Brands as masks: public secrecy and the counterfeit in Côte d'Ivoire

Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands function much like masking practices, concealing even as they reveal, using the visible to hide/signify the invisible. The classic masking scenario is one in which men wear masks and claim to be powerful ancestral spirits, keeping the fact of their performance a secret from women and uninitiated boys. However, the secrecy is ambiguous, for women give signs of knowing and men seem to believe in the spirits they pretend to be only pretending to be. In Côte d'Ivoire, where masks are a symbol of national identity, consumption focuses around displaying supposedly authentic name brand labels. Urban Ivoirians call this display of wealth and consumption ‘bluffing’, exposing the artifice of their supposed affluence. Still, the success of their performance depends on the authenticity of expensive European and American brands, in a market where most of what is available is counterfeit. Underneath the public secret of their performative display lies the deeper secret that they remain uncertain of the legitimacy of their purchases. Masks and brands both metaphorically delineate a metonymic though invisible connection to authentic power, but the secrecy of what lies beneath the masked performance provides an unstable ambiguity in which it is always possible that the surface is that which it represents. Brands always contain this instability between appearance and the genuine, for all are ultimately copies whose uncertain authenticity we cover up with public secrecy.     

Change and Chisungu in Zambia's Time of AIDS

Through an examination of amafunde – a Bemba word meaning ‘instruction’, which refers to the training given to a young woman before her marriage – this article explores the social changes that have followed widespread HIV infection on the Zambian Copperbelt. Amafunde today are marked by openness between senior women and those they train for marriage, an openness that they encourage their charges to adopt in married life. This emphasis on direct or ‘straight’ speech stands in stark contrast to earlier accounts of female initiation in Zambia, which highlight ‘obscure’ modes of communication. An analysis of this change reveals the increased importance of both secrecy and disclosure in Zambia's time of AIDS, as well as the influence of Pentecostal Christianity. Most importantly, it indexes changes in the social forms that the interplay of secrecy and disclosure has traditionally produced.     

Secret Places: On the Management of Knowledge and Information About Landscape and Yields in Northern Norway

This article addresses strategies of secrecy and deception in hunters’ and fishers’ appropriation of land- and seascape-based resources in northern Norway. We argue that in their management of relevant environmental knowledge and information, hunters and fishers often seek to avoid competitors and free riders by hiding their trails, and are particularly careful about who they share their knowledge with. Strategies of secrecy are also integral to individual hunter’s and fisher’s social reputation. Reputation is achieved not only by successful trips and sharing of spoils, but also through role enactments that become the subject of evaluating commentaries and information exchange guided by socially sanctioned rules of appropriate deference. In some important ways structural and economic changes in the social environment also change the generic properties of the practices investigated, while secrecy as practice shows a strong cultural continuity in spite of such changes.     

Biodefense research: can secrecy and safety coexist?

Over the next 10 years, the United States will spend 6 billion US dollars to develop countermeasures against biological and chemical weapons. Much of this research on highly virulent pathogens will be done in academic settings around the country. This article explores the challenges in ensuring secrecy to protect national security while accommodating the right of local communities to have access to safety information regarding select agents and laboratory-acquired infections. Secrecy has been defended as being vital for protecting national security. Problems with secrecy can include the misinterpretation of intentions, particularly in laboratories located in nuclear weapons design facilities, and the restricted access to information relevant to public health and safety. While federal select agent legislation requires laboratories to have emergency plans in place with first responders, these plans do not necessarily include public health professionals, who will be responsible for any future public health action, such as quarantine, surveillance, or mass vaccinations, in the unlikely event that a laboratory-acquired infection spreads into a community. Laboratory-acquired infections do occur, even with the best safety mechanisms in place; however, the epidemiology of the incidence and severity of these infections are not known since there is no national surveillance reporting system. Evidence suggests that many of these infections occur in the absence of an actual laboratory accident. The best emergency plans and surveillance systems are only as good as the participation and vigilance of the laboratory workers themselves. Thus, laboratory workers have a responsibility to themselves and others to report all laboratory accidents and spills, regardless how minor. In addition, they should have a lower threshold than normal in seeking medical attention when feeling ill, and their physicians should be aware of what pathogens they work with to reduce the risk of a delay in diagnosis.     

