The Ballad of Goodwill

The Ballad of Goodwill or The Lecturers Lament at the Demise of Goodwill in the Neoliberal University. The Ballad of Goodwill is a new workers ballad collectively written during a one-day singing symposium devised by Post Workers Theatre and hosted by the Allmänningen (The Common Room) at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, Gothenburg University (2021). The symposium guests included: Professor Rajani Naidoo - Director, International Centre for Higher Education Management / Dr. Joanna Figiel - Researcher and activist, Centre for Cultural Policy and Management, University of London / Dr. Stevphen Shukaitis- Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, Centre for Work and Organisation / Dr. Jenni Hyde- Ballad historian and precarious academic. Symposium guests and invited speakers all contributed to the production of a ballad through retelling, scripting and discussing the often-hidden economies of goodwill in academic labour and life. Soprano and librettist Roxanne Korda, acted as the event's Troubadour, and sings the final recording of the ballad accompanied by a PWT modular synthesiser reimagining of the tune Packington's Pound, a popular broadside ballad tune before 1700. The Ballad of Goodwill revisits the social function of the broadside ballad for the contemporary workplace and considers the ballad's potential to create relationships across different institutions and professions that face growing pressure and precarity within marketized education. The Ballad of Goodwill was organised as part of Post Workers Theatres residency within Allmänningen (The Common Room) at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, Gothenburg University. Allmänningen was a Vinnova funded research project from 2018-2021 developing and piloting alternative models for university usership and collaboration. The symposium was accessible for students and staff from the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, Gothenburg University, Goldsmiths University and Birmingham City University

Tomorrow's Great Pageant

Tomorrow’s Great Pageant is a socially charged project that re-imagined the iconic Suffrage play, A Pageant of Great Women, for a 21st Century non-binary context. Workshops and participatory events with Bedford’s LGBTQIA+ community performed active ways of debating and co-writing to generate new dialogue and form a network of contemporary voices to comment on issues of gender and freedom. The project launched during The Place Theatre, Bedford’s LGBTQIA+ season in February 2019 with a collective brainstorming event. Guest writers, critics and community activists joined an audience to revisit the structure and message of the historic play and discuss how it could be updated to represent the values and ideals of a diverse 21st century LGBTQIA+ community. Using collective creation, improvisation and debate, Bedford’s local community were then invited to co-author the new play. Workshops led by Ray Filar, Claudia Jefferies and Emma Frankland brought together Q:Youth Bedford, students and local performers over a period of six weeks to debate the original play’s premise and characters, transforming their ideas into a new dialogue and updated script. A final performative event, presented a first sharing of the script at The Place Theatre, Bedford on 6 April 2019. Subsequent sharing’s took place at Goldsmith’s, University of London, and Eastside Projects, Birmingham

Autohoodening

Autohoodening is a consciousness-raising custom for the age of A.I Capitalism, updating an ancient midwinter ritual to critically engage with the horrors of working as a seasonal associate in an Amazon fulfilment centre. Conceived in 2019 by Post Workers Theatre, Autohoodening is a collective inquiry that combines talks and debate on folk history and contemporary work issues, with scripts, songs, costume and live performance. A symposium was held within the Design Department at Goldsmiths, which acted as the catalyst for a week of collective reworking. Discussion focues on how folkloric, archetypes could be used to address contemporary labour issues. Presentations were given by Ben Jones, member of the St Nicholas at Wade Hoodeners, Folk Historian George Frampton and journalist and writer James Bloodworth who shared his experience of working undercover in Amazon's Rugeley Fulfilment Centre. Participants of the symposium went on to produce a collectively written response to the mid-winter custom of Hoodening, performed in East Kent for over 200 years. Originally, the Hoodeners were agricultural labourers, working in ploughing teams, who performed a carnivalesque satire of their working realites, visiting different locations in the local community during the fallow season of winter. Autohoodening 2019 begins to reimagine this custom for the age of automation, updating its design, delivery and social purpose. How might the singing, dancing and physical humour parody and draw attention to the horrifying working conditions hidden behind consumer-facing infrastructure and the ease of ‘one-click’ delivery

Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing

As part of the wider Autohoodening Symposium and workshops begun in 2019, this is a collaborative response to a midwinter custom dating back over 200 years. Further research in the working conditions of Amazon Workers in the UK to create a feature length tragic comic opera farce, further reimaging the Kentish calendar Custom of Hoodening. Hoodening was originally performed by farm labourers in East Kent who paraded with a horse effigy in a carnivalesque satire of their working reality during the fallow season of winter. The Opera was written in collaboration with Infinite Opera, with additional material gathered through interviews with GMB Union Managers and Amazon worker message boards. Autohoodening reimagines this custom for the age of automation, updating its design, delivery and social commentary and asks how might the singing, dancing and physical humour parody and draw attention to the horrifying working conditions hidden behind consumer-facing infrastructure and the ease of ‘one-click’ delivery? The work was premiered at Vivid Studios Birmingham at Christmas in 2021, following Amazon Prime Day and during a spate of worldwide protests against the treatment of Amazon workers, and shown again at the 2022 Lulea Bienalle in Sweden. The film focuses on Captain Swing, the fictional face of worker dissent in the great English agricultural uprising of 1830, is resurrected to confront the horrors of working as a seasonal associate in an Amazon fulfilment centre. Will Swing help the workers to overcome Alexis the evil scanner, a symbol of Amazon’s regime of technological discipline

Protesteroo

Protesteroo is a socialist rerouting of the gig economy food delivery company Deliveroo. A singing and cycling protest service that reactivates activities from the historic Clarion social movement to deliver on-demand messages of hope and resistance. Protesteroo was conceived as part of Three Day Work-Out; a three day event exploring the connections between work, social movements and free time at Tate Liverpool in May 2019. The Clarion, a historic social reform movement, was very active in Liverpool in the late 19th century. Three Day Work-Out, revisited it’s core activities: communal cycling, singing and publishing to reflect on current debates around modern forms of work and leisure. The project brought together the Liverpool Socialist Singers, and the Angry Margaret Protest Choir (BCU) led by Infinite Opera. Members of the public were invited to update songs from the Clarion Song Book and specify a location within a 2.5 mile radius of Tate Liverpool where they would like their protest to be delivered. Tate Exchange became the Protesteroo HQ, hosting a range of participatory events. These included a film screening of The Last Clarion House (2017), directed by Charlotte Bill, a talk and discussion with Prof Peter Cox on the Clarion movement, cycling cultures, and activism and a drop in a zine-making workshop led by Gareth Proskourine-Barnett and BAAAD Press

Computational-Mechanism Design: A Call to Arms

Game theory has developed several powerful tools for analyzing decision making in systems composed of multiple autonomous actors. Given this fact, AI practitioners would like to exploit these tools when building software systems containing multiple agents. However, to do this, the tools must be tailored to computational settings. To this end, the authors provide an overview of computational-mechanism design, which deals with the application of economic principles in computer systems design. Moreover, because many complex systems are inherently distributed, they also present initial results from the relatively new field of distributed-computational-mechanism design and outline the key challenges involved in making the ideas practicable.Engineering and Applied Science

Trust-Based Mechanisms for Robust and Efficient Task Allocation in the Presence of Execution Uncertainty

Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms are often used to allocate tasks to selfish and rational agents. VCG mechanisms are incentive-compatible, direct mechanisms that are efficient (i.e. maximise social utility) and individually rational (i.e. agents prefer to join rather than opt out). However, an important assumption of these mechanisms is that the agents will always successfully complete their allocated tasks. Clearly, this assumption is unrealistic in many real-world applications where agents can, and often do, fail in their endeavours. Moreover, whether an agent is deemed to have failed may be perceived differently by different agents. Such subjective perceptions about an agent’s probability of succeeding at a given task are often captured and reasoned about using the notion of trust. Given this background, in this paper, we investigate the design of novel mechanisms that take into account the trust between agents when allocating tasks. Specifically, we develop a new class of mechanisms, called trust-based mechanisms, that can take into account multiple subjective measures of the probability of an agent succeeding at a given task and produce allocations that maximise social utility, whilst ensuring that no agent obtains a negative utility. We then show that such mechanisms pose a challenging new combinatorial optimisation problem (that is NP-complete), devise a novel representation for solving the problem, and develop an effective integer programming solution (that can solve instances with about 2×105 possible allocations in 40 seconds).

