Cute Masquerade and the Pimping of Japan

This essay will consider gendered aspects of Cool Japan ideology as found in government‐sponsored texts and imagery, as well as in other international arenas. Although scholars have recently offered critiques of Cool Japan as a form of nationalistic nation branding, uses of an objectified femininity have rarely been included in these analyses. By displacing female innovations and creativity in cultural production to the margins, Cool Japan reifies and officially promotes male geek culture. We find general dematerialization of the producers of Cool Japan ideology, which in turn becomes characterized as creative, quirky, edgy, and benign, thus masking the way Cool Japan has been produced, critiqued, imagined and endorsed primarily by male elites in Japan and internationally. This discussion suggests that Cool Japan's otaku ethos does not include women and girls who fail to conform to a narrow model of cute femininity, thus maintaining and promoting structures of gender stratification. In addition, the global spread and government exploitation of uncomplicated cuteness (kawaii) often confounds a flat understanding of the aesthetic with a gendered perspective and its expressions in girl culture. Women and girls are contained in Cool Japan ideology, and are not usually represented as shaping, resisting, creating or critiquing Japanese popular culture.     

The politics of indigeneity,identity and representation in literature from north Australia's Gulf Country

The Aboriginal author Alexis Wright's novels Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book have prompted scholars and critics towards enthusiastic comparisons with the ground-breaking work of a range of international writers. With her novels all set partly in the remote Gulf Country of north Australia, Wright's work arises from intellectual and political commitment to Indigenous people, and aspires to the idea of a distinctive ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the mind’. Much less known yet, we argue, of complementary significance, are a broader suite of writings about this region, and we address representations of cultural identity and connections to place by authors with both Aboriginal and European ancestries. With our interest in a deliberately cross-disciplinary methodology, ethnographic research complements our focus on texts to facilitate analysis of diverse identities in a setting produced through both the resilience of Indigenous cultural traditions and the legacies of European settler colonialism. We argue that the range of authorial representations arising from this sector of Australian society provides a focus for understanding shared and contested postcolonial imaginaries about place, culture and identity.     

Epistemic Communities: Description and Hierarchic Categorization

ABSTRACT

Understanding the structure of knowledge communities, and particularly the organization of “epistemic communities”, or groups of agents sharing common knowledge concerns, is usually based on either social relationships or semantic similarity. To link social and semantic aspects, a formal framework based on Galois lattices (or concept lattices) categorizes epistemic communities in an automated and hierarchically structured way. The process rebuilds a whole community structure and taxonomy, and notably fields and subfields gathering a certain proportion of agents. It is applied to empirical data to exhibit these alleged structural properties, successfully compared with categories given by domain experts.     

Questioning the Self

After accession to the World Trade Organization in 1999, China has been further incorporated into the global track. The national policy of economic development requires a continuing exploitation of natural resources and intensive labor from the rural sector, and over the last few decades there has been a ceaseless wave of rural women going to the cities and working mainly as assembly-line workers, domestic helpers, and sex workers. Developing a subaltern and feminist perspective, this paper attempts to invoke a spectral figure of the subaltern as the rural woman demonstrably haunting dominant regimes of representations of modernization. Through a textual analysis of the television series Girls from Outside (1991 Girls From Outside (television series) (1991) Production Centre of TV Series of Guangzhou Television Station, China [Google Scholar]), this paper examines how a rural woman peasant worker is represented as a model of the imperative to “develop the self” as a marker of social upward mobility, in the dominant discourse of development. Yet, this paper also reads against the grain of the texts, in which there are contradictions and ambivalences in portraying a rural woman as an actor of modernization. The self here is haunted by the other, as exemplified by rural kinship, a strike, and the women “left-over” in the job market.     

基于NK模型的组织复杂性情境下管理者认知表征作用的仿真研究

通过分析管理者的认知表征在组织复杂性情境下对组织决策的影响机理,提取出表征强度、表征偏差和经验丰裕度3个重要因素,并基于NK模型进行了相应的仿真。研究结果显示,管理者的认知表征能有效改善组织复杂情境下的决策效果。最后,以此为基础建立了表征强度、表征偏差和经验丰裕度对组织决策的影响机制模型。     

伪辛空间中子空间包含关系的条件及矩阵表示

设IFq 是q个元素的有限域 ,q是 2的幂 .再令IF2v δq 是IFq 上的 2v δ维向量空间 ,这里δ =1或2 .IF2v δq 和伪辛群Ps2v δ(IFq)在它上面的作用 ,称为IFq 上的 2v δ维伪辛空间 .本文先给出伪辛空间IF2v δq中子空间的包含的充分条件 ,而后再讨论其必要条件及矩阵表示 .     

可以改编不可替代——谈中国古典小说屏幕形象的塑造

文学作品和影视作品是两种不同门类的艺术形式,在艺术表现方法上体现出不同特点。尽管影视艺术在人物形象的塑造方面具有形象、直观的表现优势,但它又无法取代文学作品的语言特长。中国四大古典小说的改编实践表明,经典原著中的人物形象实可以改编而不可替代。     

表征：认识论及审美

"表征"(Representation)概念以"显现"及"表象"意义为核心被广泛频繁地的使用在各个领域。以人类表征活动作为基础,指明表征的存在及运行方式,其意义为"一种经反映而被构造出来的、作为认知对象的替代物而存在的在思维中被加工的形式。得经由符号作用,使不同主体在共同的文化基础上达成意义共享。"表征内容依认知取向可分为两个范畴:认识论表征与审美表征,两者混同作用。审美表征在艺术处因为展现了主体"自由而主动"的能力而得到最大的突显。     

Choices Under Ambiguity With Familiar And Unfamiliar Outcomes

This paper considers a decision-making process under ambiguity in which the decision-maker is supposed to split outcomes between familiar and unfamiliar ones. She is assumed to behave differently with respect to unfamiliar gains, unfamiliar losses and customary (familiar) outcomes. In particular, she is supposed to be pessimistic on gains, optimistic on losses and ambiguity neutral on the familiar outcomes. A generalization of the usual Choquet Integral is formalized when the decision maker holds capacities and probabilities. A characterization of the decision-maker’s behavior is provided for a specific subset of capacities, in which it is shown that the decision-maker underestimates the unfamiliar outcomes while is linear in probabilities on customary ones.     

Weak representation of the cumulative hazard function under semiparametric random censorship models

In this paper we derive a weak representation of the semiparametric estimator A^se _nof the cumulative hazard function A in the random censorship model. Based on this representation we show that |A^se _n- A| is uniformly bounded in probability up to the last order statistic of the observations.