Secrecy, Ambiguity, and the Everyday in Kabre Culture

Secrecy, the intentional concealing of information, is very much a part of everyday life and discourse among the Kabre of northern Togo (West Africa). This article proposes an interpretation of Kabre everyday secrecy that relies on indigenous understandings and attempts to move beyond the functionalist assumptions of many previous analyses of secrecy in Africa. It also raises more general questions about theories of culture that ignore the everyday and that fail to come to terms with the negotiated meanings and the indirect types of communication that constitute everyday social relations.     

Multi-level on-demand access control for flexible data sharing in cloud

The exponential growth of data storage and sharing in cloud demands an efficient access control mechanism for flexible data sharing. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a promising cryptographic solution to share data among users in the cloud. But it suffers from user revocation, attribute revocation, forward secrecy and backward secrecy issues. Communication and computation overhead is more due to the linear variation in the size of ciphertext and the secret key with respect to the number of attributes. In this paper, we investigate an on-demand access control for flexible sharing of secure data among randomly selected users. It is a tunable access control mechanism for the flexible sharing of ciphertext classes in the cloud. It delegates the decryption rights of any set of ciphertext classes among the users only if their attributes are satisfied with the access policy associated with ciphertext and if they should possess a compact key corresponding to the intended set of ciphertext classes. It produces a constant size ciphertext and a compact secret key to efficiently utilize the storage space and reduce the communication cost. The compact key aggregates the power of secret keys used to encrypt the outsourced data. This method flexibly shares the ciphertext classes among the randomly selected users with a specific set of attributes. All other ciphertext classes outside the set remain confidential. It allows dynamic data updates by verifying the data manipulation privilege of users with the help of claim policy. The proposed scheme provides access control of varying granularity, at user-level, at file-level, and attribute-level. Granularity levels can be chosen based on applications and user demands. Hence, it is a multi-level, tunable access control over the shared data. It is very useful for secure data storage. This scheme tackles user revocation and attribute revocation problems so that, it allows the data owner to revoke a specific user or a group of users. It prevents forward and backward secrecy issues.

     

Access to data and material for research: putting empirical evidence into perspective

The aim of this article is to put into critical perspective the empirical findings on secrecy and withholding in research. In other words, by taking existing empirical literature into account, it is intended that a crucial question is answered: Is secrecy and withholding in research harmful or innocuous to science? To understand how secrecy and withholding in research have affected academic science, empirical studies have been placed in the wider context of Mertonian underpinnings of the anticommons threat. The turning point in testing the effects of secrecy and withholding of data and material on scientific research was marked by statistical studies based on surveys and bibliometric measures. These two types of empirical studies have given answers to the basic question since academia was threatened by different modes of practicing science.     

The Coevolution of Secrecy and Stigmatization

We propose a coevolutionary model of secrecy and stigmatization. According to this model, secrecy functions to conceal potential fitness costs detected in oneself or one’s genetic kin. In three studies, we found that the content of participants’ distressing secrets overlapped significantly with three domains of social information that were important for inclusive fitness and served as cues for discriminating between rewarding and unrewarding interaction partners: health, mating, and social-exchange behavior. These findings support the notion that secrecy functions primarily as a defense against stigmatization by suppressing information about oneself or one’s kin that evolutionarily has been devalued in mating and social exchange.     

