Relationships between power and agency: the role of the ‘theatre designer’ in performance-making processes

In 2013, the Contemporary Theatre Review dedicated an issue to ‘Alphabet: A Lexicon of Theatre and Performance’. The entry for ‘M’, ‘Mise en Scene’, reflects on the invisible creativity of the ‘unseen work that led to the production’s first night’ (Singleton, 2013, p.47). This paper aims to address an absence of theorising about the ways that professional identities and creative practices of theatre designers are shaped by performance-making practices. Theatre design pedagogy has been selected as the site of investigation because it provides a means by which normative beliefs and practices about ‘being’ a designer and ‘doing’ design, might be evaluated. I consider how designers’ ‘agency’ is expressed and/or implied in contemporary theatre design pedagogies, and the relationship of this to how power is manifested in ‘structures’ (Giddens, 1984) of performance making. I conclude that differences between dramatic or ‘texted’ performance (Schechner, 1968) and devised, site-specific or ‘post-dramatic’ performance (Lehmann, 2006), frame conceptions and enactment of designer agency in different ways. In particular, I focus on three notions of agency; ‘authorial agency’ (Isackes, 2012), ‘professional agency’ (Eteläpelto et al, 2013) and ‘identity agency’ (Hitlin and Elder, 2007)

A formula-driven scalable benchmark model for ABM, applied to FLAME GPU

Agent Based Modelling (ABM) systems have become a popular technique for describing complex and dynamic systems. ABM is the simulation of intelligent agents and how these agents communicate with each other within the model. The growing number of agent-based applications in the simulation and AI fields led to an increase in the number of studies that focused on evaluating modelling capabilities of these applications. Observing system performance and how applications behave during increases in population size is the main factor for benchmarking in most of these studies. System scalability is not the only issue that may affect the overall performance, but there are some issues that need to be dealt with to create a standard benchmark model that meets all ABM criteria. This paper presents a new benchmark model and benchmarks the performance characteristics of the FLAME GPU simulator as an example of a parallel framework for ABM. The aim of this model is to provide parameters to easily measure the following elements: system scalability, system homogeneity, and the ability to handle increases in the level of agent communications and model complexity. Results show that FLAME GPU demonstrates near linear scalability when increasing population size and when reducing homogeneity. The benchmark also shows a negative correlation between increasing the communication complexity between agents and execution time. The results create a baseline for improving the performance of FLAME GPU and allow the simulator to be contrasted with other multi-agent simulators

A Discontinuity in the Distribution of Fixed Point Sums

The quantity $f(n,r)$, defined as the number of permutations of the set $[n]=\{1,2,... n\}$ whose fixed points sum to $r$, shows a sharp discontinuity in the neighborhood of $r=n$. We explain this discontinuity and study the possible existence of other discontinuities in $f(n,r)$ for permutations. We generalize our results to other families of structures that exhibit the same kind of discontinuities, by studying $f(n,r)$ when ``fixed points'' is replaced by ``components of size 1'' in a suitable graph of the structure. Among the objects considered are permutations, all functions and set partitions.Comment: 1 figur

TASS Mark IV Photometric Survey of the Northern Sky

The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS) is a loose confederation of amateur and professional astronomers. We describe the design and construction of our Mark IV systems, a set of wide-field telescopes with CCD cameras which take simultaneous images in the $V$ and $I_C$ passbands. We explain our observational procedures and the pipeline which processes and reduces the images into lists of stellar positions and magnitudes. We have compiled a large database of measurements for stars in the northern celestial hemisphere with $V$-band magnitudes in the range 7 < V < 13. This paper describes data taken over the four-year period starting November, 2001. One of our results is a catalog of repeated measurements on the Johnson-Cousins system for over 4.3 million stars.Comment: Accepted for publication in December, 2006, issue of PASP. 44 pages including 20 figures. Patches catalog available at http://spiff.rit.edu/tass/patches

Wide Field Multiband Imaging of Low Redshift Quasar Environments

We present photometry of the large scale environments of a sample of twelve broad line AGN with $0.06 < z < 0.37$ from deep images in the SDSS $u$, $g$, $r$, and $i$ filters taken with the 90Prime prime focus camera on the Steward Observatory Bok Telescope. We measure galaxy clustering around these AGN using two standard techniques: correlation amplitude (B$_{gq}$) and the two point correlation function. We find average correlation amplitudes for the 10 radio quiet objects in the sample equal to (9$\pm$18, 144$\pm$114, -39$\pm$56, 295$\pm$260) Mpc$^{1.77}$ in ($u$, $g$, $r$, $i$), all consistent with the expectation from galaxy clustering. Using a ratio of the galaxy-quasar cross-correlation function to the galaxy autocorrelation function, we calculate the relative bias of galaxies and AGN, $b_{gq}$. The bias in the $u$ band, $b_{gq}=3.08\pm0.51$ is larger compared to that calculated in the other bands, but it does not correlate with AGN luminosity, black hole mass, or AGN activity via the luminosity of the [OIII] emission line. Thus ongoing nuclear accretion activity is not reflected in the large scale environments from $\sim$10 h$^{-1}$ kpc to $\sim$0.5 h$^{-1}$ Mpc and may indicate a non-merger mode of AGN activity and/or a significant delay between galaxy mergers and nuclear activity in this sample of mostly radio quiet quasars.Comment: 23 pages, 17 figures; Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal; Table 2 available as a machine readable table in online articl

Distinguishing cancerous from non-cancerous cells through analysis of electrical noise

Since 1984, electric cell-substrate impedance sensing (ECIS) has been used to monitor cell behavior in tissue culture and has proven sensitive to cell morphological changes and cell motility. We have taken ECIS measurements on several cultures of non-cancerous (HOSE) and cancerous (SKOV) human ovarian surface epithelial cells. By analyzing the noise in real and imaginary electrical impedance, we demonstrate that it is possible to distinguish the two cell types purely from signatures of their electrical noise. Our measures include power-spectral exponents, Hurst and detrended fluctuation analysis, and estimates of correlation time; principal-component analysis combines all the measures. The noise from both cancerous and non-cancerous cultures shows correlations on many time scales, but these correlations are stronger for the non-cancerous cells.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; submitted to PR

Metal-Insulator transition in the Generalized Hubbard model

We present the exact ground-state wave function and energy of the generalized Hubbard model, subjected to the condition that the number of double occupied sites is conserved, for a wide, physically relevant range of parameters. For one hole and one double occupied site the existence of the ferromagnetic ground-state is proved which allow one to determine the critical value of the on-site repulsion corresponding to the point of metal-insulator transition. For the one dimensional model the exact solution for special values of the parameters is obtained.Comment: 20 pages, LaTex. Mod.Phys.Lett.B 7 (1993) 1397; Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter (to appear

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds