilities.

AbstractVarious oscillatory phenomena occur in the world. Because some are associated with abnormal states (e.g. epilepsy), it is important to establish ways to terminate oscillations by external stimuli. However, despite the prior development of techniques for stabilizing unstable oscillations, relatively few studies address the transition from oscillatory to resting state in nonlinear dynamics. This study mainly analyzes the oscillation-quenching of metronomes on a platform as an example of such transitions. To facilitate the analysis, we describe the impulsive force (escapement mechanism) of a metronome by a fifth-order polynomial. By performing both averaging approximation and numerical simulation, we obtain a phase diagram for synchronization and oscillation quenching. We find that quenching occurs when the feedback to the oscillator increases, which will help explore the general principle regarding the state transition from oscillatory to resting state. We also numerically investigate the bifurcation of out-of-phase synchronization and beat-like solution. Despite the simplicity, our model successfully reproduces essential phenomena in interacting mechanical clocks, such as the bistability of in-phase and anti-phase synchrony and oscillation quenching occurring for a large mass ratio between the oscillator and the platform. We believe that our simple model will contribute to future analyses of other dynamics of mechanical clocks.

Abstract The most important property for accurate mechanical time bases is isochronism: the independence of period from oscillation amplitude. This paper develops a new concept in isochronism adjustment for flexure-based watch oscillators. Flexure pivot oscillators, which would advantageously replace the traditional balance wheel-spiral spring oscillator used in mechanical watches due to their significantly lower friction, exhibit nonlinear elastic properties that introduce an isochronism defect. Rather than minimizing this defect, we are interested in controlling it to compensate for external defects such as the one introduced by escapements. We show that this can be done by deriving a formula that expresses the change of frequency of the oscillator with amplitude, i.e., isochronism defect, caused by elastic nonlinearity. To adjust the isochronism, we present a new method that takes advantage of the second-order parasitic motion of flexures and embody it in a new architecture we call the co-RCC flexure pivot oscillator. In this realization, the isochronism defect of the oscillator is controlled by adjusting the stiffness of parallel flexures before fabrication through their length Lp, which has no effect on any other crucial property, including nominal frequency. We show that this method is also compatible with post-fabrication tuning by laser ablation. The advantage of our design is that isochronism tuning is an intrinsic part of the oscillator, whereas previous isochronism correctors were mechanisms added to the oscillator. The results of our previous research are also implemented in this mechanism to achieve gravity insensitivity, which is an essential property for mechanical watch time bases. We derive analytical models for the isochronism and gravity sensitivity of the oscillator and validate them by finite element simulation. We give an example of dimensioning this oscillator to reach typical practical watch specifications and show that we can tune the isochronism defect with a resolution of 1 s/day within an operating range of 10% of amplitude. We present a mock-up of the oscillator serving as a preliminary proof-of-concept.

I was dining some years ago at the Society of Fellows—a now venerable Harvard institution modelled largely on the Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge—and had the good fortune to be seated next to a handsome grey-haired gentleman by the name of Norman Ramsey. What do you do? I asked. I’m a physicist, he said. What kind of physics? I measure time. Imagine that, I said, it so happens that I’m writing a book on the history of time measurement. Well it was a good dinner, and I learnt a great deal about today’s methods of high-frequency time measurement, of which more later. But the one sentence that made the most impression on me and that I have never forgotten was the remark: ‘Any stable frequency is a clock. The counting we can leave to the technicians. ’ The importance of this remark, to me at least, was twofold. First it transformed my sense of the priorities. All the material I had been reading on antiquarian horology and the history of clockmaking focused on the escapement mechanism: that part of the clock which, among other things, counts the beats and thus ticks the passing of time. Now I came to understand (why hadn’t I understood this sooner?) the primary significance in time measurement of the controller—the device that generates the frequency whose even rhythm tries to match the perfectly even units of ideal passing time.