Studying Cardiovascular Disease Using Human Stem Cell-derived 3D Cardiomyocytes

Veronica Bohl ’20 Major: Biology and Psychology, Neuroscience Certificate Program Nicholas Dash ’20 Major: Biology Faculty Mentor: Dr. Charles Toth, Biology This experiment provides insight on how using metabolites derived naturally from the microbiome can influence cardiac inflammation.3D cardiomyocytes were derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells through the utilization of small molecules and growth factors. Quantitative PCR was performed to verify that the organoids expressed genes associated with cardiomyocyte cells. Primers for the genes FOXa2, TNNT2, MYH7, AHR, CACNA1, and KCNH2 were used for the qPCR, as these genes are expressed more prominently in cardiomyocyte cells than the undifferentiated iPSCs.Cardiovascular disease was modeled by inducing inflammation in the organoids using lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a gram-negative bacteria membrane product associated with inflammation and septic shock, indoxyl-3-sulfate (I3S), which is representative of uremic toxins build-up, and poly (I:C), which simulates a viral infection. Cell viability was analyzed by a luminescence (Cell Titer Glo) assay

High-intensity drinking in adult Australian twins

Background: Many adult drinkers consume far beyond the binge threshold. This “high-intensity drinking” (HID), defined as 2 (HID-2) and 3 (HID-3) times the binge threshold, is of public health interest due to its role in acute alcohol-related harms. Research on HID has mostly been limited to college-aged young adults, focused on contextual factors, and neglected the potential role of genetic influences on the propensity to engage in HID. Methods: Structured diagnostic interviews assessing past-year alcohol involvement were conducted with 3,785 individuals (1,365 men, 2,420 women; Mage = 32, range = 21 to 46), including 3,314 twins and 471 nontwin siblings from the Australian Twin Registry. Multinomial logistic regression analyses were conducted to compare HID-2 and HID-3 to binge drinking on demographic correlates, drinking characteristics, and drinking-related consequences. Biometric modeling was conducted to estimate the role of genetic, common, and individual-specific environmental factors in HID propensity. Results: Among past-year drinkers, the prevalence of HID-2 and HID-3 was both 22%, with men disproportionally represented. The frequencies of drinking, intoxication, and binge drinking significantly increased across the heavier drinking categories, which also evidenced higher average consumption quantities and higher rates of alcohol-related consequences. The propensity to engage in HID was significantly heritable (A = 37% [95% CI: 28 to 46%]), with individual-specific environmental influences accounting for the remainder of the variance. Conclusions: This study convincingly demonstrates that HID is not restricted to college-aged young adults, but also can be highly prevalent among those of working age, and that the propensity to engage in HID is partially explained by genetic influences. © 2020 by the Research Society on Alcoholis

Optimal Bidding Strategies for Simultaneous Vickrey Auctions with Perfect Substitutes

We derive optimal bidding strategies for a global bidder who participates in multiple, simultaneous second-price auctions with perfect substitutes. We prove that, if everyone else bids locally in a single auction, the global bidder should always place non-zero bids in all available auctions, provided there are no budget constraints. With a budget, however, the optimal strategy is to bid locally if this budget is equal or less than the valuation. Furthermore, for a wide range of valuation distributions, we prove that the problem of finding the optimal bids reduces to two dimensions if all auctions are identical. Moreoever, we address markets with both sequential and simultaneous auctions, non-identical auctions, and the allocative efficiency of the market. Finally, by combining analystical and simulation results, we analyse equilibrium strategies in case of several global bidders. However, a stable solution is then only found if there are local bidders as well