Law handbook

2004 handbook for the faculty of La

Women and Work in Contemporary Japan: Deconstructing the "Crisis" of the Gender Order

ABSTRACT The 1990s saw important developments in the employment practices of Japanese women as necessitated by economic recession. Japanese women are increasingly postponing their traditional roles of wife and mother in lieu of expanding education and employment opportunities, suggesting that we are approaching or witnessing a period of redefinition of the prevailing gender structure. This thesis offers a theoretical exposition of this “crisis” in the gender structure utilising Connell’s concept of “hegemonic masculinity” and Finnemore and Sikkink’s “norm life cycle model”. This thesis will be presented as follows: i) hegemonic masculinity will be applied to the Japanese context to argue for the centrality of masculinity defined through the corporation, and for its significance in an understanding of femininity; ii) discussion of the “feminisation” of part-time work in Japan will test whether a challenge to the gender order from within of this nature represents a profound redefinition of the hegemonic gender structure; and iii) discursive study of Japanese state legislation and policy will reveal government commitment to ensuring continuity in gender norm dynamics. The findings suggest that we are not witnessing a period of “crisis” or profound transformation in the gender structure for greater gender equality. The pervasiveness of gender norm ideology in Japan is such that once established these norms have maintained an internal momentum so that changes in the material sphere are constrained by these ideational structures and not vice versa. The current period is marked by cooptation of gender norm challenges by corporations and government in an effort to neutralise gender norm challenge.N/ADepartment of Government and International Relation

The impact of epilepsy surgery on sex hormones and the menstrual cycle in female patients

AbstractWe investigated the impact of temporal lobe epilepsy surgery on sex hormones and menstrual cycles. Sixteen female patients with temporal lobe epilepsy were investigated prior to surgery and 3, 6, and 12 months after surgery. The patients received carbamazepine (CBZ) as monotherapy (10 patients ) or in combination with other antiepileptic drugs (six patients ). Antiepileptic drugs were maintained after surgery. During the 1-year follow-up after surgery eight patients (50%) remained completely free of seizures. In another four patients (25%) only rare disabling seizures occurred. There were no significant differences between pre-surgical and post-surgical serum concentrations of testosterone, free testosterone, prolactin, dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, growth hormone, cortisol and sex hormone binding globulin. There was, however, a significant increase in serum androstenedione concentration 6 months post-surgically (P< 0.02). Documentation of menstrual cycles in addition to laboratory parameters revealed individual post-surgical changes of the menstrual cycle in eight patients . Four patients had a change in menstrual periodicity: two patients with complete seizure control had regular cycles instead of oligomenorrhoea and two patients with incomplete seizure control had oligomenorrhoea instead of regular cycles. These data indicate that at least in some patients with temporal lobe epilepsy surgical treatment influences menstrual periodicity

'The medical gaze and the watchful eye' : the treatment, prevention and epidemiology of venereal diseases in New South Wales c.1901 - 1925