Nearly 50 years on from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1971), contemporary society finds itself navigating the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This era has been described as the convergence of digitisation, robotics, artificial intelligence, globalisation—and speed (Johannessen). As such, temporality is taking on a turbulent and elusive edge. In the previous century, Toffler highlighted that technological change accelerated perceptions of time, and he predicted that by the 21st century, people would find it “increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterises our time”, where change would come about “with waves of ever accelerating speed and unprecedented impact” (18). While Toffler could not have predicted the exact nature and detail of the specificities of day-to-day life in 2019, we suggest Toffler’s characterisation marks an insightful ‘jumping off’ point for further introspection. With Toffler’s concerns in mind, this issue of M/C Journal is interested in multiple ways that digital media influences and expresses conceptions of temporality in this historical period, the final weeks of 2019. On the basis of the pieces that comprise this issue, we take this concern further to politicise the temporal figurations of media, which we propose permeate all aspects of contemporary experience. Theoretically, this position pays homage to the work performed by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin more than two decades ago. In 1996, Bolter and Grusin ruminated on the “the wire”, a fictional device that was the central focus of the film Strange Days (1995), a media gadget that could mediate experience from one subject to another, “pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex” (311). For Bolter and Grusin, ‘the wire’ epitomised contemporary culture’s movement toward virtual reality, “with its goal of unmediated visual and aural experience” and they suggested that the film provided a critique of the historical mode “in which digital technologies are proliferating faster than our cultural, legal, or educational institutions can keep up with them” (313). For us, perhaps even more urgently, the wire epitomises the colonisation, infiltration and permeation of the production of temporal layers through media systems and devices into the subject’s direct experience. The wire symbolises, among many things, a simulation of the terrain of time according to the Jorge Luis Borges fable, that is, one-for-one.Contingent upon new shifts, and the academic literature which has sought to critique them thus far, in this editorial, we raise the contention that the technologies and operations of power brought about through the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and its media apparatus, have exposed the subject to a multiplicity of timescapes. In doing so, these configurations have finally colonised subjective experience of time and temporality.Consequently, we have specifically featured a broad selection of articles that explore and discuss the presence of online, mobile, or streamed media as the primary means through which culture understands, expresses, and communicates the world, and ideas around temporality. The articles featured herein explore the ways in which constructs of time organise (and are organised by) other constructs such as; neoliberalism (Bianchino), relaxation (Pont), clocks (Cambpell), surveillance, biopower, narrative (Glitsos), monetisation (Grandinetti), memorialising (Wishart), time travel (Michael), utopias and dystopias (Herb). Through the spectrum of topics, we hope to elucidate to the reader the ways in which digital culture performs and generates ontological shifts that rewrite the relationship between media, time, and experience.ContemporaneityA key concern for us in this issue is the idea of ‘contemporaneity,’ which has been discussed more recently in art theory and criticism by Terry Smith, and Peter Osborne, amongst others. Both Smith and Osborne use the term to articulate the effects of contemporary globalisation, transnationalism, and post-conceptual art. Smith reminds us that in contemporary society there isthe insistent presentness of multiple, often incompatible temporalities accompanied by the failure of all candidates that seek to provide the overriding temporal framework – be it modern, historical, spiritual, evolutionary, geological, scientific, globalizing, planetary. (196)As a result, artists are negotiating and critiquing multiple intersecting and contradictory time codes that pervade contemporary society in order to grapple with contemporaneity today. Yet, concerns with overlayed temporalities enter our everyday more and more, as explored through Justin Grandinetti’s piece, “A Question of Time: HQ Trivia and Mobile Streaming Temporality”, in which he interrogates mobile streaming practices and the ways in which new devices seek out every possible moment that might be monetised and ‘made productive.’Grandinetti’s concern, like the others featured in this issue, attends to the notion of time as evasive, contradictory and antonymous while forming a sense of urgency around the changing present, and also reconciling a multiplicity of time codes at play through technology