All Hail, the Baklang Kanal!: Subversive frivolity in two Filipino influencers

In November 2020, in a now-deleted tweet, twelve queer Filipino influencers on Twitter were branded as “baklang kanal,” for their noted expressions of dissent against the Rodrigo Duterte regime. Soon after, an online debate ensued: among these twelve influencers, who are the most rightful to be considered as baklang kanal ? While the term as commonly used now in Twitter is understood to refer to “gay individuals who are unapologetically outspoken about their views” (Vilog, 2020a), this paper intuits baklang kanal as a means to symbolically negotiate with the audience, toward construction of a seeming authenticity that is crucial for the establishment, maintenance, and expansion of their influencer status—what can be nominated as subversive frivolity, or the “generative power…arising from (populist) discursive framing as marginal, inconsequential, and unproductive” (Abidin, 2016, p. 2). We explore such harnessing of baklang kanal as generative power through a case study of two social media influencers, namely Pipay (@pipaykipayy) and Sassa Gurl (@Itssassagurl), exemplary not only for their large followings, but as well as their inclusion in the inaugural Bardy’s, a parodic people’s choice award facilitated over Twitter, for the Cannes’al (i.e., “kanal”) category.

The Generative Power of Protest: Time and Space in Contentious Politics

How do social movements sustain themselves under authoritarian rule? This remains a crucial puzzle for scholars of comparative politics. This article gains traction on this puzzle by foregrounding the generative power of protest, namely the power of protest experiences themselves to deepen and broaden movements. Some studies have started to draw attention to those questions without yet systematically examining how the form of protest differentially affects those outcomes. I argue that different forms of protest have varying effects on movements depending on their duration and geographic scope. While short, multiple-site actions, such as marches, can broaden movements by expanding their base, extended, single-site actions, such as sit-ins, are more likely to deepen movements by fostering collective identities and building organizational capacities. This article is based on field research in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, and Morocco and interviews with more than 100 movement participants and civil society activists.

Changing Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

In first-century CE Judaism, the Scriptures validated Jesus and his message, but later Christians “read back” to Old Testament sources of New Testament texts. Constant alluding to a past document tended to make the document look obsolete and useful only as a source. Can the Old Testament regain its generative power for Christians today? The article sketches the first-century Christian situation, looks at subsequent interpretation, and calls on recent Roman Catholic documents to revise old assumptions.

Protect privacy of deep classification networks by exploiting their generative power

Research showed that deep learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks, which aim to determine if an example is in the training set of the model. We propose a new framework to defend against this sort of attack. Our key insight is that if we retrain the original classifier with a new dataset that is independent of the original training set while their elements are sampled from the same distribution, the retrained classifier will leak no information that cannot be inferred from the distribution about the original training set. Our framework consists of three phases. First, we transferred the original classifier to a Joint Energy-based Model (JEM) to exploit the model’s implicit generative power. Then, we sampled from the JEM to create a new dataset. Finally, we used the new dataset to retrain or fine-tune the original classifier. We empirically studied different transfer learning schemes for the JEM and fine-tuning/retraining strategies for the classifier against shadow-model attacks. Our evaluation shows that our framework can suppress the attacker’s membership advantage to a negligible level while keeping the classifier’s accuracy acceptable. We compared it with other state-of-the-art defenses considering adaptive attackers and showed our defense is effective even under the worst-case scenario. Besides, we also found that combining other defenses with our framework often achieves better robustness. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/ChenJiyu/meminf-defense.git.

Sacrificial human remains in an initiatory variant of the African waste heap (Kabye country, Togo)

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, in the Kabye country, some heads of enemies – those of men foreign to the group – were buried in a mound of earth referred to as hude, meaning ‘manure’. In each locality, this mound is situated inside a wooded sanctuary where the spirit of the mythical founding ancestor resides. In order to understand this practice, this article examines how it fitted within the overall logic of the male initiation cycle, contextualising it in relation to past and present practices. Because it was a highly ambivalent element of the bush, the head of an enemy renewed the generative power of this original ‘manure’ prodigiously, so as to ensure the group’s survival in their land. The burial of the heads of strangers appears to be an initiatory variant of other forms of mastery of the ambivalence of wild forces, entrusted in other African societies to the chief and his waste heap.

Ancient Etymology and the Enigma of Okeanos

Okeanos is at once a mythological figure and a philosophical concept appearing in many ancient accounts of the world. A frequent object of allegoresis, his cosmological role and his name posed an enigma to Homer’s readers, especially those with a rationalizing bent. This paper proposes that the paradoxical representation of Okeanos as a primordial generative power and a geographical limit may be explained by the influence of etymological speculation, which was a popular heuristic method used by Greek intellectuals from the archaic period throughout antiquity.

A Bio-Inspired Model of Picture Array Generating P System with Restricted Insertion Rules

In the bio-inspired area of membrane computing, a novel computing model with a generic name of P system was introduced around the year 2000. Among its several variants, string or array language generating P systems involving rewriting rules have been considered. A new picture array model of array generating P system with a restricted type of picture insertion rules and picture array objects in its regions, is introduced here. The generative power of such a system is investigated by comparing with the generative power of certain related picture array grammar models introduced and studied in two-dimensional picture language theory. It is shown that this new model of array P system can generate picture array languages which cannot be generated by many other array grammar models. The theoretical model developed is for handling the application problem of generation of patterns encoded as picture arrays over a finite set of symbols. As an application, certain floor-design patterns are generated using such an array P system.