复眼透镜光学信息保密编码及译码的研究——Ⅰ.昆虫复眼成像特性及编、译码技术原理

本文根据光学并列型和光学重叠型两类昆虫复眼的屈光系统,具有分解和综合二维图像的光学特性,提出了一种新的用复眼透镜实现二维图像光学信息编码和译码的技术原理.利用复眼透镜和一个特制的随机抽样编码的掩模板,可将一幅有序的二维图像(或者文献、资料等)编码形成为一幅无序的,具有良好保密性能的分解编码像,而且,还能将此编码像反演综合再现出原始图像.它不仅实现了对二维图像信息的多通道并行处理,而且还具有传输量大、速度快、保密性强等优点.我们利用此种复眼透镜光学信息编、译码的技术原理,对二维图像的光学信息进行了分解编码记录及综合译码再现.     

BACTERIAL AND CHEMICAL WARFARE-The Current Status

For fourteen years public attention has been focused so sharply on atomic weapons as to lose sight of other, less spectacular but equally significant advances in the art of warfare. In the shadows cast by brilliant research in nuclear physics are hidden startling advances in the field of chemical and biological weapons. These weapons, as now developed, are not only capable of producing mass casualties quite comparable with those of atomic bombs, but they also possess certain advantages which may make them the weapons of choice for an unscrupulous enemy. If war should come, it is the medical profession which will have the sole responsibility for protecting the citizens of California against these weapons, and we can therefore delay no longer in acquainting ourselves with their potentialities and characteristics. In this task, we are working under two serious handicaps. The first is that our classical medical training affords little appreciation of the real danger, and the second is the cloak of secrecy surrounding the entire subject.     

BACTERIAL AND CHEMICAL WARFARE—The Current Status

For fourteen years public attention has been focused so sharply on atomic weapons as to lose sight of other, less spectacular but equally significant advances in the art of warfare.In the shadows cast by brilliant research in nuclear physics are hidden startling advances in the field of chemical and biological weapons. These weapons, as now developed, are not only capable of producing mass casualties quite comparable with those of atomic bombs, but they also possess certain advantages which may make them the weapons of choice for an unscrupulous enemy.If war should come, it is the medical profession which will have the sole responsibility for protecting the citizens of California against these weapons, and we can therefore delay no longer in acquainting ourselves with their potentialities and characteristics.In this task, we are working under two serious handicaps. The first is that our classical medical training affords little appreciation of the real danger, and the second is the cloak of secrecy surrounding the entire subject.     

复眼透镜光学信息保密编码及译码的研究——Ⅰ.昆虫复眼成像特性及编、译码技术原理

本文根据光学并列型和光学重叠型两类昆虫复眼的屈光系统,具有分解和综合二维图像的光学特性,提出了一种新的用复眼透镜实现二维图像光学信息编码和译码的技术原理.利用复眼透镜和一个特制的随机抽样编码的掩模板,可将一幅有序的二维图像(或者文献、资料等)编码形成为一幅无序的,具有良好保密性能的分解编码像,而且,还能将此编码像反演综合再现出原始图像.它不仅实现了对二维图像信息的多通道并行处理,而且还具有传输量大、速度快、保密性强等优点.我们利用此种复眼透镜光学信息编、译码的技术原理,对二维图像的光学信息进行了分解编码记录及综合译码再现.     

Le deuil de la fertilité dans l’insémination avec sperme de donneur (IAD)

In a sterile man, the practice of insemination with donor’s sperm paradoxically sets up a clamping of the bereavement of his fertility. The symptom of this is the setting of the conception of the child into secrecy. The psychological help required for the elaboration of the bereavement will allow lifting this secrecy, but that is not enough for this man to have access to fatherhood. By owning himself active and his child designer, he will have to confront the latent homosexuality inherent in the practice of insemination with donor’s sperm. Bringing the work of mourning to a successful issue will make the sterile man an authentic and peaceful father.     

Bodyworlds and the ethics of using human remains: a preliminary discussion

Accepting the claim that the living have some moral duties with regard to dead bodies, this paper explores those duties and how they bear on the popular travelling exhibition Bodyworlds. I argue that the concept of informed consent presupposes substantial duties to the dead, namely duties that reckon with the meaning of the act in question. An attitude of respect and not regarding human remains as mere raw material are non-alienable substantial duties. I found the ethos of Bodyworlds premature but full of promises such as public attitudes to organ donations. At the practical level I conclude that Bodyworlds should use only willed donations or unclaimed bodies for which dignified funerals are not available. In the case of live donations, Bodyworlds has a duty to participate in the medical care of needy donors. However, secrecy with regard to the source of cadavers seems to be the most troublesome aspect of Bodyworlds.     

