Laboratory, library, database : London’s avant-garde drama societies and ephemeral repertoire

How did London’s avant-garde drama societies shape the performance repertoire? Dedicated to the discovery of new or sometimes very old plays, these subscription societies were experimental coterie clubs composed of members whose annual fees financed, and secured tickets to, a season of private productions. In 1891, J. T. Grein founded the first such group in Britain, the Independent Theatre Society, in order to stage a performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which the Lord Chamberlain had banned from the public stage. Over 140 subscription societies followed; the Stage Society (1899–1939) ran longest and most successfully. This essay begins by quantitatively analyzing a database of over 23,000 London productions from 1890–1959 in order to determine the extent to which subscription societies introduced a modern dramatic repertoire to the public stage, otherwise known as the commercial theater. Then, it argues that subscription societies virtually assembled the very idea of a modern dramatic repertoire using ephemera such as prospectuses, programs, annual reports, and tickets. The methodological aims with respect to the study of repertoire are two-fold: to demonstrate the potentials and limitations of digital databases, and to make a case for integrating them with book history. The essay expands on previous analyses of the relationship between page and stage by articulating the role of ephemera, an under-theorized print genre but one of importance to institutions generally and to theater specifically. It contends that the rise of digital databases further invites us to think about how theatrical collectivity is conditioned by media both new and old

Schoolchildren or citizen shareholders? : Provincial repertory audiences, letters to the editor, and public subscription

When the Abbey Theatre installed a nightly police cordon to silence protesting playgoers during the 1907 run of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, spectators voiced their objections in newsprint. Under pseudonyms like “A Western Girl,” “A Commonplace Person,” “A Much Interested Foreigner,” and “A Lover of Liberty,” correspondents sent letters to the Dublin Evening Telegraph, Freeman's Journal, and Dublin Evening Mail. “Vox Populi” wrote that the arrested protesters “showed an admirable public spirit, which in any other country would be highly honoured.” “Oryza” reported a conversation overheard from the stalls in which Synge had said that the audience's hissing was “quite legitimate.” After journalist and Galway MP Stephen Gwynn penned a letter supporting the Abbey, biographer D. J. O'Donoghue responded that “the vindictiveness which has been shown night after night in expelling and prosecuting people who ahve [sic], in their excitement, called out ‘It's a libel’ or ‘shame,’ or otherwise mildly protested, is a serious menace to the freedom of an audience.” He referred to the furor as a “newspaper controversy”; others called it a “newspaper war.” In a public discussion at the Abbey after the play's run, Yeats quoted from the correspondence when defending his decision to call in the police. According to playwright William Boyle, the controversy boiled down to political representation. In a letter to the Freeman's Journal, he argued that protesters had not reacted “by staying away,” as some supporters had suggested they should, “because the ‘Abbey’ is a subsidised theatre, independent of the money taken at the door. Therefore … the public had no remedy, but the one resorted to.” Private subsidy had muffled the democratic shuffling of playgoers’ pocketbooks; forced to shut their mouths inside the theatre, playgoers opened up to the newspapers that circulated around it

From public library prankster to playwright : Joe Orton and postwar Britain’s nanny state

Posters with graffiti are among the most visible examples of vandalism against Postwar Britain’s nanny state; this essay focuses on more off-the-wall exploits by 1960s public-library prankster and playwright Joe Orton. After spending six months in prison for defacing library books, Orton emerged to become one of Postwar Britain’s most important dramatists. Linking histories of libraries, propaganda, and graffiti, this essay asks why media regulators are so often analogized to old maids, and their vandals, to young men. What role do books and other print media play as mouthpieces for state authority, and as canvases for talking back to it

