Are Female Paraphilias Hiding in Plain Sight? Risqué Male–Male Erotica for Women in Sinophone and Anglophone Regions

Female-oriented male–male erotica is a genre of popular culture often know as Boys’ Love (BL), yaoi, and danmei. It is one of the largest by-and-for women sexual subcultures and a global phenomenon. With the largest data sets in the field, we ask: Which risqué sexual content do Sinophone (Chinese-speaking) and Anglophone (English-speaking) participants particularly enjoy in BL and does this differ between cultures?, and Are there sub-demographics in Sinophone and in Anglophone culture who enjoy particular forms of risqué sexual content in BL and do these forms relate also to enjoyment of particular storylines and concern with legal issues? The material studied meets the DSM-5 definition of the paraphilic, and little is known about paraphilias in women or in the general population. Using Categorical Principal Component Analysis we explored one 15-response question from our Sinophone (N = 1922) and Anglophone (N = 1715) BL fandom surveys: Which risqué sexual content do you particularly enjoy in BL? We also tested for associations with seven demographic and other BL content-related questions. Notably, the component structure was nearly replicated between the two independent samples, in order of strength: BDSM Specialist, Mechanoid/Animal Sex Specialist, Underage Sex Specialist, and Minority Paraphilia Specialist. In both samples, it was the avid BL fans and/or those who liked explicitly sexual stories, a largely overlapping demographic, who most engage the risqué content, while, for the Sinophone, this included also more non-heterosexual and/or other-gendered people. We conclude that women’s paraphilias have been largely overlooked because they might be expressed more commonly through fantasy than action, that their mass expression has awaited both the means and the market force, and that current conceptualization of, and assumptions about, paraphilias is overly modeled on that of men.

Turning Over the Keys: Public Prisons, Private Equity, and the Normalization of Markets Behind Bars

In recent decades, public prisons and jails have increasingly outsourced operational functions by “turning over the keys” to private business and, more recently and specifically, to private equity. By the early 2000s, private equity-owned corporations had entered the core sectors of prison and jail operations, creating “markets behind bars” in telecommunications, commissary sales, health provision, and a range of other services. Two decades later, they have become a quasi-oligopolistic market force across the carceral economy. Reacting to these developments, scholars and activists have explored how private firms generate profits by extracting resources from families of the incarcerated. Less explored is the fact that it is often and particularly private equity firms that partner with public carceral institutions in these extractive practices. In this reflection, we propose a three-part schematic for understanding how such partnerships, with their attendant predation on the poor and people of color, have become normalized. We focus, first, on the mechanism of bureaucracy through which mutual profit-making by public and private entities becomes regularized; second, we explore the legal mechanisms—the apparently small but potent and politically unexamined legal maneuvers—that enable the redirection of family resources beyond the support of a loved one to the operational needs of jails and prisons; finally, we trace the role of gender as a social mechanism through which private equity and its prison/jail partners rely simultaneously on women’s traditional role as caretaker and non-traditional role as primary breadwinner. We show that all three mechanisms are crucial to the economic functioning of the carceral state.

Ict as a development factor in the tunisian olive oil sector

Olive oil is one of the main agricultural products of the countries that make up the Mediterranean basin. The low profitability of this sector of activity and the growing challenges of an increasingly turbulent market force the sector to search for more efficient organization. The aim of this paper is to determine the organisational and technological factors associated with the most economically efficient Tunisian olive-growing organisations. To this end, firstly the Data Envelopment Analysis method has been used to establish a hierarchy of the most efficient organizations. Secondly, the Qualitative Comparative Analysis method has been used, which allows us to establish the relationships of variables that explain the highest levels of economic efficiency. The results obtained show that the academic training of the top manager, training in information technology, the age of the organisation and the existence of plans and budget items for the adoption of information and communication technologies are variables that explain this greater efficiency.

Determinants and Sustainability of Manufacturing Sector Performance in Nigeria: The Roles of Selected Macroeconomic Variables

Manufacturing sector is a vibrant sector that spurs growth in every other sector of the economy. Despite this, macroeconomic environment in the country has not made this desire materialized. Therefore, the study examined the determinants and sustainability of manufacturing sector performance in Nigeria from 1994-2019. The data used include manufacturing sector output, interest rate, real exchange rate, tax rate, money supply and trade openness. Also, Error Correction Model (ECM) and Pairwise Granger Causality(PGC) techniques were used for the formulated objective. The unit root test confirmed stationarity of interest rate at level; while other were integrated of order one (D = 1). The Johansen co-integration established a long-run relationships. The ECM corrected the disequilibrium at an annual rate of 77.5%. Also, real exchange rate, tax rate and trade openness had a direct and significant effect on manufacturing sector output. While, interest rate and money supply were non-significance. The PGC result revealed a bi-directional causality between real exchange rate and manufacturing sector and tax rate and manufacturing sector output. It was concluded that increase in consumption tax, real exchange rate and liberation of the economy were the determinants of manufacturing sector performance, while appreciation of nigeria’s currency (naira) and increase in tax rate with proportional improvement in infrastructural facilities are needed to sustain it. Therefore, recommended that the financial institutions especially the apex bank should eliminate different bench-mark of exchange rate policy by allowing the market force of demand and supply to depict the real value of naira.

