'Are you sick, yet? / Are you disgusted, yet?': Watching torture in Dennis Kelly's works

Detention without charge, severe physical and mental pain and suffering, intimidation, coercion, and other forms of torture set out in the United Nations Convention against Torture, have become justified and normalized since the start of the twenty-first century in order supposedly to guarantee national security and maintain law, order, freedom and democracy. This chapter derives its theoretical premise from Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970), to illustrate how a number of Dennis Kelly’s plays testify to the torture and other human rights abuses taking place not only in totalitarian regimes, but also in states that supposedly uphold civil liberties. The chapter illustrates both how Kelly exposes the torture that habitually takes place in covert locations behind a façade of ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’, and also the ethics implicit in how audiences spectate the abusive degradation of others from the safety of our television screens, or of our theatre seats

Nods of Agreement: Webcam-Driven Avatars Improve Meeting Outcomes and Avatar Satisfaction Over Audio-Driven or Static Avatars in All-Avatar Work Videoconferencing

Avatars are edging into mainstream videoconferencing, but evaluation of how avatar animation modalities contribute to work meeting outcomes has been limited. We report a within-group videoconferencing experiment in which 68 employees of a global technology company, in 16 groups, used the same stylized avatars in three modalities (static picture, audio-animation, and webcam-animation) to complete collaborative decision-making tasks. Quantitatively, for meeting outcomes, webcam-animated avatars improved meeting effectiveness over the picture modality and were also reported to be more comfortable and inclusive than both other modalities. In terms of avatar satisfaction, there was a similar preference for webcam animation as compared to both other modalities. Our qualitative analysis shows participants expressing a preference for the holistic motion of webcam animation, and that meaningful movement outweighs realism for meeting outcomes, as evidenced through a systematic overview of ten thematic factors. We discuss implications for research and commercial deployment and conclude that webcam-animated avatars are a plausible alternative to video in work meetings

Embodied time travel in VR: from witnessing climate change to action for prevention

This study explores the impact of embodied experiences in Virtual Reality (VR) on individuals’ attitudes and behavior towards climate change. A total of 41 participants were divided into two groups: an embodied group that interacted with a virtual environment through full-body avatars, and a non-embodied group that observed the scenarios from an invisible observer’s point of view. The VR experience simulated the progressive consequences of climate change across three generations within a family, aiming to make the abstract and relatively distant concept of climate change a tangible and personal issue. The final scene presented an optimistic scenario of a future where humans had successfully combated climate change through collective action. The evidence suggests that there is an effect of the scenario on the carbon footprint response, even 6 weeks after the VR exposure, irrespective of condition. Additionally, increases were found in participants’ perceived influence on climate action and engagement in pro-environmental behaviors, with the embodied group showing a more pronounced response in the short term. These findings suggest that immersive VR experiences that incorporate virtual embodiment can be an effective tool in enhancing awareness and motivating pro-environmental behavior by providing a powerful and personal perspective on the impacts of climate change

Next-Generation Healthcare: Digital Twin Technology and Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network Enhancing Monkeypox Detection - Comparison with Pre-trained Models

The rise of digital healthcare has led to the adoption of various technologies aimed at enhancing health operations, patient well-being, and healthcare costs. Digital Twin (DT) technology is a pivotal innovation in this domain. Monkeypox virus (MPXV), a zoonotic virus, poses a significant public health risk, particularly in remote regions of Central and West Africa. Early diagnosis of monkeypox lesions is crucial but challenging due to similarities with other skin conditions. Many studies have employed deep-learning models to detect the monkeypox virus. However, those models often require substantial storage space. This research introduces the Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network (MxSLDNet), an automated digital twin framework designed to enhance digital healthcare operations by enabling early detection and classification of monkeypox and non-monkeypox lesions. Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network (MxSLDNet) significantly advances monkeypox lesion identification, outperforming conventional models like Visual Geometry Group 19 (VGG-19), Densely Connected Network 121 (DenseNet-121), Efficient Network B4 (EfficientNet-B4) and Residual Network 101 (ResNet-101) regarding precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy, while requiring less storage. This innovation addresses the critical issue of storage demands, making the Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network (MxSLDNet) a viable solution for early monkeypox lesion detection in resource-limited healthcare settings. Utilizing the “Monkeypox Skin Lesion Dataset” with 1428 monkeypox and 1764 non-monkeypox images, Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network (MxSLDNet) achieves high recall, precision, and F1-scores of 0.96, 0.95, and 0.95, respectively. Integrating digital twins into healthcare promises to create a scalable, intelligent, and comprehensive health ecosystem, enhancing treatments by connecting patients and healthcare providers

Ray of Light

Expanded version of paper given at the colloquium celebrating the work of Nicholas Royle on the occasion of his retirement

BioBERT-RxReadmit: Improving Hospital Readmission Predictions Through Clinical Text Analysis with BioBERT

This study introduces BioBERT-RxReadmit, a dual stage model designed to predict hospital readmissions using unstructured clinical data from the MIMIC-III dataset. The model's name reflects its dual focus: leveraging BioBERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Biomedical Texts) for analyzing medical text and Rx, symbolizing prescription and medical intervention, to address readmission risks. In the first stage, BioBERT identifies key clinical features such as symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments from free-text clinical notes. These features are then integrated with the complete clinical text in the second stage, where BioBERT is fine-tuned for classification to predict 30-day readmissions. This comprehensive approach improves the model's ability to recognize complex patterns in patient data, resulting in improved predictive accuracy. BioBERT-RxReadmit helps identify high-risk patients more effectively, reducing preventable readmissions, optimizing healthcare resources, and improving patient care, showcasing the transformative potential of advanced NLP mod-els in healthcare

Starmer’s election victory: from the politics of support to the politics of power

Keir Starmer was elected Labour leader in 2020 after the party’s worst election defeat since 1935. Just four years later, the party returned to government with a landslide majority. Scholars have explained the dominance of the Conservative Party through an analysis of the ‘politics of support’ and the ‘politics of power’. This article applies that framework to Labour, focussing on how support was built in the run up to 2024. It examines the politics of support across the party organization, parliament and, most importantly, the electorate. I argue that Starmer’s bid to achieve electoral support relied on two main factors: a ‘decontamination’ strategy related to the party’s immediate past; and a cautious approach that minimized policy commitments and downplayed the role of ideology. The approach was electorally successful, but resulted in shallow support, gained in large part from removing reasons voters in target seats had previously not supported the party. The article concludes by discussing the challenges this strategy of support presents for the ‘politics of power’

The complexity of transnationalism: A case study of the British-Bangladeshi diaspora

This chapter from an edited book by Ajaya Sahoo will be a definitive handbook on South Asian diasporas. This chapter will focus on the British Bangladeshi experience and discuss the social, race, religious, political and social class dynamics of transnationalism