Topological Entropy of Braids on the Torus

A fast method is presented for computing the topological entropy of braids on the torus. This work is motivated by the need to analyze large braids when studying two-dimensional flows via the braiding of a large number of particle trajectories. Our approach is a generalization of Moussafir's technique for braids on the sphere. Previous methods for computing topological entropies include the Bestvina--Handel train-track algorithm and matrix representations of the braid group. However, the Bestvina--Handel algorithm quickly becomes computationally intractable for large braid words, and matrix methods give only lower bounds, which are often poor for large braids. Our method is computationally fast and appears to give exponential convergence towards the exact entropy. As an illustration we apply our approach to the braiding of both periodic and aperiodic trajectories in the sine flow. The efficiency of the method allows us to explore how much extra information about flow entropy is encoded in the braid as the number of trajectories becomes large.Comment: 19 pages, 44 figures. SIAM journal styl

Competition among Sellers in Securities Auctions

We study simultaneous security-bid second-price auctions with competition among sellers for potential bidders. The sellers compete by designing ordered sets of securities that the bidders can offer as payment for the assets. Upon observing auction designs, potential bidders decide which auctions to enter. We characterize all symmetric equilibria and show that there always exist equilibria in which auctions are in standard securities or their combinations. In large markets the unique equilibrium is auctions in pure cash. We extend the model for competition in reserve prices and show that binding reserve prices never constitute equilibrium as long as equilibrium security designs are not call options. (JEL D44, D82, G10)

Coupled information networks drive honeybee (Apis mellifera) collective foraging

Collective behaviour by eusocial insect colonies is typically achieved through multiple communication networks that produce complex behaviour at the group level but often appear to provide redundant or even competing information. A classic example occurs in honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies, where both the dance communication system and robust scent-based mechanisms contribute to the allocation of a colony's workforce by regulating the flow of experienced foragers among known food sources. Here we analysed social connectivity patterns during the reactivation of experienced foragers to familiar feeding sites to show that these social information pathways are not simply multiple means to achieve the same end but intersect to play complementary roles in guiding forager behaviour. Using artificial feeding stations, we mimicked a natural scenario in which two forager groups were simultaneously collecting from distinct patches containing different flowering species. We then observed the reactivation of these groups at their familiar feeding sites after interrupting their foraging. Social network analysis revealed that temporarily unemployed individuals interacted more often and for longer with foragers that advertised a familiar versus unfamiliar foraging site. Due to such resource-based assortative mixing, network-based diffusion analysis estimated that reactivation events primarily resulted from interactions among bees that had been trained to the same feeding station and less so from different-feeder interactions. Both scent- and dance-based interactions strongly contributed to reactivation decisions. However, each bout of dance-following had an especially strong effect on a follower's likelihood of reactivation, particularly when dances indicated locations familiar to followers. Our findings illustrate how honeybee foragers can alter their social connectivity in ways that are likely to enhance collective outcomes by enabling foragers to rapidly access up-to-date information about familiar foraging sites. In addition, our results highlight how reliance on multiple communication mechanisms enables social insect workers to utilise flexible information-use strategies that are robust to variation in the availability of social information

From dyads to collectives: a review of honeybee signalling

From Springer Nature via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2022-03-11, rev-recd 2022-07-12, accepted 2022-07-24, registration 2022-07-26, pub-electronic 2022-08-22, online 2022-08-22, pub-print 2022-09Publication status: PublishedFunder: H2020 European Research Council; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100010663; Grant(s): 638873Abstract: The societies of honeybees (Apis spp.) are microcosms of divided labour where the fitness interests of individuals are so closely aligned that, in some contexts, the colony behaves as an entity in itself. Self-organization at this extraordinary level requires sophisticated communication networks, so it is not surprising that the celebrated waggle dance, by which bees share information about locations outside the hive, evolved here. Yet bees within the colony respond to several other lesser-known signalling systems, including the tremble dance, the stop signal and the shaking signal, whose roles in coordinating worker behaviour are not yet fully understood. Here, we firstly bring together the large but disparate historical body of work that has investigated the “meaning” of such signals for individual bees, before going on to discuss how network-based approaches can show how such signals function as a complex system to control the collective foraging effort of these remarkable social insect societies

