Lilian Baylis: The Visionary Impresario

Lilian Baylis (1874–1937) was one of the most influential impresarios in the history of the performing arts in Britain. We assert that through her work over the first decades of the twentieth century she was the architect for the creation of some of the UK's most important performing companies. Baylis died on 25 November 1937. In an appreciation the following day, The Manchester Guardian was clear about her contribution: Miss Lilian Baylis . . . has left the most enduring memory. She made the Old Vic almost the one theatre in Britain to which an Englishman of cultivated tastes could go without first looking to see what was being played there – though not without first booking his seat. Her productions of Shakespeare did more than anything else to rescue our greatest dramatist from the hands of the unscrupulous actor-managers and to save him from the uncomfortable pedestal on which bardolaters had set him. It is significant that when this year controversy arose on the proposal to build a national theatre not only did Miss Baylis claim that she and her company were the national theatre but that many eminent authorities were ready to agree with her. Her work for opera was equally valiant, though its success was limited by the greater difficulties which surrounded it; the production of opera is an expensive pleasure, for which the English have always been unwilling to pay. Though Miss Baylis's name will always be connected with the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells theatres in London, she did not forget that London was not England. She sent a company to dance the ballets in the Northern cities and this year made it possible for Buxton to stage a dramatic festival of the highest quality. If she had lived longer this practical missionary of the theatre might have brought light into many dark places. 1 In this chapter, we trace Baylis’ career, paying particular attention to her ground-breaking innovations at the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells Theatres and role in establishing British ballet, and argue that her work laid the foundations for the creation of the National Theatre, English National Opera, The Royal Ballet, and Birmingham Royal Ballet

Cross-validation

Cross-validation is one of the most widely used data resampling methods for model selection and evaluation. Cross-validation can be used to tune the hyperparameters of statistical and machine learning models, to prevent overfitting, to compare learning algorithms, and to estimate the generalization error of predictive models. This article gives an introduction to the most common types of cross-validation, such as k-fold cross-validation, nested cross-validation, and leave-one-out cross-validation, as well as their relation to other data resampling strategies

Performance Measures for Binary Classification

This article is an introduction to some of the most fundamental performance measures for the evaluation of binary classifiers. These measures are categorized into three broad families: measures based on a single classification threshold, measures based on a probabilistic interpretation of error, and ranking measures. Graphical methods, such as ROC curves, precision-recall curves, TPR-FPR plots, gain charts, and lift charts, are also discussed. Using a simple example, we illustrate how to calculate the various performance measures and show how they are related. The article also explains how to assess the statistical significance of an obtained performance value, how to calculate approximate and exact parametric confidence intervals, and how to derive percentile bootstrap confidence intervals for a performance measure

Sites of Empowerment: Fin-de-Siècle Salon Culture and the Music of Cécile Chaminade

Marcia J. Citron, the leading Chaminade scholar, argues that many women composers who were active during the 1900s and across the fin-de-siècle period have been linked negatively to the salons and salon culture. She argues that Cécile Chaminade provides a case in point. Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) was a pianist and composer active in fin-de-siècle Paris. She completed around 400 compositions (many of them piano works), of which nearly all were published. In 1913 she received the honour of becoming the first female composer to be awarded the Légion d'Honneur. Beyond France, Chaminade was popular in Britain, where she toured annually and performed for Queen Victoria, and in the US, where she conducted an extensive tour and where many Chaminade Clubs were formed by enthusiasts for her music around 1900. Citron argues, however, that although Chaminade was extremely popular through 1910, her reputation was tarnished through mere association with the salon. Citron cites The New Grove Dictionary from 1980, as perpetuating this perspective by including Gustave Ferrari's entry from Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, from 1911, which states that Chaminade's music is intended for the drawing room. She also writes that Nicolas Slonimsky has deployed the salon as a sign of trivial music in his definition of ‘pseudo-music’ in Music Since 1900, 4th edition, from 1971. 7 Citron states: These accounts typify the pervasive twentieth-century association of women with the salon, and the salon with marginal artistic activity. The social and stylistic democratization in the salon has reinforced negative gender associations. She suggests that the reason for this is that the salons have been denigrated as feminised spaces and were therefore not beneficial to those who participated in them. She goes on to explain that much of this denigration can be attributed to ‘male society’ beginning to ‘fear the salon as a site of female power’, and she asserts that a deliberate suppression of women was conducted through ‘discreditation: denigration of the mixing of the personal and the artistic within the home’