From Federation in 1901 through the first three decades of the twentieth century there was a perceptible shift in modes of rule in New South Wales (NSW) related to the management of venereal diseases. At the beginning of the twentieth century a medicopenal approach was central. By 1925, persuasion and ‘responsibilisation’ were becoming important modes, and young people rather than ‘case-hardened prostitutes' were assessed as being a ‘venereal’ risk. Framing this period were three important legislative developments which informed, and were informed by, these shifts: the NSW Prisoners Detention Act 1909, the NSW Select Committee into the Prevalence of Venereal Diseases 1915 and the NSW Venereal Diseases Act 1918. At its core this thesis is concerned with examining shifting modes of rule. This thesis closely examines each. I suggest that these modes of rule can be viewed through the lens of biopolitics, and following Foucault, deploy the ‘medical gaze’ and the ‘watchful eye’ as constructs to examine the relationship between the government of self, government of others and government of the state. I use the medical gaze to describe not only the individual venereal patient attending a hospital and the body of the patient diagnosed with syphilis and/or gonorrhoea, but most importantly to describe the power relationship between the medical practitioner, the teaching hospital and the patient. I use the watchful eye in a more overarching way to suggest the suite of techniques and apparatus deployed by government to monitor and regulate the venereal body politic, both the populations perceived to be posing a venereal risk, and populations at risk of venereal infection. In relation to the venereal body and the venereal body politic, I analyse three fundamental aspects of the management of venereal diseases: treatment, prevention and epidemiology. Treatment: Over this period, treatment moved from lock institutions to outpatient clinics. Embodied in this change was a widespread institutional ambivalence towards treating venereal patients. I contend that treatment of venereal diseases was painful, prolonged and punitive precisely because of the moral sickness perceived to be at the iv heart of venereal infection. I track this ambivalence to a systemic fear of institutional ‘venerealisation’, which decreased perceptibly across the period. Closely analysing surviving patient records, I argue that in their conduct, venereal patients were often compliant, conscientious and responsible. Prevention: I argue that preventative approaches to venereal diseases became increasingly complex, and operated in three domains – preventative medicine (diagnosis, treatment and vaccination); public health prevention (notification, isolation and disinfection); and prevention education (social purity campaigns and sex hygiene). An emerging plethora of community-based organisations and campaigns began to shift the sites and practices of power. Epidemiology: I suggest that there was a shift from danger to risk in the conceptualisation of venereal diseases. This shift necessitated a focus on factors affecting populations, as opposed to factors affecting individuals. This in turn led to the deployment of various techniques to monitor the conduct of venereal populations. The NSW Venereal Diseases Act 1918 created two important new venereal categories: the ‘notified person’ and the ‘defaulter,’ both of which came to permeate renditions of venereal patients throughout the 20th century

Language processing within the human medial temporal lobe

Although the hippocampal formation is essential for verbal memory, it is not fully understood how it contributes to language comprehension. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) directly from two substructures of the medial temporal lobe (MTL), the rhinal cortex and the hippocampus proper, while epilepsy patients listened to sentences that either were correct or contained semantic or syntactic violations. Semantic violations elicited a large negative ERP response peaking at approximately 400 ms in the rhinal cortex. In contrast, syntactically incorrect sentences elicited a negative deflection of 500-800 ms in the hippocampus proper. The results suggest that functionally distinct aspects of integration in language comprehension are supported by different MTL structures: the rhinal cortex is involved in semantic integration, whereas the hippocampus proper subserves processes of syntactic integration. An analysis of phase synchronization within the gamma band between rhinal and hippocampal recording sites showed that both of the above-mentioned ERP components were preceded by an increase of phase synchronization. In contrast to these short phasic increases of phase synchronization in both violation conditions, correct sentences were associated with a long-lasting synchronization in a late time window, possibly reflecting the integration of semantic and syntactic information as required for normal comprehension

Local category-specific gamma band responses in the visual cortex do not reflect conscious perception

Which neural processes underlie our conscious experience? One theoretical view argues that the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) reside in local activity in sensory cortices. Accordingly, local category-specific gamma band responses in visual cortex correlate with conscious perception. However, as most studies manipulated conscious perception by altering the amount of sensory evidence, it is possible that they reflect prerequisites or consequences of consciousness rather than the actual NCC. Here we directly address this issue by developing a new experimental paradigm in which conscious perception is modulated either by sensory evidence or by previous exposure of the images while recording intracranial EEG from the higher-order visual cortex of human epilepsy patients. A clear prediction is that neural processes directly reflecting conscious perception should be present regardless of how it comes about. In contrast, we observed that although subjective reports were modulated both by sensory evidence and by previous exposure, gamma band responses solely reflected sensory evidence. This result contradicts the proposal that local gamma band responses in the higher-order visual cortex reflect conscious perception

A Robust Method for Detecting Interdependences: Application to Intracranially Recorded EEG

We present a measure for characterizing statistical relationships between two time sequences. In contrast to commonly used measures like cross-correlations, coherence and mutual information, the proposed measure is non-symmetric and provides information about the direction of interdependence. It is closely related to recent attempts to detect generalized synchronization. However, we do not assume a strict functional relationship between the two time sequences and try to define the measure so as to be robust against noise, and to detect also weak interdependences. We apply our measure to intracranially recorded electroencephalograms of patients suffering from severe epilepsies.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, paper accepted for publication in Physica

Entropically-driven binding of mithramycin in the minor groove of C/G-rich DNA sequences

Final full-text version available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkm037.-- Supplementary Data is available.The antitumour antibiotic mithramycin A (MTA) is a DNA minor-groove binding ligand. It binds to C/G-rich tracts as a dimer that forms in the presence of divalent cations such as Mg2+. Differential scanning calorimetry, UV thermal denaturation, isothermal titration calorimetry and competition dialysis were used, together with computations of the hydrophobic free energy of binding, to determine the thermodynamic profile of MTA binding to DNA. The results were compared to those obtained in parallel using the structurally related mithramycin SK (MSK). The binding of MTA to salmon testes DNA determined by UV melting studies (Kobs = 1.2 (±0.3) x 10^5 M–1) is tighter than that of MSK (2.9 (±1.0) x 10^4 M–1) at 25°C. Competition dialysis studies showed a tighter MTA binding to both salmon testes DNA (42% C + G) and Micrococcus lysodeikticus DNA (72% C + G). The thermodynamic analysis of binding data at 25°C shows that the binding of MTA and MSK to DNA is entropically driven, dominated by the hydrophobic transfer of the antibiotics from solution to the DNA-binding site. Direct molecular recognition between MTA or MSK and DNA through hydrogen bonding and van der Waals contacts may also contribute significantly to complex formation.Supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (SAF2005-00551) and the FEDER program of the European Community. This work was carried out within the framework of the Centre de Referencia en Biotecnologia of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Funding to pay the Open Access publication charge was provided by the Ministry of Education and Science and CSIC (Spain).Peer reviewe

Redundant sensory information does not enhance sequence learning in the serial reaction time task

In daily life we encounter multiple sources of sensory information at any given moment. Unknown is whether such sensory redundancy in some way affects implicit learning of a sequence of events. In the current paper we explored this issue in a serial reaction time task. Our results indicate that redundant sensory information does not enhance sequence learning when all sensory information is presented at the same location (responding to the position and/or color of the stimuli; Experiment 1), even when the distinct sensory sources provide more or less similar baseline response latencies (responding to the shape and/or color of the stimuli; Experiment 2). These findings support the claim that sequence learning does not (necessarily) benefit from sensory redundancy. Moreover, transfer was observed between various sets of stimuli, indicating that learning was predominantly response-based

Theta phase synchronization between the human hippocampus and prefrontal cortex increases during encoding of unexpected information: A case study

Events that violate predictions are thought to not only modulate activity within the hippocampus and PFC but also enhance communication between the two regions. Scalp and intracranial EEG studies have shown that oscillations in the theta frequency band are enhanced during processing of contextually unexpected information. Some theories suggest that the hippocampus and PFC interact during processing of unexpected events, and it is possible that theta oscillations may mediate these interactions. Here, we had the rare opportunity to conduct simultaneous electrophysiological recordings from the human hippocampus and PFC from two patients undergoing presurgical evaluation for pharmacoresistant epilepsy. Recordings were conducted during a task that involved encoding of contextually expected and unexpected visual stimuli. Across both patients, hippocampal–prefrontal theta phase synchronization was significantly higher during encoding of contextually unexpected study items, relative to contextually expected study items. Furthermore, the hippocampal–prefrontal theta phase synchronization was larger for contextually unexpected items that were later remembered compared with later forgotten items. Moreover, we did not find increased theta synchronization between the PFC and rhinal cortex, suggesting that the observed effects were specific to prefrontal–hippocampal interactions. Our findings are consistent with the idea that theta oscillations orchestrate communication between the hippocampus and PFC in support of enhanced encoding of contextually deviant information