30472 research outputs found
Sort by
‘‘Female Director’: discourses and practices in contemporary Japan
No full textSince the turn of the twenty-first century, the number of female directors in Japan has notably increased, permeating all types of genres and cinematic categories. This is the first time that a substantial number of women are steadily directing films, instead of disappearing after one or two productions. In this flourishing environment, which marks a turning point in Japanese women’s filmmaking, the label “female director” (josei eiga kantoku or josei kantoku) remains controversial.
This chapter examines the concept of the “female director” as a discursive category constructed and circulated in the different, yet interconnected, contexts of contemporary Japanese cinema. Complementing studies focused on the textual analysis of films directed by women and their conditions of production, exhibition and reception, our aim is to shift the attention to the label itself to clarify how the term “female director” is used, perceived, and justified or dismissed by different agents implicated in the Japanese film industry. In particular, we will explore case studies from women’s film festivals in Tokyo and Nagoya, publications by women’s grassroots groups (Yoshida et al., 2001; Kotōda et al., 2004-2015), and film journals to juxtapose their conceptions of “female director” with industrial data (MPPAJ, 2021) and the opinions of actual Japanese women filmmakers extracted from a survey we circulated in 2019
How universities' third mission engagement can support inclusive innovation and sustainable development: addressing some open questions Introduction to the special issue
Get PDFThis editorial is structured as follows. First we outline several key gaps in current research regarding universities’ contribution to inclusive innovation and sustainable development through their engagement in UICs and other third mission activities. We then describe how the papers in the special issue address each of those gaps, and we conclude by summarizing the overall contribution of the special issue and outlining key implications for research and practice
Out of phase Quaternary uplift-rate changes reveal normal fault interaction, implied by deformed marine palaeoshorelines
Get PDFWe have mapped and constrained the timing of tectonically deformed uplifted Late Quaternary palaeoshorelines
in the Messina Strait, southern Italy, an area above a subduction zone containing active normal faults. The
palaeoshorelines are preserved from up to thirteen Late Quaternary sea-level highstands, providing a record of
the deformation over this timescale (~500 ka) for the Messina-Taormina Fault, the Reggio Calabria Fault and the
Armo Fault. The palaeoshorelines reveal spatial patterns of uplift through time along the strike of these normal
faults, and, given the across strike arrangement of the faults, also reveal how the contribution of each fault to the
regional strain-rate progressed through time. The results reveal that the uplift rates mapped within the fault
hangingwalls and footwalls were not constant through time, with a marked change in the location of strain
accumulation at ~50 ka. The uplift rates, once converted into throw-rates, imply that the three faults comprised
similar throw-rates prior to ~50 ka (in the range 0.77–0.96 mm/yr), with the Armo and Reggio Calabria faults
then switching to lower rates (0.32 mm/yr and 0.33 mm/yr respectively), whilst the Messina-Taormina Fault
accelerated to 2.34 mm/yr. The regional extension rate, gained by summing the implied heave rates across the
three faults, was maintained through time despite this re-organisation of local strain accumulation at ~50 ka. We
explain these out-of-phase fault throw-rate changes during the constant-rate regional extension conditions as due
to interactions between these upper plate normal faults. We finally discuss how fault throw-rates changing
through time may affect a long-term seismic hazard assessment within active normal fault systems
A sentiment analysis approach to the prediction of market volatility
Get PDFPrediction and quantification of future volatility and returns play an important role in financial modeling, both in portfolio optimisation and risk management. Natural language processing today allows one to process news and social media comments to detect signals of investors' confidence. We have explored the relationship between sentiment extracted from financial news and tweets and FTSE100 movements. We investigated the strength of the correlation between sentiment measures on a given day and market volatility and returns observed the next day. We found that there is evidence of correlation between sentiment and stock market movements. Moreover, the sentiment captured from news headlines could be used as a signal to predict market returns; we also found that the same does not apply for volatility. However, for the sentiment found in Twitter comments we obtained, in a surprising finding, a correlation coefficient of -0.7 (p < 0.05), which indicates a strong negative correlation between negative sentiment captured from the tweets on a given day and the volatility observed the next day. It is important to keep in mind that stock volatility rises greatly when the market collapses but not symmetrically so when it goes up (the so-called leverage effect). We developed an accurate classifier for the prediction of market volatility in response to the arrival of new information by deploying topic modeling, based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation, in order to extract feature vectors from a collection of tweets and financial news. The obtained features were used as additional input to the classifier. Thanks to the combination of sentiment and topic modeling even on modest (essentially personal) architecture our classifier achieved a directional prediction accuracy for volatility of 63%
Ownership without control? Mortgage finance and changing formations of property
Get PDFBook synopsis: This handbook brings together diverse perspectives, major topics, and multiple approaches to one of the biggest legal institutions in society: property.
Property touches on many fundamental human questions. It involves decisions about power, economy, morality, work, and ecology. It also involves ideas about where humans fit in the world and how humans relate to more-than-human life. This book will ask in myriad ways such questions as: what property means, what kinds of property there are, what is and should be the relationship between owned and owner, and what is the impact of different forms of property on life in this world? Drawing on a range of socio-legal and empirical methodologies, renowned scholars and rising stars in property from around the world present current issues and map future directions in research. Coming from the place of law but reaching out through cognate disciplines, this handbook provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of current research at the interface of property, society, and the environment.