That killing joke isn't funny anymore: Rebranding speciesism after Brexit

The sociological analysis of discourses about non-human animals is crucial to understanding the normalization of their oppression and victimization (Cole & Stewart 2016). This chapter undertakes a parallel deconstruction of two disparate, yet cognate, discursive constructions to expose their violent absurdity: a recent media campaign to rename two aquatic species by Cornish ‘fishermen’ (BBC News, 2021); and the ‘laughing fish’ storyline from Detective Comics (Englehart 1978a, 1978b) and its adaptation for television in Batman: The Animated Series (1992). The Cornish Fish Producers Organisation (CFPO) are seeking to expand the British market for spider crabs and megrim soles by renaming them respectively as ‘Cornish King crab’ and ‘Cornish sole’. This is in response to lost export sales of both species to Europe in the aftermath of Brexit. In ‘The Laughing Fish’, Batman’s arch nemesis, The Joker, brands fishes with his own facial likeness, in order to copyright them and thereby profit from their sale. In both examples, human interests override those of the victimized species. Despite differences in genre, culture and historical period, both examples reveal how speciesism can be socially constructed via affective representations of non-human animals

Tax after the American War of Independence: A Consideration of The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist Papers

The American War of Independence ended formally with the Versailles peace treaty of 1783 – leaving 13 independent states needing a constitution. Tax played a key role in the lead-up to and during the War and in subsequent years, notably in the debate about the newly-developed Constitution. That debate is captured in The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers comprise articles written by Founding Fathers James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, aimed at promoting acceptance of the new Constitution, and explaining and justifying the political principles it embodied. Key – and highly controversial – issues were the separation of powers between the judiciary, the legislature and the executive, and the concept of federalism. Numbers 30–36 of The Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, concern taxation. Although not opposed to individual state taxation, Hamilton aimed to persuade readers that federal taxation was required to provide public necessities. Particularly contentious was the relationship between state tax law and any federal imposition and their respective standing. The views of the Federalists were countered by The Anti-Federalist Papers. The Anti-Federalists opposed ratification of the Constitution, though they too favoured federalism: they wanted a ‘small republic’ (a weak central government), as opposed to a ‘big republic’, fearing that a national government would be too powerful and threaten individual liberties and state government. The Anti-Federalist Papers are liberally peppered with detailed arguments about taxation, with numbers 30–36 being devoted entirely to tax. Of concern was the federal power to tax, which they wanted limited to taxing overseas imports. In this chapter, we will examine the background to The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers in terms of the philosophical ideas (eg Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Paine) about tax leading to the War, the taxes imposed during and after the War and influences on tax policy-making

The effectiveness of microwave heating as an ISRU extraction technique on different arrangements of icy lunar regolith

The lunar poles potentially contain vast quantities of water ice. The water ice is of interest due to its capability to answer scientific questions regarding the Solar System's water reservoir and its potential as a useable space resource for the creation of a sustainable cislunar economy. The lunar polar water ice exists in extremely harsh conditions under vacuum at temperatures as low as 40 K. Therefore, finding the most effective technique for extracting this water ice is an important aspect of ascertaining the suitability of lunar water as an economically viable space resource. Based on previous work, this study investigates the impact of the different possible arrangements of icy regolith in the lunar polar environment on the suitability of microwave heating as a water extraction technique. Three arrangements of icy regolith analogues were created: permafrost, fine granular, and coarse granular. The samples were created to a mass of 40 g, using the lunar highlands simulant LHS-1, and a target water content of 5 wt %. The samples were processed in a microwave heating unit using 250 W, 2.45 GHz microwave energy for 60 min. The quantity of water extracted was determined by measuring the sample mass change in real-time during microwave heating and the sample mass before and after heating. The permafrost, fine granular, and coarse granular samples had extraction ratios of 92 %, 83 %, and 97 %, respectively. Possible explanations for the observed variations seen in the mass loss profiles of the respective samples are provided, including explanations for the differences between samples of varying ice morphology (permafrost and granular) and the differences between samples with varying ice surface areas (fine and coarse granular). While differences were observed, microwave heating effectively extracted water in all the samples and remains an effective ISRU technique for extracting water from icy lunar regolith. Differences in the water extraction of different icy regolith could be useful in determining the arrangement of ice in buried samples