Context: A growing number of Japanese people have completed advance directives, especially living wills, even though there is no legislation recognising such documents and little empirical research on their impact on clinical care at the end of life in Japan.Objectives: To investigate physicians’ attitudes about living wills and their experiences with patients who had completed a living will and later died.Design: Self administered survey and qualitative study using open question and content analysis.Setting: Japan.Participants: Physicians known to have cared for a (...) patient who had presented a living will prior to death.Measurements: The physician’s response to receiving a living will, communication about the living will, the impact of the living will on clinical care, demographics, and their opinion on advance directives, especially living wills.Main results: Fifty five per cent of respondents approved of advance directives in general, and 34% had more opportunities to communicate with a patient and his/her family after receiving the living will. Sixty nine per cent of the physicians who received a living will did not, however, change their course of therapy as a consequence of receiving the living wills. Based on the analysis, we identified three areas of concern in the comments on living wills: concerns relative to patients, physicians, and families; social context, and clinical and administrative concerns. The physicians raised various topics for discussion; they tended to describe the issues from a clinical perspective.Conclusions: Our identified areas of concern should prove helpful in better understanding the clinical and ethical implications of living wills in Japan. (shrink)

Ethical problems surrounding organ donation have been discussed since before technologies supported the procedure. In addition to issues on a societal level (e.g. brain-stem death, resource allocation), ethical concerns permeate the clinical practice of health care staff. These latter have been little studied. Using qualitative methods, this study, focused on transplant co-ordinators and their descriptions of dilemmas, ethical concerns and actions in response to them. Interviews with three co-ordinators in Japan and two in the UK revealed five areas in which (...) dilemmas occurred: aspects of discrimination; conditions placed on who should be the recipient and the related issues of directed donation; respect for a person's right to make a decision and the extent of information provided and understood by donors and recipients; potential issues of coercion, compensation and rewards in live-related and live-unrelated donations; and potential conflicts in duties. This study describes the dilemma areas revealed. Their meaning for co-ordinators will be presented in a subsequent report. (shrink)

宗教に蓄積された心身のテクノロジー。見神から禅定まで―宗教体験を語る固有の方法とは。宗教の輝きと危うさと―生と死の新しいかたちを探る。.

“私”という意識の創成。不定形で豊饒な、宗教の培養槽とは。魂、霊、気―東西の世界像の逆説に満ちた生成のプロセスを追う。宗教の輝きと危うさと―生と死の新しいかたちを探る。.

思想的提案としてのアヴァンギャルドは、今なお存在できるのか!?因襲への「反逆」と「切断」を試みた思想家たちの企てを通じ、真の新しさを追求する思想と芸術の前衛の可能性を「模索」する。.

アヴァンギャルドは何を切断したのか!?20世紀初頭の芸術運動である未来派、ダダ、シュールレアリズムから、岡本太郎、荒川修作など、歴史や地理を越えた芸術運動の考察。.

Many have claimed that education of the ethical issues raised by biotechnology is essential in universities, but there is little knowledge of its effectiveness. The focus of this paper is to investigate how university students assess the information given in class to make their own value judgments and decisions relating to issues of agricultural biotechnology, especially over genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Analysis of homework reports related with agricultural biotechnology after identification of key concepts and ideas in each student report is (...) presented. The ideas were sorted into different categories. The ideas were compared with those in the reading materials using the same categories. These categories included: concern about affects on humans, affects on the environment, developing countries and starvation, trust in industry, responsibility of scientists, risk perception, media influence, need for (international) organizations or third parties, and information dissemination. What was consistent through the different years was that more than half of the students took a “neutral” position. A report was scored as “neutral” when the report included both the positive and negative side of an issue, or when the student could not make a definite decision about the use of GMOs and GM food. While it may be more difficult to defend a strong “for” or “against” position, some students used logical arguments successfully in doing so. Sample comments are presented to depict how Japanese students see agricultural technology, and how they value its application, with comparisons to the general social attitudes towards biotechnology. (shrink)

