Venues on the verges: London's theater government between 1594 and 1614

In 1594, major decisions were made by the governors of London and the country about plays and playing. We need to learn what lay behind these events, such as what led James Burbage to build his Blackfriars theater in 1596. That initial fiasco might tell us much about what lay behind Shakespeare’s decision to join the new Chamberlain’s Men in 1594 and his subsequent commitment to them as a full-time playwright. When the Globe burned down in 1613, a majority of the shareholders decided to rebuild it at great cost, but Shakespeare withdrew. The rebuilding was old-fashioned thinking, reverting to the company’s desire, asserted in 1594, to play indoors in winter, which helps to clarify their decisions and Shakespeare’s own—to write plays rather than more long poems. The few surviving papers of the Privy Council and the London mayoralty from the time suggest that one of the two new companies of 1594 preferred to play indoors during the winter instead of at their allocated open playhouses in the suburbs. They tried to renew this traditional practice, first in 1594 and again in 1596 when James Burbage built the indoor Blackfriars playhouse for them. The renewal of the Globe in 1614 was part of the same thinking, although Shakespeare evidently opted out of the decision.

'Out Vile Jelly': Sarah Kane's 'Blasted' & Shakespeare's 'King Lear'

Sarah Kane's notorious 1995 debut, Blasted, has been widely though belatedly recognized as a defining example of experiential or ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. However, Graham Saunders here argues that the best playwrights not only innovate in use of language and dramatic form, but also rewrite the classic plays of the past. He believes that too much stress has been placed on the play's radical structure and contemporary sensibility, with the effect of obscuring the influence of Shakespearean tradition on its genesis and content. He clarifies Kane's gradually dawning awareness of the influence of Shakespeare's King Lear on her work and how elements of that tragedy were rewritten in terms of dialogue, recast thematically, and reworked in terms of theatrical image. He sees Blasted as both a response to contemporary reality and an engagement with the history of drama. Graham Saunders is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and author of the first full-length study of Kane's work: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester University Press, 2002). An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium’ conference in Brussels, May 2001. Saunders is currently working on articles about Samuel Beckett and Edward Bond

Mapping the trickle out benefits of social and environmental enterprises: a pilot study of an East African eco business

• Objectives The objective of this paper is to propose a framework for mapping the sustainable development and poverty alleviation impacts of social and environmental enterprises in Africa. This framework is then piloted with reference to an East African Ecobusiness. • Prior Work This paper is based on data collected as part of a wider research project examining social and environmental enterprises across the 19 countries of Southern and Eastern Africa. In total, the sustainable development and poverty alleviation impacts of 20 in-depth case studies in 4 countries are being examined. • Approach Data was collected using in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders associated with the case study business. Secondary materials were also analysed and a quantitative survey of customers undertaken. • Results In addition to their impacts on the environment, African eco businesses can also have substantial social, economic and wider poverty alleviation impacts. This paper maps the impacts of a case study East African ecobusiness, as part of developing a social and environmental enterprise impact framework for Africa and the wider developing world. In our case study, positive and negative impacts are identified, while questions are raised in relation to tradeoffs between social and environmental objectives and temporal dimensions of impact. The usefulness of existing frameworks for understanding the social, environmental and development impacts of these kinds of organisations are also considered. • Implications This paper outlines the necessity of building an African-centric impact map to capture the multi-level poverty alleviation and sustainable development impacts of social and environmental enterprise activity in developing world environments. The framework proposed also offers guidance to businesses operating in Africa about the factors that might be considered as part of their wider social and environmental responsibilities. • Value Assessing the impact of social and environmental enterprises, especially as a route to development within low income countries, is receiving increasing attention in academia and beyond. This paper presents a useful contribution to the scarce literature on social and environmental enterprises in Africa.

Human geographies of climate change: landscape, temporality and lay knowledges.

In this paper we bring together work on landscape, temporality and lay knowledges to propose new ways of understanding climate change. A focus on the familiar landscapes of everyday life offers an opportunity to examine how climate change could be researched as a relational phenomenon, understood on a local level, with distinctive spatialities and temporalities. Climate change can be observed in relation to landscape but also felt, sensed, apprehended emotionally as part of the fabric of everyday life in which acceptance, denial, resignation and action co-exist as personal and social responses to the local manifestations of a global problem.

Thinking out of the box – skills for work

Since the Dearing Report .1 there has been an increased emphasis on the development of employability and transferable (‘soft’) skills in undergraduate programmes. Within STEM subject areas, recent reports concluded that universities should offer ‘greater and more sustainable variety in modes of study to meet the changing demands of industry and students’.2 At the same time, higher education (HE) institutions are increasingly conscious of the sensitivity of league table positions on employment statistics and graduate destinations. Modules that are either credit or non-credit bearing are finding their way into the core curriculum at HE. While the UK government and other educational bodies argue the way forward over A-level reform, universities must also meet the needs of their first year cohorts in terms of the secondary to tertiary transition and developing independence in learning.

Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out

Social media utilities have made it easier than ever to know about the range of online or offline social activities one could be engaging. On the upside, these social resources provide a multitude of opportunities for interaction; on the downside, they often broadcast more options than can be pursued, given practical restrictions and limited time. This dual nature of social media has driven popular interest in the concept of Fear of Missing Out – popularly referred to as FoMO. Defined as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, FoMO is characterized by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing. The present research presents three studies conducted to advance an empirically based understanding of the fear of missing out phenomenon. The first study collected a diverse international sample of participants in order to create a robust individual differences measure of FoMO, the Fear of Missing Out scale (FoMOs); this study is the first to operationalize the construct. Study 2 recruited a nationally representative cohort to investigate how demographic, motivational and well-being factors relate to FoMO. Study 3 examined the behavioral and emotional correlates of fear of missing out in a sample of young adults. Implications of the FoMOs measure and for the future study of FoMO are discussed.

