Browsing by Subject "time"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Information foraging on the web: The effects of “acceptable” Internet delays on multi-page information search behavior
    (2006-11) Taylor, Nolan J.; Dennis, Alan R.
    Web delays are a persistent and highly publicized problem. Long delays have been shown to reduce information search, but less is known about the impact of more modest “acceptable” delays — delays that do not substantially reduce user satisfaction. Prior research suggests that as the time and effort required to complete a task increases, decision-makers tend to reduce information search at the expense of decision quality. In this study, the effects of an acceptable time delay (seven seconds) on information search behavior were examined. Results showed that increased time and effort caused by acceptable delays provoked increased information search.
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    Marking Time in the San Gabriel Mission Garden
    (Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 2014-03-03) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth
    Each of the twenty‐one missions constructed from 1769 to 1823 by Franciscans and Native American “neophytes” along the California coast and inland valleys has some form of a “mission garden” as part of the contemporary landscape. These ornamental gardens, in contrast to the more utilitarian uses of the landscape during the colonial era, were first constructed in Santa Barbara in 1872 and continued to be built throughout the twentieth century in the central courtyards and forecourts of the missions. Using historical documentary and visual evidence, as well as analysis of the contemporary sites, this paper analyzes features such as sundials, inscriptions, memorials, and ruins (both real and fabricated) as physical, metaphorical, and metaphysical markers of time. In this construction of time, past, present, and future are implicated both in the gardens’ design elements and in their reception by those who produced and consume the landscape. Specifically, the gardens are cast as peaceful, beautiful oases in which visitors can “step back” to a simpler time. They commemorate the lives lived and lost in the missions, and they signal the biblical associations of the cloister gardens as Edenic sanctuaries and portents of a paradise yet to come. The time markers operate in a recursive way to locate the spaces in a broader historical narrative and to signify "heritage" in contemporary cultural practice. Even as the missions are promoted as iconic sites in the state's origin story, these time markers in the mission garden operate to mediate contradictory meanings of the sites' colonial heritage.
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    The Staccato Run: A Contemporary Issue in the Zenonian Tradition
    (2000) Burke, Michael B.
    The “staccato run,” in which a runner stops infinitely often while running from one point to another, is a prototype of the “superfeat” (or "supertask”), that is, a feat involving the completion in a finite time of an infinite sequence of distinct, physically individuated acts. There is no widely accepted demonstration that superfeats are impossible logically, but I argue here, contra Grunbaüm, that they are impossible dynamically. Specifically, I show that the staccato run is excluded by Newton’s three laws of motion, when those laws are supplemented with a certain defensible philosophical judgment.