Apocalipse 1,11 in São Paulo: Aesthetic Vertigo or Exploitation?

Post-print version of article. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2002 MIT Press.Performed in an abandoned prison, Apocalipse I, II re-enacts a 1992 massacre at São Paulo's Carandiru prison where 111 prisoners were shot by the military police. But the inclusion of a live sex show and gratuitous violence raises questions. Apocalipse I, II sought to use theatrical coups to politicize its audience. But for Stanton it failed to get beyond its own gleefully explicit transgressions and develop a coherent critical narrative of the state of Brazil that could empower its audience

British Radio Dramaturgy and the Effects of the New Conservatism

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2004 Cambridge University Press.This essay, which is informed by the author's own practice as a playwright working in the medium of radio drama, looks at some effects of the enforced merger of radio with TV drama to create a ‘bi-media’ department at the BBC, and considers the evolution of commissioning policy since the imposition of the internal market under the Director Generalship of John Birt (from 1992 to 2000). Considering radio drama, after Adorno, as a producer in the culture industry, he suggests that the neo-conservatism of the 1980s, as described by Habermas, is a significant factor in understanding current commissioning practices and the dramaturgy of new realism in some radio drama

A Postcolonial Tempest in Florianopolis

Post-print version of article. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2002 Intellect Ltd.This article seeks to give an account of some of the work that took place during an academic link between the University of Exeter and Santa Catarina State University (UDESC) in Florianopolis, Brazil in 1999 and 2000. The link was jointly funded by the British Council and the Brazilian CAPES and was intended for pairs of academics to visit each other's institutions, share their work and experience the contrasting academic and social cultures. On the author's second visit to Brazil in November-December 2000 he worked with Dr André Carreira to co-direct a production of The Tempest at UDESC; work that attempted to develop and stage a postcolonial reading of the play in a location that is the site of colonial expropriation

The Preservation of the Native bird Population from Invasive Rats on the Island of Tahuna Iti, Tetiaroa, French Polynesia

Tetiaroa is a small atoll in the Society Islands in the South Pacific. Along with many places like it around the world, this atoll has an issue with invasive rats colonizing its islands. Tahuna Iti, one of the small of the atoll, is rat-free and is therefore home to thousands of nesting sea birds. An analysis of aerial photographs from 1955,2002, 2006, as well as island delineation data from 2011, found that the island of Tahuna Iti has not only changed shape, but also size and proximity to Rimatuu, one of the rat-colonized islands. analysis of the change in shoreline proximity indicates a 288m movement between 1955 and 2011, providing conditions that could potentially result in the destruction of the bird population by rats if the islands are connected via a lang bridge. From this data we were then able to suggest preventative and combative measures that could be used to save the bird population of Tahuna Iti

Diasporas and Outsourcing: Evidence from oDesk and India

This study examines the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. Our data are taken from oDesk, the world's largest online platform for outsourced contracts, where India is the largest country in terms of contract volume. We use an ethnic name procedure to identify ethnic Indian users of oDesk in other countries around the world. We find very clear evidence that diaspora-based links matter on oDesk, with ethnic Indians in other countries 32% (9 percentage points) more likely to choose a worker in India. Yet, the size of the Indian diaspora on oDesk and the timing of its effects make clear that the Indian diaspora was not a very important factor in India becoming the leading country on oDesk for fulfilling work. In fact, multiple pieces of evidence suggest that diaspora use of oDesk increases with familiarity of the platform, rather than a scenario where diaspora connections serve to navigate uncertain environments. We further show that diaspora-based contracts mainly serve to lower costs for the company contacts outsourcing the work, as the workers in India are paid about the market wage for their work. These results and other observations lead to the conclusion that diaspora connections continue to be important even as online platforms provide many of the features that diaspora networks historically provided (e.g., information about potential workers, monitoring, and reputation foundations)

Freshwater and airborne textile fibre populations are dominated by ‘natural’, not microplastic, fibres

The potential role of natural textile fibres as environmental pollutants has been speculated upon by some environmental scientists, however, there is a general consensus that their biodegradability reduces their environmental threat. Whilst the risks that they pose remain poorly understood, their environmental prevalence has been noted in several recent microplastic pollution manuscripts. Here we highlight the extent to which natural textile fibres dominate fibre populations of upstream reaches of the River Trent, UK, as well as the atmospheric deposition within its catchment, over a twelve month microplastic sampling campaign. Across 223 samples, natural textile fibres represented 93.8% of the textile fibre population quantified. Moreover, though microplastic particles including synthetic fibres are known to be pervasive environmental pollutants, extruded textile fibres were absent from 82.8% of samples. Natural textile fibres were absent from just 9.7% of samples