Anhydride-Cured Epoxy Powder Coatings from Natural-Origin Resins, Hardeners, and Fillers

Carbon-neutral policy and technological race on the powder coatings market force to develop more advanced, safer, cheaper, and naturally sourced products. To meet the market needs, powder coating compositions and coatings were prepared from safe and natural-origin hardeners, resins, and fillers prepared from rosin, bio-diols, bio-epichlorohydrin, and halloysite, to investigate their thermal, mechanical, and functional properties in comparison with petroleum-based references: cross-linking behavior, glass transition temperature, thermal stability, hardness, cupping resistance, adhesion, chemical resistance, gloss, color, and anti-corrosive behavior in salt chamber. As a result, compositions containing up to 83 wt.% of natural resources, and showing comparable or better properties, as compared to references, were successfully prepared. Their application includes binders for future ecological powder paints for demanding protection of steel substrates.

When Things Get Real: (Re)Considering the Challenges to Cultural Industries Research

This article considers the practical methodological challenges and variances related to doing research in the cultural industries. More specifically, it seeks to illuminate how considering the specific proclivities of prescribed, historically inflected, fields of study and concomitant sites therein (e.g., in our case study, the infrastructural/cultural dynamics of media organizations in a small, central-European media market) force methodological (re)considerations which can enhance doing practical research in this realm.

Tale of Two “Rumah”

In this paper, I will juxtapose the socio-economic histories of two Austronesian communities in order to highlight the working of a key cultural concept, “house” or rumah, in both communities in the face of encroaching contemporary state and market forces. The communities under consideration are an Iban longhouse community of Sarawak and a Paiwan community of Southern Taiwan. Both group honored a kind of precedence in terms of land occupancy and the utilization of natural resources. Both group follow a rather fundamental cognatic principle in kinship recognition, household division and property transmission. While a comprehensive comparison of the two on so complex a subject is apparently way beyond the scope of a conference paper, I choose here to focus on the interplay of state policy (both colonial and independent) and market force on land tenure and land utilization among the two communities, and hope to demonstrate the upholding of the notion umah as a value in these peoples modernization strategies. Even though the contents, scopes and representations of the notion of “House” are different in these two societies, its centralities in their respective social and cultural systems are fascinatingly comparable. I do not intent to say that these two local communities of the Austronesian experience no difficulties whatsoever in their ever-increasing involvement in the national, regional and global systems. From what we observe, however, we do see that they are not just surviving the encroaching external impacts, they continue to exist as two “rumah”.

Cyber-Physical Systems for Micro-/Nano-assembly Operations: a Survey

Purpose of Review Latest requirements of the global market force manufacturing systems to a change for a new production paradigm (Industry 4.0). Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) appear as a solution to be deployed in different manufacturing fields, especially those with high added value and technological complexity, high product variants, and short time to market. In this sense, this paper aims at reviewing the introduction level of CPS technologies in micro/nano-manufacturing and how these technologies could cope with these challenging manufacturing requirements. Recent Findings The introduction of CPS is still in its infancy on many industrial applications, but it actually demonstrates its potential to support future manufacturing paradigm. However, only few research works in micro/nano-manufacturing considered CPS frameworks, since the concept barely appeared a decade ago. Summary Some contributions have revealed the potential of CPS technologies to improve manufacturing performance which may be scaled to the micro/nano-manufacturing. IoT-based frameworks with VR/AR technologies allow distributed and collaborative systems, or agent-based architectures with advance algorithm implementations that improve the flexibility and performance of micro-/nano-assembly operations. Future research of CPS in micro-/nano-assembly operations should be followed by more studies of its technical deployment showing its implications under other perspectives, i.e. sustainable, economic, and social point of views, to take full advance of all its features.

Structured Methodology for Clustering Gas Turbine Transients by Means of Multivariate Time Series

At present, the challenges related to energy market force gas turbine owners to improve the reliability and availability of gas turbine engines, especially in the ever competitive Oil & Gas sector. Gas turbine trip leads to business interruption and also reduces equipment remaining useful life. Thus, the identification of symptoms of trips allows the prediction of their occurrence and avoids further damages and costs. Gas turbine transients are tracked by gas turbine operators while they occur, but a database including the complete details of past events for many fleets of engines is not always available. Therefore, a methodology aimed at classifying transients into clusters that identify the type of event (e.g., normal shutdown or trip) is required. Clustering is a data mining technique that addresses the scope of partitioning multivariate time series into a given number of homogeneous and separated groups. Thus, the multivariate time series belonging to the same cluster are expected to be very similar to each other. This paper presents a structured methodology composed of a subsequent matching algorithm, a featured-based clustering approach exploiting the unsupervised fuzzy C-means algorithm and a procedure that assigns a label to each cluster for classification purposes. The methodology is applied to a real-word case-study that includes transients acquired from a fleet of Siemens gas turbines in operation during three years. The results obtained by using heterogeneous datasets including six measured variables allowed values of Precision, Recall and Accuracy higher than 90 % in almost all cases.