Performance, Politics, and the War on Terror: Whatever It Takes

Lindsey Mantoan reviews Performance, Politics, and the War on Terror: Whatever It Takes (by Sara Brady) for TDR: The Drama Review

Freedomland

Lindsey Mantoan reviews a performance of Freedomland (by Michael Gene Sullivan) for Theatre Journal

Afterword

In this afterword to a special issue (On Time) of the journal Performance Research, co-editor Lindsey Mantoan posits what happens to a conference once it has ended

In the Wake

Lindsey Mantoan reviews a performance of In the Wake (by Lisa Kron) for Theatre Journal

Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent

Lindsey Mantoan reviews Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (edited by Jenny Spencer) for Theatre Topics

High-Visibility Time-Bin Entanglement for Testing Chained Bell Inequalities

The violation of Bell's inequality requires a well-designed experiment to validate the result. In experiments using energy-time and time-bin entanglement, initially proposed by Franson in 1989, there is an intrinsic loophole due to the high postselection. To obtain a violation in this type of experiment, a chained Bell inequality must be used. However, the local realism bound requires a high visibility in excess of 94.63 percent in the time-bin entangled state. In this work, we show how such a high visibility can be reached in order to violate a chained Bell inequality with 6, 8 and 10 terms.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Does the healthcare system know what to cut under the pandemic emergency pressure? An observational study on geographic variation of surgical procedures in Italy

During 2020 many countries reduced the number of elective surgeries to free up beds and cope with the COVID-19 outbreak. This situation led healthcare systems to prioritise elective interventions and reduce the overall volumes of treatments.The aim of this paper is to analyse whether the pandemic and the prioritisation policies on elective surgery were done considering the potential inappropriateness highlighted by the measurement of geographic variation

ELECTRAMed: a new pre-trained language representation model for biomedical NLP

The overwhelming amount of biomedical scientific texts calls for the development of effective language models able to tackle a wide range of biomedical natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The most recent dominant approaches are domain-specific models, initialized with general-domain textual data and then trained on a variety of scientific corpora. However, it has been observed that for specialized domains in which large corpora exist, training a model from scratch with just in-domain knowledge may yield better results. Moreover, the increasing focus on the compute costs for pre-training recently led to the design of more efficient architectures, such as ELECTRA. In this paper, we propose a pre-trained domain-specific language model, called ELECTRAMed, suited for the biomedical field. The novel approach inherits the learning framework of the general-domain ELECTRA architecture, as well as its computational advantages. Experiments performed on benchmark datasets for several biomedical NLP tasks support the usefulness of ELECTRAMed, which sets the novel state-of-the-art result on the BC5CDR corpus for named entity recognition, and provides the best outcome in 2 over the 5 runs of the 7th BioASQ-factoid Challange for the question answering task

Perspective: Vagal nerve stimulation in the treatment of new-onset refractory status epilepticus

IntroductionResistance to drug therapy is a major hurdle in new-onset refractory status epilepticus (NORSE) treatment and there is urgent need to develop new treatment approaches. Non-drug approaches such as neuromodulation offer significant benefits and should be investigated as new adjunct treatment modalities. An important unanswered question is whether desynchronizing networks by vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) may improve seizure control in NORSE patients.Main textWe present a summary of published NORSE cases treated with VNS and our own data, discuss possible mechanisms of action, review VNS implantation timing, stimulation setting titration protocols and outcomes. Further, we propose avenues for future research.DiscussionWe advocate for consideration of VNS for NORSE both in early and late stages of the presentation and hypothesize a possible additional benefit from implantation in the acute phase of the disease. This should be pursued in the context of a clinical trial, harmonizing inclusion criteria, accuracy of documentation and treatment protocols. A study planned within our UK-wide NORSE-UK network will answer the question if VNS may confer benefits in aborting unremitting status epilepticus, modulate ictogenesis and reduce long-term chronic seizure burden

Building Relations and Enhanced Relationality as the Backbone of Methodologies in the Digital and Public Humanities

The very act of building relations or putting things into relationship – be they technology and culture, scholars and audiences, data and materials – thus form the backbone of scholarly projects that came to define this research field. The authors chosen for this first issue interpret the topic of “Relations” at different levels, from the scholarly practice of creating internal and external references across a digital research project (Stonayova, Pizzirusso), to the necessity of connecting digital resources and audiences from different domains (Venuti et al.), to the more theoretical reflection on relations between resources and users in the web (Scanagatta, Charlesworth et al.). What emerges from all papers is the on-going effort to build platforms and resources that aim to become collaborative workspaces for sharing research results and the essential precondition of building digital communities of scholars and practitioners to achieve this goal