对心血管外科进修生的教学体会

为造福更多的心血管病患者,进一步提高治疗心血管疾病专业人才的质量,建立科学、健全的心血管外科进修生管理和培养模式很有必要。我科室通过总结多年的进修生教学经验,树立"双赢"理念,规范培训制度,实行导师负责制,实施PBL教学方式,进行多学科协作培训,定期对进修医生考核等方法措施,切实提高进修生的医疗水平,更好地为基层医院服务、为心血管病患者服务。     

Middle Eastern masculinities in the age of new reproductive technologies: male infertility and stigma in Egypt and Lebanon

Worldwide, male infertility contributes to more than half of all cases of childlessness; yet, it is a reproductive health problem that is poorly studied and understood. This article examines the problem of male infertility in two Middle Eastern locales, Cairo, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon, where men may be at increased risk of male infertility because of environmental and behavioral factors. It is argued that male infertility may be particularly problematic for Middle Eastern men in their pronatalist societies; there, both virility and fertility are typically tied to manhood. Thus, male infertility is a potentially emasculating condition, surrounded by secrecy and stigma. Furthermore, the new reproductive technology called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), designed specifically to overcome male infertility, may paradoxically create additional layers of stigma and secrecy, due to the complex moral and marital dilemmas associated with Islamic restrictions on third-party donation of gametes.     

植物医学专业农药学课程体系设置

植物医学是保持植物健康及预防、缓解或治疗植物疾病的科学和技术.植物医学的理念已被我国很多学者接受,开办植物医学专业的呼声越来越高.农药学类课程是植物医学专业课程体系的重要组成部分,本文针对植物医学专业农药学课程体系的教学目标、教学内容等进行了初步讨论,以期为植物医学专业背景下农药学课程体系的建立提供参考.     

Simultaneous authentication and secrecy in identity-based data upload to cloud

Most existing works to secure cloud devote to remote integrity check, search and computing on encrypted data. In this paper, we deal with simultaneous authentication and secrecy when data are uploaded to cloud. Observing that cloud is most interesting to companies in which multiple authorized employees are allowed to upload data, we propose a general framework for secure data upload in an identity-based setting. We present and employ identity-based signcryption (IBSC) to meet this goal. As it is shown that it is challenging to construct IBSC scheme in the standard model and most IBSC schemes are realized in the random oracle model which is regarded weak to capture the realistic adversaries, we propose a new IBSC scheme simultaneously performing encryption and signature with cost less than the signature-then-encryption approach. The identity based feature eliminates the complicated certificates management in signcryption schemes in the traditional public-key infrastructure (PKI) setting. Our IBSC scheme exploits Boneh et al.’s strongly unforgeable signature and Paterson et al.’s identity-based signature. The scheme is shown to satisfy semantic security and strong unforgeability. The security relies on the well-defined bilinear decision Diffie-Hellman (BDDH) assumption and the proof is given in the standard model. With our IBSC proposal, a secure data upload scheme is instantiated with simultaneous authentication and secrecy in a multi-user setting.     

Teaching bioethics to future health professionals: a case-based clinical model

In summary, I believe that ethics teaching based on actual cases, presented in a small-group format led by a clinician and an ethicist, offers the best prospect for achieving these goals. The physician serves as a role model and ensures that information and options are medically accurate. The ethicist helps to identify morally relevant features, can articulate ethical principles, and direct students to the appropriate literature. This method does not guarantee that the behavior of future health professionals will always be humane or ethically sound. But it is likely to get future health professionals to think about what they are doing when they encounter cases that resemble those discussed in teaching conferences devoted to clinical ethics.