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Show CONFUCIAN GOVERNANCE AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS: NEO-CONFUCIAN-ISM IN EARLY CHOSON KOREA AND THE DEGRADATION OF FEMALE FREEDOMS Josh Eckman (Kuiweon Cho), Department of Asian Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112. In recent years, Korean women have made significant inroads into their male-dominated, patrilineal society However, advocates of true equality confront an entrenched culture that for thousands of years has defined a woman's identity around her relationship to men, home and the family A study of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910 Ad.) offers a strong explanation for modern Korean gender conventions. The Choson dynasty was founded on the principles of neo-Confucianism, which specifically detail the roles that women and men should assume in a moral soci-ety. Due to its duration, strength, recency and the pervasiveness of Neo-Confu-cian thought it engendered, the Choson dynasty contributed to the foundation of gender socialization in modern Korea. The Choson dynasty marks a definite de-cline in the freedoms of women. In the previous Koryo dynasty, women enjoyed a comparatively high degree of autonomy. They could transact business, own land, claim equal inheritance with male siblings, and move about in society with some de-gree of freedom. As the Choson dynasty unfolded, these and many other freedoms were lost. For example, it became com-mon practice to physically confine women to the interior of their traditional household compounds, to ostensibly protect their chastity and prevent the moral decay of society. This paper will examine the de-cline of women's rights associated with the establishment of the Choson dynasty and its adoption of neo-Confucianism. The hypothesis is that the decline in women's rights immediately following the transition to the Choson dynasty was influenced by the Choson government's institutionaliza-tion of neo-Confucianism. Direct causa-tion cannot be proved, because many fac-tors may have played a role in the decline of female freedoms. Therefore, this paper will juxtapose the decline of women's rights in the economic, public and do-mestic spheres against the development of Korean neo-Confucianism and its role in the Choson governmental structure. MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF DIRECTION SELECTIVITY IN PRIMARY VISUAL CORTEX John R. Faust, (Dr. Paul Bressloff), Depart-ment of Mathematics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 The study of the brain has both philo-sophical and practical motivations and the primary visual cortex is the logical starting point of that study. Microelectrode recording experiments have shown that neurons in primary visual cortex are sen-sitive to stimulus direction. The existence of a large number of strong lateral recur-rent connections in the visual cortex moti-vates a model employing recurrent neural networks with asymmetric lateral connec-tions to account for the properties of direc-tion selective of cortical neurons. I analyze a nonlinear mathematical model of direc-tion selectivity to investigate the nonlinear dynamics that arise in simple nonlinear neural networks with asymmetric recurrent lateral connections driven by moving input stimuli in order to determine the anatomi-cal and physiological basis for the prop-erties of direction selective neurons. The result is that such networks have stable solutions, called stimulus-locked travel-ing pulses, whose speed is determined by the speed of the input. Outside a certain regime of stimulus speeds, the stability of the traveling pulse solutions breaks down and another class of solutions arises, lurching activity pulses. The existence of lurching activity pulses provides an experi-mentally testable prediction that is specific to the explanation of direction selectivity by asymmetric lateral connections |