Topological Chaos in Spatially Periodic Mixers

Topologically chaotic fluid advection is examined in two-dimensional flows with either or both directions spatially periodic. Topological chaos is created by driving flow with moving stirrers whose trajectories are chosen to form various braids. For spatially periodic flows, in addition to the usual stirrer-exchange braiding motions, there are additional topologically-nontrivial motions corresponding to stirrers traversing the periodic directions. This leads to a study of the braid group on the cylinder and the torus. Methods for finding topological entropy lower bounds for such flows are examined. These bounds are then compared to numerical stirring simulations of Stokes flow to evaluate their sharpness. The sine flow is also examined from a topological perspective.Comment: 18 pages, 14 figures. RevTeX4 style with psfrag macros. Final versio

Common datastream permutations of animal social network data are not appropriate for hypothesis testing using regression models

1. Social network methods have become a key tool for describing, modelling and testing hypotheses about the social structures of animals. However, due to the non-independence of network data and the presence of confounds, specialised statistical techniques are often needed to test hypotheses in these networks. Datastream permutations, originally developed to test the null hypothesis of random social structure, have become a popular tool for testing a wide array of null hypotheses in animal social networks. In particular, they have been used to test whether exogenous factors are related to network structure by interfacing these permutations with regression models.2. Here, we show that these datastream permutations typically do not represent the null hypothesis of interest to researchers interfacing animal social network analysis with regression modelling, and use simulations to demonstrate the potential pitfalls of using this methodology.3. Our simulations show that, if used to indicate whether a relationship exists between network structure and a covariate, datastream permutations can result in extremely high type I error rates, in some cases approaching 50%. In the same set of simulations, traditional node-label permutations produced appropriate type I error rates (~5%).4. Our analysis shows that datastream permutations do not represent the appropriate null hypothesis for these analyses. We suggest that potential alternatives to this procedure may be found in regarding the problems of non-independence of network data and unreliability of observations separately. If biases introduced during data collection can be corrected, either prior to model fitting or within the model itself, node-label permutations then serve as a useful test for interfacing animal social network analysis with regression modelling

Transcriptomic assessment of resistance to effects of an aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) agonist in embryos of Atlantic killifish (Fundulus heteroclitus) from a marine Superfund site

© The Author(s), 2011. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in BMC Genomics 12 (2011): 263, doi:10.1186/1471-2164-12-263.Populations of Atlantic killifish (Fundulus heteroclitus) have evolved resistance to the embryotoxic effects of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other halogenated and nonhalogenated aromatic hydrocarbons that act through an aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR)-dependent signaling pathway. The resistance is accompanied by reduced sensitivity to induction of cytochrome P450 1A (CYP1A), a widely used biomarker of aromatic hydrocarbon exposure and effect, but whether the reduced sensitivity is specific to CYP1A or reflects a genome-wide reduction in responsiveness to all AHR-mediated changes in gene expression is unknown. We compared gene expression profiles and the response to 3,3',4,4',5-pentachlorobiphenyl (PCB-126) exposure in embryos (5 and 10 dpf) and larvae (15 dpf) from F. heteroclitus populations inhabiting the New Bedford Harbor, Massachusetts (NBH) Superfund site (PCB-resistant) and a reference site, Scorton Creek, Massachusetts (SC; PCB-sensitive). Analysis using a 7,000-gene cDNA array revealed striking differences in responsiveness to PCB-126 between the populations; the differences occur at all three stages examined. There was a sizeable set of PCB-responsive genes in the sensitive SC population, a much smaller set of PCB-responsive genes in NBH fish, and few similarities in PCB-responsive genes between the two populations. Most of the array results were confirmed, and additional PCB-regulated genes identified, by RNA-Seq (deep pyrosequencing). The results suggest that NBH fish possess a gene regulatory defect that is not specific to one target gene such as CYP1A but rather lies in a regulatory pathway that controls the transcriptional response of multiple genes to PCB exposure. The results are consistent with genome-wide disruption of AHR-dependent signaling in NBH fish.This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grants P42ES007381 (Superfund Basic Research Program at Boston University) and by a grant from the WHOI Ocean Life Institute