From Marginality to Possibility: Doing Transgender Studies in Japanese Studies

Area studies has been described as having lost its significance and legitimacy in the 21st century globalised world. However, research has shown that the strengths of area studies—empirical research and context-sensitive knowledge—remain relevant not only in helping us to understand our contemporary world, but also in challenging the hegemony of theories and concepts developed in Euro-American contexts that have come to dominate both academic and general writing. In this paper, I draw on my research on the transgender community in Japan—an area of study that is relegated to the margins of both Japanese studies and trans studies—to show how the tools of area studies play an important role in expanding the conceptual boundaries of trans studies, and how the lens of transgender can expand or complicate existing knowledge on the culture and society of Japan. I highlight how Japanese transgender identities and cultures are shaped not only by global processes, but also legal, medical, cultural and social conditions specific to Japan. I argue against the assumed universal applicability of Eurocentric conceptualisations of gender/sexual non-conformity, and in doing so I call attention to the ways in which the fields of transgender studies and Japanese studies can enrich each other. More than ever in these precarious times, we need to emphasise the strengths and overcome the weaknesses of our field(s), so that we may be better equipped to turn marginality into possibility.

Producing gender-blind drug knowledge and representations in prison spaces

Purpose This paper aims to examine knowledge production and problem representation with regard to new psychoactive substances (NPS) in Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons (HMCIP) annual reports. Design/methodology/approach Seven annual reports published by HMCIP for England and Wales between 2014 and 2020 have been systematically reviewed drawing on thematic analysis. Findings This paper demonstrates how framing in HMCIP annual reports produced a characterisation of NPS in prisons that inadvertently obstructed gender-sensitive knowledge production and problem representation. The framing formalised knowledge silences about spice in women’s prisons. Originality/value HMCIP annual reports monitor drugs in prisons and this affects how these spaces are represented to government and other stakeholders. This paper provides theoretical and practical insights into how gender-blind knowledge is produced by discussing examples of gender-blind drug representations in a specific policy context.

Privacy Preserving Fuzzy Association Rule Mining in Data Clusters Using Particle Swarm Optimization

An association rule is classified as sensitive if its thread of revelation is above certain confidence value. If these sensitive rules were revealed to the public, it is possible to deduce sensitive knowledge from the published data and offers benefit for the business competitors. Earlier studies in privacy preserving association rule mining focus on binary data and has more side effects. But in practical applications the transactions contain the purchased quantities of the items. Hence preserving privacy of quantitative data is essential. The main goal of the proposed system is to hide a group of interesting patterns which contains sensitive knowledge such that modifications have minimum side effects like lost rules, ghost rules, and number of modifications. The proposed system applies Particle Swarm Optimization to a few clusters of particles thus reducing the number of modification. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is efficient in terms of lost rules, number of modifications, hiding failure with complete avoidance of ghost rules.

EDUCATION FOR LEISURE IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL: THE USE OF COMIC BOOKS IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION CLASSES

In Brazil, many students dislike Physical Education classes because of content repetition, dissatisfactory curricular organization, among other factors. This work aims at assessing the efficiency of a proposal for Physical Education classes, which includes contents of physical activities and the use of comic books. This is a qualitative study and both bibliographic and field researches were carried out. Ten classes were held to a group of ninth graders from a public school in the city of Piracicaba/SP/Brazil. We found that the use of comic books as a teaching resource is effective: it portrays the experiences that the students, felt and mediated through their “rational” and “sensitive” knowledge about physical activities.

DISTORTION-BASED HEURISTIC METHOD FOR SENSITIVE ASSOCIATION RULE HIDING

In the past few years, privacy issues in data mining have received considerable attention in the data mining literature. However, the problem of data security cannot simply be solved by restricting data collection or against unauthorized access, it should be dealt with by providing solutions that not only protect sensitive information, but also not affect to the accuracy of the results in data mining and not violate the sensitive knowledge related with individual privacy or competitive advantage in businesses. Sensitive association rule hiding is an important issue in privacy preserving data mining. The aim of association rule hiding is to minimize the side effects on the sanitized database, which means to reduce the number of missing non-sensitive rules and the number of generated ghost rules. Current methods for hiding sensitive rules cause side effects and data loss. In this paper, we introduce a new distortion-based method to hide sensitive rules. This method proposes the determination of critical transactions based on the number of non-sensitive maximal frequent itemsets that contain at least one item to the consequent of the sensitive rule, they can be directly affected by the modified transactions. Using this set, the number of non-sensitive itemsets that need to be considered is reduced dramatically. We compute the smallest number of transactions for modification in advance to minimize the damage to the database. Comparative experimental results on real datasets showed that the proposed method can achieve better results than other methods with fewer side effects and data loss.

Perceptual knowledge

This chapter critically analyzes Locke’s views on “sensitive knowledge.” Its main theses are: (1) Locke sometimes confuses the legitimate question (Q1), “When we perceive a body, how can we know that we aren’t hallucinating instead?” with the faulty “veil-of-perception” question, (Q2) “How do we know bodies exist, since we can’t perceive them?” (2) When Locke does mention (Q1), he sometimes just dismisses it, because he holds that simple ideas of sensation are by definition produced by bodies. (3) At other times, Locke humors the skeptic, and offers a defense of the senses, in the form of an inference to the best explanation. (4) It’s doubtful that he could successfully rule out other possible explanations of our perceptual experience, like Descartes’s deceiver scenario and its contemporary variants. (5) There are reasons for this weakness, and they carry over to any attempt to defeat skepticism by an inference to the best explanation.

Knowledge in general

This chapter explains: (1) Locke’s definition of knowledge as idea-agreement; (2) his four species of knowledge— identity/diversity, relation, co-existence/necessary connection, real existence; (3) his three degrees of knowledge—intuitive, demonstrative, sensitive; (4) his view of the extent of knowledge for each species; and (5) his view about the reality of knowledge. It notes that the first three species of knowledge cover mostly generalizations, whereas the last species covers existence claims. It discusses the extent of knowledge in each of the first three species. It explains why Locke thinks that knowledge of co-existence (which is knowledge of substances’ properties) is “very small,” leaving sensitive knowledge for the last two chapters. It argues that although Locke’s discussion of the reality of knowledge accommodates mathematical and possibly moral generalizations well enough, it does not fit laws of science, and misleadingly invites us to think of them as a priori truths rather than empirical truths.