Drivers of in-group and out-of-group electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM)

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to address a recent call for additional research on electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). In response to this call, this study draws on the social network paradigm and the uses and gratification theory (UGT) to propose and empirically test a conceptual framework of key drivers of two types of eWOM, namely in-group and out-of-group. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed model, which examines the impact of usage motivations on eWOM in-group and eWOM out-of-group, is tested in a sample of 302 internet users in Portugal. Findings – Results from the survey show that the different drivers (i.e. mood-enhancement, escapism, experiential learning and social interaction) vary in terms of their impact on the two different types of eWOM. Surprisingly, while results show a positive relationship between experiential learning and eWOM out-of-group, no relationship is found between experiential learning and eWOM in-group. Research limitations/implications – This is the first study investigating the drivers of both eWOM in-group and eWOM out-of-group. Additional research in this area will contribute to the development of a general theory of eWOM. Practical implications – By understanding the drivers of different eWOM types, this study provides guidance to marketing managers on how to allocate resources more efficiently in order to achieve the company's strategic objectives. Originality/value – No published study has investigated the determinants of these two types of eWOM. This is the first study offering empirical considerations of how the various drivers differentially impact eWOM in-group and eWOM out-of-group.

Terrorism and electoral accountability: one strike, you're out!

We examine the relationship between terrorism and electoral accountability. We find that terror has a robust positive effect on the probability that the incumbent government is replaced. The magnitude of the effect increases with the severity of the terrorist attack.

A radial basis function network classifier to maximise leave-one-out mutual information

tWe develop an orthogonal forward selection (OFS) approach to construct radial basis function (RBF)network classifiers for two-class problems. Our approach integrates several concepts in probabilisticmodelling, including cross validation, mutual information and Bayesian hyperparameter fitting. At eachstage of the OFS procedure, one model term is selected by maximising the leave-one-out mutual infor-mation (LOOMI) between the classifier’s predicted class labels and the true class labels. We derive theformula of LOOMI within the OFS framework so that the LOOMI can be evaluated efficiently for modelterm selection. Furthermore, a Bayesian procedure of hyperparameter fitting is also integrated into theeach stage of the OFS to infer the l2-norm based local regularisation parameter from the data. Since eachforward stage is effectively fitting of a one-variable model, this task is very fast. The classifier construc-tion procedure is automatically terminated without the need of using additional stopping criterion toyield very sparse RBF classifiers with excellent classification generalisation performance, which is par-ticular useful for the noisy data sets with highly overlapping class distribution. A number of benchmarkexamples are employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Drivers of in‐group and out‐of‐group electronic word‐of‐mouth (eWOM)

Purpose– The purpose of this study is to address a recent call for additional research on electronic word‐of‐mouth (eWOM). In response to this call, this study draws on the social network paradigm and the uses and gratification theory (UGT) to propose and empirically test a conceptual framework of key drivers of two types of eWOM, namely in‐group and out‐of‐group. Design/methodology/approach– The proposed model, which examines the impact of usage motivations on eWOM in‐group and eWOM out‐of‐group, is tested in a sample of 302 internet users in Portugal. Findings– Results from the survey show that the different drivers (i.e. mood‐enhancement, escapism, experiential learning and social interaction) vary in terms of their impact on the two different types of eWOM. Surprisingly, while results show a positive relationship between experiential learning and eWOM out‐of‐group, no relationship is found between experiential learning and eWOM in‐group. Research limitations/implications– This is the first study investigating the drivers of both eWOM in‐group and eWOM out‐of‐group. Additional research in this area will contribute to the development of a general theory of eWOM. Practical implications– By understanding the drivers of different eWOM types, this study provides guidance to marketing managers on how to allocate resources more efficiently in order to achieve the company's strategic objectives. Originality/value– No published study has investigated the determinants of these two types of eWOM. This is the first study offering empirical considerations of how the various drivers differentially impact eWOM in‐group and eWOM out‐of‐group.

Second Strike and you are (finally) out? The Quashing of the Prevention of Infiltration Law (Amendment no. 4)

The blog-post critically analyses the Israeli Supreme Court judgment (HCJ 8425/13 Anon v. Knesset et al) quashing the Prevention of Infiltration Law (Amendment no. 4), offering themes of comparative constitutional interest.

Locking-in carbon, locking-out livelihoods? ASM and REDD in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the potential mutual conflict between interventions aimed at formalising artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) on the one hand, and policies implemented in response to the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) initiative on the other. Deforestation caused by ASM undermines sound forest management, and potentially threatens the implementation of REDD. Conversely, the adoption of REDD could further marginalise and criminalise the ASM sector, reducing its contribution to poverty alleviation. Reviewing a series of commonalities between ASM and forest management highlights many difficulties facing policy-makers. Potentially, contradictory outcomes of evolving governance arrangements means novel cross-sectoral institutions will be required in order to realise the full potential of REDD and ASM to address poverty reduction in a complementary fashion. The analysis reiterates the centrality of livelihoods to REDD and the need for policies to take into account local contexts.