Distance dramaturgy

A correspondence and conversation between Dee Heddon and Alex Kelly. How do you tell a life? Throughout much of 2004 and into 2005 Dee Heddon and Alex Kelly corresponded by email: about auto/biographical performance, auto/biographical literature, Lad Lit, reading, writing, story telling and Third Angel’s performance making processes. This discussion was one strand of the making process of Third Angel’s performance The Lad Lit Project; a dramaturgy at a distance. Responding to research prompts from Alex – reading lists, notebook quotes, research and rehearsal room reports – Dee intervened with questions, provocations, opinions, suggestions for devising exercises. The personal, practical and theoretical intertwined. These interventions had a significant effect on the process and final show, helping Alex to move the work from a theatrical quoting of the Lad Lit genre, to become a performance work that is both autobiographical and about autobiography. For the creation of this text Dee and Alex return to their original correspondence, teasing out the significant strands and key exchanges, reflecting on carrying out dramaturgy at a distance, and discussing the impact of this process on the final performance. A document of quoted archive material (emails, notebook extracts) and discussion after the event

Acoustic mechanisms of a species-based discrimination of the chick-a-dee call in sympatric black-capped (Poecile atricapillus) and mountain chickadees (P. gambeli)

Previous perceptual research with black-capped and mountain chickadees has demonstrated that these species treat each other’s namesake chick-a-dee calls as belonging to separate, open-ended categories. Further, the terminal dee portion of the call has been implicated as the most prominent species marker. However, statistical classification using acoustic summary features suggests that all note-types contained within the chick-a-dee call should be sufficient for species classification. The current study seeks to better understand the note-type based mechanisms underlying species-based classification of the chick-a-dee call by black-capped and mountain chickadees. In two, complementary, operant discrimination experiments, both species were trained to discriminate the species of the signaler using either entire chick-a-dee calls, or individual note-types from chick-a-dee calls. In agreement with previous perceptual work we find that the D note had significant stimulus control over species-based discrimination. However, in line with statistical classifications, we find that all note-types carry species information. We discuss reasons why the most easily discriminated note-types are likely candidates to carry species-based cues.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

High daily energy expenditure of incubating shorebirds on High Arctic tundra: a circumpolar study

1. Given the allometric scaling of thermoregulatory capacity in birds, and the cold and exposed Arctic environment, it was predicted that Arctic-breeding shorebirds should incur high costs during incubation. Using doubly labelled water (DLW), daily energy expenditure (DEE) during incubation was measured in eight shorebird species weighing between 29 and 142 g at various sites in the Eurasian and Canadian High Arctic. The results are compared with a compilation of similar data for birds at lower latitudes. 2. There was a significant positive correlation between species average DEE and body mass (DEE (kJ day−1) = 28·12 BM (g)^0·524, r^2 = 0·90). The slopes of the allometric regression lines for DEE on body mass of tundra-breeding birds and lower latitude species (a sample mostly of passerines but including several shorebirds) are similar (0·548 vs 0·545). DEE is about 50% higher in birds on the tundra than in temperate breeding areas. 3. Data for radiomarked Red Knots for which the time budgets during DLW measurements were known, indicated that foraging away from the nest on open tundra is almost twice as costly as incubating a four-egg clutch. 4. During the incubation phase in the High Arctic, tundra-breeding shorebirds appear to incur among the highest DEE levels of any time of the year. The rates of energy expenditure measured here are among the highest reported in the literature so far, reaching inferred ceilings of sustainable energy turnover rates.

Glory box: Tim Miller's autobiography of the future

Performance artist Tim Miller has been making autobiographical work for more than twenty years. Dee Heddon explores Miller's recent show, Glory Box (2001), arguing that, both in his practice and his use of his own life stories, he is attempting not only to connect with but to energize his audiences, transforming them into activist spectators. One tactic Miller employs in Glory Box is futurity – performing an autobiography that he has not yet lived. This future is one that Miller compels us collectively to rewrite, inviting us to change his potential life and life-story in the process. Dee Heddon argues that Miller's commitment to and faith in the transformative potential of live performance enacts a resistance to those pejorative terms too easily thrown at autobiographical performance: Miller may work from his 'self', but his work is far from solipsistic, egotistic, or narcissistic

Doc2EDAG: An End-to-End Document-level Framework for Chinese Financial Event Extraction

Most existing event extraction (EE) methods merely extract event arguments within the sentence scope. However, such sentence-level EE methods struggle to handle soaring amounts of documents from emerging applications, such as finance, legislation, health, etc., where event arguments always scatter across different sentences, and even multiple such event mentions frequently co-exist in the same document. To address these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end model, Doc2EDAG, which can generate an entity-based directed acyclic graph to fulfill the document-level EE (DEE) effectively. Moreover, we reformalize a DEE task with the no-trigger-words design to ease the document-level event labeling. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Doc2EDAG, we build a large-scale real-world dataset consisting of Chinese financial announcements with the challenges mentioned above. Extensive experiments with comprehensive analyses illustrate the superiority of Doc2EDAG over state-of-the-art methods. Data and codes can be found at https://github.com/dolphin-zs/Doc2EDAG.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 201

East Asian Economic Integration and its Impact on Future Growth

Two propositions appear to be gaining wide currency, given the revealed preference for preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the East Asian region and elsewhere. The first is that economic integration is a good way to promote economic growth. The second is that PTAs, particularly ones that go beyond goods trade, are an effective way to promote economic integration. Yet both propositions are empirical questions. In this paper, a partial evaluation of the evidence suggests caution is called for. Current PTAs appear to be doing little to remove the important impediments to growth in the region. Far greater income gains would come from comprehensive reform of nondiscriminatory impediments to competition, as part of a thorough-going program of unilateral domestic regulatory reform. It may be time to rethink East Asian economic integration as a policy priority, or at least review the way in which it might be pursued.East Asia, economic integration, trade, Growth