Previous findings in cultural psychology indicated that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to be attentive to contextual information (e.g., Nisbett & Masuda, ). However, to what extent and in which conditions culture influences patterns of attention has not been fully examined. As a result, universal patterns of attention may be obscured, and culturally unique patterns may be wrongly assumed to be constant across situations. By carrying out two cross-cultural studies, we demonstrated that (a) both European Canadians (...) and Japanese attended to moving objects similarly when the task was to simply observe the visual information; however, (b) there were cultural variations in patterns of attention when participants actively engaged in the task by constructing narratives of their observation (narrative construction). These findings suggest that cultural effects are most pronounced in narrative construction conditions, where the need to act in accordance with a culturally shared meaning system is elicited. (shrink)

Universities are increasingly part of wider geographical processes including international, national and sub-national actors. Universities now find themselves having to pay attention to many more political centres than before, as seen, for example, with research grants, assessments and teaching accreditation from transnational bodies, individual states and regional authorities. As an institution, the university constitutes a place which needs to be situated within a wider space and the geography of power-relations. This article traces these spatial developments in relation to recent policy (...) changes in the Japanese context. The current university reforms, set against the development of the globalising knowledge-based economy and regionalization of innovation policies, are examined in relation to the changing role of universities in multi-spacial innovation systems. (shrink)