This handbook will appeal to students and researchers across a range of disciplines, including law, sociology, geography, history, and economics
Fatherlessness, sperm donors, and ‘So What?’ parentage: arguing against the immorality of donor conception through ‘World Literature’"
Get PDFIs biology and knowing biological ancestral information essential to the construction of identity? Bioethicist James David Velleman believes this is the case and argues that donor gamete conception is immoral because a portion of genetic heritage will be unknown. Velleman is critical of sperm donation and the absence of a biological father in donor-assisted families. His bioethical work, specifically the 2005 article ‘Family History’, is oft-cited in articles debating the ethics surrounding gamete donations and diverse family formations. However, I wonder to what extent Velleman’s ethical stance is exhibited in contemporary culture? Velleman suggests that innate knowledge of bio-superiority helps readers and audiences appreciate the importance of biological family structures in literature and film; he says, ‘When people deny the importance of biological ties, I wonder how they can read world literature with any comprehension’ (2005, 369). Velleman understands the stories of Oedipus, Moses, Telemachus and Luke Skywalker as demonstrating a universal cultural comprehension that genetics are essential to identity construction. I adopt Velleman’s list of stories and ask if they really can support an antidonation sentiment and suggest that most of the stories actually support diverse family structures. By exploring the significance of story-telling in cultural understandings of family and identity, it is possible to identify the ways in which story-telling can impact how society negotiates complex issues such as assisted reproduction, donor conception and donor industry regulation
L’Antisémitisme dans la Révolution russe (1917-1920)
No full textBook synopsis: Historiography often overlooks the many pogroms perpetrated during the Russian Revolution. If most are due to the White armies, the Reds also took their part. Faced with this, the Communist leaders, often of Jewish origin themselves, found it difficult to define a clear position in the fear they had of cutting themselves off from a part of their base which spontaneously confused the Jews and "the bourgeois enemy. It is finally under the pressure of the more or less Zionist Jewish socialist parties, like the Poale Zion (Workers of Zion), that the bar will be straightened and that the Bolshevik power will resolutely fight these deleterious tendencies. It is all this that, in his pioneering work, written from Russian and Ukrainian archives, the young historian Brendan McGeever exposes in detail
What would it be like to be a parent? Exploring the role of sexual orientation and culture on perceptions of parenthood in the future
Get PDFObjective: This study explored the impact of sexual orientation and cultural context on the way lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) and heterosexual cisgender adults without children from Portugal, Israel, and the UK anticipate the parenting experience.
Background: Higher levels of parenthood aspirations (e.g. desires and intentions) and more positive perceptions of the parenting experience (e.g. emotional enrichment upon having children) have been reported among heterosexual individuals than LGB ones, and more so in familistic societies than in individualistic ones. However, perceptions of the parenting experience have rarely been examined across different cultural contexts.
Methods: One-hundred and sixty-eight adults without children (57 self-reported as LGB) in Portugal were matched on socio-demographic variables with 168 participants from the UK and 168 participants from Israel, resulting in a convenience sample of N = 504 (Heterosexual: n = 333, Mage = 27.48, SD = 5.47; LGB: n = 171, Mage = 29.77, SD = 7.12).
Results: Overall, participants from Israel and Portugal, as well as heterosexual participants in general, perceived parenting in a more positive way than either their counterparts in the UK or LGB participants, respectively. Parallel patterns also appeared separately for LGB and heterosexual participants, with higher levels of social support and lower levels of stigma anticipated in both Portugal and Israel than the UK. Conclusion: Both sexual orientation and the socio-cultural context are associated with parenting perceptions. However, the effect of the cultural context seems to surmount that of sexual orientation, with both LGB and heterosexual individuals from more familistic countries anticipating parenthood in a more positive way, than their peers from the UK.
Implications: Repercussions of the findings include consideration of the needs of prospective LGB parents in terms of social support, culturally competent and affirmative interventions regarding LGB parenthood, and policies targeting prejudice and counteracting heteronormativity
The impact of COVID-19 on home advantage: a conditional order-m analysis of football clubs' efficiency in the top-5 European leagues
Get PDFThis study aims to contribute to the recent literature on the effects of COVID on football teams’ performance, focusing on the impact of ghost games on offensive and defensive technical efficiency. Using season-level data for the top 5 European leagues, a novelty for efficiency studies on football, the analysis compares the ten seasons played before the pandemic outbreak with the only season (2020-21) almost entirely played behind closed doors. A further novel contribution is the methodology – conditional order-m – applied to calculate efficiency scores. Our results show that in the post-COVID season both offensive and defensive efficiency significantly increased for away games, whereas for home games offensive efficiency shows a very slight increase, and defensive efficiency remains basically unchanged. These findings are valid for all the five leagues and provide evidence of a generalised reduction in the home advantage
Data sources:
Access Repository Dashboard
Do you manage Birkbeck Institutional Research Online? Access insider analytics, issue reports and manage access to outputs from your repository in the CORE Repository Dashboard!