today. The present is immediately written and archived through news media live feeds, GPS tracking and bio data in apps used for fitness and entertainment amongst others, while the pace of national television, print media, and local radio is folded through our daily experiences. Consequently, we’re interested in the multiple, and sometimes incompatible temporalities that emerge through the varied ways in which digital media is used to express, explore, and communicate in the world today beyond the arenas of contemporary art and art history that Smith and Osborne are primarily concerned with. ExperienceExperience is key. Experience may in fact be the key that unlocks these following conversations about time and the subject, after all, time is nothing if not experiential. Empirically, we might claim that, time is “conceived as the intervals during which events occur” (Toffler 21). However, of course one can only be if one is being in time. Through Bergson we might say that the individual’s perception of time manifests “rightly or wrongly, to be inside and outside us at one and the same time … . To each moment of our inner life there thus corresponds a moment of our body and of all environing matter that is ‘simultaneous’ with it” (205). Time is the platform through which experience of consciousness is mediated, thus the varying manipulations of time through media apparatuses are therefore inextricable with our lived ‘everyday’.E.P. Thompson might call this our “time-sense”, a kind of “inward notation of time” (58), however this rationalisation of time is amplified and complicated by digital media, as warned by Campbell in this issue. Campbell explores the performativity of publicly writing the self on social media that commodifies experience. An inward notion of time therefore becomes inverted and publicly performed through digital media, which is a key source of anxiety and control for individuals. In Toffler’s estimation, even by as early as the 1970s the technoscience of Western culture had “released a totally new social force” and he contends that this had reshaped the collective psyche witha stream of change so accelerated that it influences our sense of time, revolutionizes the tempo of daily life, and affects the very way we “feel” the world around us. We no longer “feel” life as men [sic] did in the past. And this is the ultimate difference, the distinction that separates the truly contemporary man [sic] from all others. (17)While Toffler was referring to a different technological context, he serves as a reminder that digital media amplifies pre-existing effects of technology. Therefore, while autofiction and the public writing of the self is not necessarily new, it is nevertheless key to contemporary feelings of acceleration and the temporal vernacular of contemporaneity – one that exacerbates the experiences of acceleration, inertia, and how we ‘feel’ the present and our presence in the world.In this issue we also wish to note the ways in which digital culture, and perhaps in particular new media platforms and narratives that permeate our homes, appear to be directing the Western “time-sense” (Thompson 80) away from metaphors constructed through the linear trope of ‘rivers’ or ‘streams’ and toward the more complex arrangements that we suggest are more suited to metaphors of ‘confetti’ or ‘snow’, as Laura Glitsos elucidates in her piece “From Rivers to Confetti: Reconfigurations of Time through New Media Landscapes”.As just one example, we might think of the multiplicity of ‘peculiar times’ built upon each other in the production, distribution, consumption and convergence of so many levels of digital media. In one sense, we might approach ‘peculiar times’ as the peculiarity of temporality in any given context. However, in another sense, we might also recognise the layering of standardisation which is then peculiar to each of the modes of production, consumption, and distribution (as laid out by Althusser and Balibar). As just one example, in the context of streaming services, we find the “flattening of historical frames” (Kaplan 144) in the scrolling back and forward on social media timelines (Powell 2). So perhaps our peculiar time speaks of the collapsing between ontological boundaries of past, present, and future—a kind of contemporaneity that splits between the peculiarities of production and consumption of digital media.StandardisationHistoriographies of time-sense in the Western tradition have been covered by thinkers as diverse as E.P. Thompson, Graeme Davidson, Bernard Stiegler, and Henri Lefebvre. While it is not our aim to repeat those narratives here, we concede some markers are crucial to note in order to set the context for our selected pieces. Beginning in the early- to mid- middle ages in Europe, up until the spread of clocks in the 14th century, time was largely related to processes, tasks or stages of light during the day, and time does still continues to exist in this way for some communities (Thompson 58). During this era, and of even back to the third century BCE, there were time-keeping technologies which could measure smaller increments of the day, such as the water-clock, the sun-dial, and the hour-glass, but everyday activities for the working