Teaching Post-Pornography

This article introduces the term ‘post-pornography’, drawing on diverse texts from the last three decades. We propose that ‘post-pornography’ expands Porn Studies beyond its focus on explicit representations of sex. First, we outline the history of post-pornography as a concept that emerged in the sex-positive, anti-censorship and queer/feminist moment in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and has subsequently been taken up by a diverse group of artists, activists and scholars to describe practices that both reference and attempt to move beyond pornography. We define post-pornography as characterised by three aspects—the denaturalising of sex, the de-centring of the spectator and the recognition of media and technology as inseparable from sex. We examine the history of Porn Studies in the university, including in our own faculty at UNSW Art & Design, and the singular influence of Linda Williams in defining its place and setting out its pedagogical methods. We propose post-pornography as a framework that can confront prevailing assumptions about sex and sexuality that underpin Porn Studies and its critique of pornography, and outline a set of concepts that have emerged from the development of the second- and third-year art theory course Post-Pornographic Bodies

Designing Network Protocols for Good Equilibria

Designing and deploying a network protocol determines the rules by which end users interact with each other and with the network. We consider the problem of designing a protocol to optimize the equilibrium behavior of a network with selfish users. We consider network cost-sharing games, where the set of Nash equilibria depends fundamentally on the choice of an edge cost-sharing protocol. Previous research focused on the Shapley protocol, in which the cost of each edge is shared equally among its users. We systematically study the design of optimal cost-sharing protocols for undirected and directed graphs, single-sink and multicommodity networks, and different measures of the inefficiency of equilibria. Our primary technical tool is a precise characterization of the cost-sharing protocols that induce only network games with pure-strategy Nash equilibria. We use this characterization to prove, among other results, that the Shapley protocol is optimal in directed graphs and that simple priority protocols are essentially optimal in undirected graphs

TreeQN and ATreeC: Differentiable Tree-Structured Models for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Combining deep model-free reinforcement learning with on-line planning is a promising approach to building on the successes of deep RL. On-line planning with look-ahead trees has proven successful in environments where transition models are known a priori. However, in complex environments where transition models need to be learned from data, the deficiencies of learned models have limited their utility for planning. To address these challenges, we propose TreeQN, a differentiable, recursive, tree-structured model that serves as a drop-in replacement for any value function network in deep RL with discrete actions. TreeQN dynamically constructs a tree by recursively applying a transition model in a learned abstract state space and then aggregating predicted rewards and state-values using a tree backup to estimate Q-values. We also propose ATreeC, an actor-critic variant that augments TreeQN with a softmax layer to form a stochastic policy network. Both approaches are trained end-to-end, such that the learned model is optimised for its actual use in the tree. We show that TreeQN and ATreeC outperform n-step DQN and A2C on a box-pushing task, as well as n-step DQN and value prediction networks (Oh et al. 2017) on multiple Atari games. Furthermore, we present ablation studies that demonstrate the effect of different auxiliary losses on learning transition models

On the mass aspect function and positive energy theorems for asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds

We prove positivity of energy for a class of asymptotically locally hyperbolic manifolds in dimensions $4\le n \le 7$. The result is established by first proving deformation-of-mass-aspect theorems in dimensions $n\ge 4$. Our positivity results extend to the case $n = 3$ when more stringent conditions are imposed.Comment: trivial typos correcte

Consuming identities: alcohol marketing and the commodification of youth experience

Marketing has successfully used the postmodern turn in conceptualisations of the human subject and incorporated contemporary theorising of identities and self into its understanding of the key drivers of consumption. Such developments clearly converge in alcohol marketing practices that target young people where commercialized youth identities available for consumption and engagement are a significant element. This paper reports data from young people that reflect the uptake of such identities and considers the challenges that these developments represent for public health and the wellbeing of young people

Creating intoxigenic environments: Marketing alcohol to young people in Aotearoa New Zealand

Alcohol consumption among young people in New Zealand is on the rise. Given the broad array of acute and chronic harms that arise from this trend, it is a major cause for alarm and it is imperative that we improve our knowledge of key drivers of youth drinking. Changes wrought by the neoliberal political climate of deregulation that characterised the last two decades in many countries including Aotearoa New Zealand have transformed the availability of alcohol to young people. Commercial development of youth alcohol markets has seen the emergence of new environments, cultures and practices around drinking and intoxication but the ways in which these changes are interpreted and taken up is not well understood. This paper reports findings from a qualitative research project investigating the meaning-making practices of young people in New Zealand in response to alcohol marketing. Research data included group interviews with a range of Maori and Pakeha young people at three time periods. Thematic analyses of the youth data on usages of marketing materials indicate naturalisation of tropes of alcohol intoxication. We show how marketing is used and enjoyed in youth discourses creating and maintaining what we refer to as intoxigenic social environments. The implications are considered in light of the growing exposure of young people to alcohol marketing in a discussion of strategies to manage and mitigate its impacts on behaviour and consumption

FAA Letter in Response to White House Letter Regarding FAA Changes to Air Traffic Control Specialist Hiring Process

On July 18, 2014, you submitted a letter to President Obama regarding the Federal Aviation Administration\u27s (FAA) recent changes to the Air Traffic Control Specialist (ATCS) hiring process. You expressed concern with the FAA\u27s decision to implement a single all sources hiring strategy and, as a result, you feel that it has disadvantaged graduates who successfully completed the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) program, such as xxx. You also expressed concern with the implementation of the Biographical Assessment. Your letter was forwarded by the White House to our agency to address your concerns

CTI White Paper

The FAA Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) Program has 36 partner institutions across the United States which offer a variety of accredited academic degrees and actively promote a multicultural and diverse collegiate environment

Understanding binary neutron star collisions with hypermodels

Gravitational waves from the collision of binary neutron stars provide a unique opportunity to study the behaviour of supranuclear matter, the fundamental properties of gravity, and the cosmic history of our Universe. However, given the complexity of Einstein's Field Equations, theoretical models that enable source-property inference suffer from systematic uncertainties due to simplifying assumptions. We develop a hypermodel approach to compare and measure the uncertainty gravitational-wave approximants. Using state-of-the-art models, we apply this new technique to the binary neutron star observations GW170817 and GW190425 and the sub-threshold candidate GW200311_103121. Our analysis reveals subtle systematic differences between waveform models, and a frequency-dependence study suggests that this is due to the treatment of the tidal sector. This new technique provides a proving ground for model development, and a means to identify waveform-systematics in future observing runs where detector improvements will increase the number and clarity of binary neutron star collisions we observe.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Published Nature Astronom