people were largely regulated by natural or circadian rhythms (Thompson). It is perhaps these rhythms which served to shape the ‘inward notation of time’, in Thompson’s words, through the discourses of nature, that is through the language of streams and rivers—or ‘flows’.The 13th century saw the advent of mechanical time-keeping technology utilising what is called a “verge escapement mechanism”, that is, a “feedback regulator that controls the speed of a mechanical clock” (Headrick 42). About a century later, coupled with the emergence of puritanism, Thompson tells us that we start to see a shift in the construction of time which more and more depends on the synchronisation of labour (Thompson 70). Even so, working rhythms remain fairly irregular, still more suited to what Thompson describes as “a natural human rhythm” (71). This changes suddenly in the 19th century when, with the explosion of the Industrial Age, we witness the dominance of factory-time and, of course, the adoption and standardisation of railway-time across Britain, Europe, India and North America (Schivelbusch). The trend toward standardisation continues into the mid-20th century with what George Ritzer has famously called “McDonaldization” (2008). Thus, through the blanketing nature of 20th century “industrial capitalism” (Thompson 80), everyday experience became predicated on standardisation. Thompson tells us that these “changes in manufacturing technique … demand greater synchronization of labour and a greater exactitude in time-routines in society” (80). For Thompson, the “technological conditioning” of “time-sense” ushers in the model of “time-measurement as a means of labour exploitation” (80). This historical point is central to Giacomo Bianchino’s argument in “Afterwork and Overtime: The Social Reproduction of Human Capital”, in his discussion of the fundamental nature of capitalism in shaping time-sense. However, what we suggest is that this theme of ‘time-sense’ as shaped by the broader political economy of media is found within each of the pieces in the issue.A discussion of standardisation is problematic, however, in the wider conceptualisation of time as elusive, multi-dynamic and fractured. Surely, standardisation should at least come with the ability of certainty, in some respects. However, this is the paradox of the digital and new media age: That standardisation is both arbitrary and, in echo of Balibar and Althusser, ‘peculiar’ to an endless layering of separate time-streams. It is, perhaps, the jumping between them, which has become a necessary function of living in the digital age, that produces the sense of fracture, the loss of standard.This issue of M/C Journal explores the various ways in which the constellation of current media practices that are online, offline, embodied, and networked, collectively inform and express concepts of time. The feature article "With This Body, I Subtract Myself from Neoliberalised Time: Sub-Habituality & Relaxation after Deleuze", written by Antonia Pont, keenly asks how relaxation might be used to evade neoliberal machinations around organising time, efficiency, and productivity, all of which endanger a diversity of temporalities. While all media have their own unique limitations and affordances regarding influencing and expressing relationships to time, they are also impacted by current perceptions of uncertainty and neoliberal agendas that underlie the working relationships between people, the media that they engage in, and representations of the world.The feelings of inertia expressed by Toffler nearly 50 years ago has not only been accelerated through technological expansion, but by a layering of multiple time codes which reflect the wide range of media practices that permeate the contemporary vernacular. In 2019, concepts from the current post-Internet stage are beginning to emerge and we are finding that digital media fragments as much as it connects and unites. An ‘inward notion of time’ becomes brokered through automated processes, issues around surveillance, affect, standardisation, norms, nostalgia, and the minutiae of digital time.ReferencesAlthusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: NBL, 1970.Ansell-Pearson, Keith, John Ó Maoilearca, and Melissa McMahon. Henri Bergson: Key Writings. New York: Continuum, 2002.Bolter, Jay, and Richard Grusin. “Remediation.” Configurations 4.3 (1996): 311-358.Davison, Graeme. The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1993.Headrick, M.V. “Origin and Evolution of the Anchor Clock Escapement.” IEEE Control Systems 22.2 (2002): 41-52.Johannessen, Jon-Arild. Automation, Innovation and Economic Crisis: Surviving the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Milton: Routledge, 2018.Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987.Powell, Helen. Stop the Clocks! Time and Narrative in Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Los Angeles: Pine Forge P, 2008.Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Oakland: U of California P, 2014.Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.Thompson, E.P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38.1 (1967): 56-97.Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. London: Bodley Head, 1970.