To apply reinforcement learning to difficult classes such as real-environment learning, we need to use a method robust to perceptual aliasing problem. The exploitation-oriented methods such as Profit Sharing can deal with the perceptual aliasing problem to a certain extent. However, when the agent needs to select different actions at the same sensory input, the learning efficiency worsens. To overcome the problem, several state partition methods using history information of state-action pairs are proposed. These methods try to convert a POMDP (...) environment into an MDP environment, and thus they are sometimes very useful. However, their computation cost is very high especially in large state spaces. In contrast, memory-less approaches try to escape from the aliased states by outputting actions stochastically. However, these methods output actions stochastically even in unaliased states, and thus the learning efficiency is bad. If we desire to guarantee the rationality in POMDPs, it is efficient to output actions stochastically only in the aliased states and to output one action deterministically in the other unaliased states. Hence, to discriminate between aliased states and unaliased states, the utilization of χ² -goodness-of-fit test is proposed by Miyazaki et al. They point out that, in aliased states, the distributions of the state transitions by random search and a particular policy are different. This difference doesn't occur owing to non-deterministic actions. Hence, if the agent can collect enough samples to implement the test, the agent can distinguish between aliased states and unaliased states well. However, such a test needs a large amount of data, and it's a problem how the agent collects samples without worsening learning efficiency. If the agent uses random search in the course of learning, the learning efficiency worsens especially in unaliased states. Therefore, in this research, we propose a new method called Extended On-line Profit Sharing with Judgement (EOPSwJ) to detect important incomplete perception, which doesn't need large computation cost and numerous samples. We use two criterions for detecting important incomplete perceptions to attain a task. One is the rate of transitions to each state, and the other is the deterministic rate of actions. We confirm the availability of EOPSwJ using two simulations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 3-11 [Access article in PDF] A Historical Overview of Art Education in Japan Introduction The stage of art education in Japan that was given its form by "imports" from overseas — mainly Western countries — is now over. Recently, even at international art education conferences and similar venues, a wide range of dynamic presentations and speeches were heard representing Japan's unique perspective. (...) There is, however, a rather long and involved history leading up to this shift.In this essay, I present a general outline and an overview of art education in Japan, by looking back at the transitions this system of education has undergone. My hope is to increase understanding of the unique features of art education in Japan, examining the characteristics ofmodern art education, and determining the form that art education should take in the future. The Birth of Art Education: 1872-1910 Art education in Japan began in 1872 with the promulgation of the "Gakusei" as a formal system for school education. 1 It was in this same year that Germany introduced a similar system, an indication that Japan was more or less in step with advanced Western nations. Moreover, from the end of the Tokugawa shogunate through to the Meiji era (1868-1912), the seeds of Westernization had clearly taken root. Although the term "art education" is used, for many years the emphasis in art education was on drawing.The first curriculum was established at this time. In the context of art education, Kikagaku Keiga Taii [Introduction to Geometrical Line Drawing] (renamed Keiga the following month) was introduced as a compulsory subject in upper elementary grades (students 10 to 13 years of age) at ordinary elementary schools. Keiga referred to a method of copying pictures from a copybook using graph paper — a method that was extremely restrictive and emphasized practicality.By 1887, under the new government's policy, Westernization was being promoted in all aspects of society, including politics and culture. Art education was no exception, as Western style education began to focus on pencil drawings. During this period, a liberal system for issuing and selecting textbooks was in place, and a consequently a large number of art-related texts were issued. The first drawing textbook in Japan was Seiga Shinan [Guide to [End Page 3] Western Pictures] (1871), a translation of "The Illustrated Drawing Book" by English author Robert Scott Burn, with selected figure quotations from"The American Drawing-Book" by American author John G. Chapman. 2 In addition to these texts, many other books on drawing and the natural sciences were quoted. These textbooks adopted a pragmatic approach, using a "progressive method" in which students were taught to draw easy subjects and gradually moved to more difficult ones.The next significant change came in the form of calls for nationalism, as a reaction to the wave of Westernization early in the Meiji period. Educationalcircles underwent a shift toward nationalist education, and the art worldexperienced a resurgence in traditional Japanese art led by the American Ernest Fenollosa and Tenshin Okakura, among others. Reflecting this trend, a large number of brush painting textbooks were written, and an authorization system similar to the one currently in effect was adopted. The ZugaTorishirabe Gakari [the Committee for the Study of Drawing] was launched in 1885, and then reorganized in 1887, at which time it was renamed the Tokyo Fine Arts School (currently the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). The education offered at this new institution placed a strong emphasis on purely Japanese elements.In 1903, the Elementary School Order was revised and government-designated textbooks were issued. This system remained in force from 1904 until 1947. The debate surrounding pencil drawing and brush painting continued, and two types of texts were issued — a Enpitsuga Tehon [pencil drawing copybook] and a Mohitsuga Tehon [brush painting copybook] — either of which could be used by the instructor. Both copybooks had similar configurations, with copying as the basic theme, and using a progressive study method. Drawing was still an optional subject in ordinary elementary schoolsat the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 3-11 [Access article in PDF] A Historical Overview of Art Education in Japan Introduction The stage of art education in Japan that was given its form by "imports" from overseas — mainly Western countries — is now over. Recently, even at international art education conferences and similar venues, a wide range of dynamic presentations and speeches were heard representing Japan's unique perspective. (...) There is, however, a rather long and involved history leading up to this shift.In this essay, I present a general outline and an overview of art education in Japan, by looking back at the transitions this system of education has undergone. My hope is to increase understanding of the unique features of art education in Japan, examining the characteristics ofmodern art education, and determining the form that art education should take in the future. The Birth of Art Education: 1872-1910 Art education in Japan began in 1872 with the promulgation of the "Gakusei" as a formal system for school education. 1 It was in this same year that Germany introduced a similar system, an indication that Japan was more or less in step with advanced Western nations. Moreover, from the end of the Tokugawa shogunate through to the Meiji era (1868-1912), the seeds of Westernization had clearly taken root. Although the term "art education" is used, for many years the emphasis in art education was on drawing.The first curriculum was established at this time. In the context of art education, Kikagaku Keiga Taii [Introduction to Geometrical Line Drawing] (renamed Keiga the following month) was introduced as a compulsory subject in upper elementary grades (students 10 to 13 years of age) at ordinary elementary schools. Keiga referred to a method of copying pictures from a copybook using graph paper — a method that was extremely restrictive and emphasized practicality.By 1887, under the new government's policy, Westernization was being promoted in all aspects of society, including politics and culture. Art education was no exception, as Western style education began to focus on pencil drawings. During this period, a liberal system for issuing and selecting textbooks was in place, and a consequently a large number of art-related texts were issued. The first drawing textbook in Japan was Seiga Shinan [Guide to [End Page 3] Western Pictures] (1871), a translation of "The Illustrated Drawing Book" by English author Robert Scott Burn, with selected figure quotations from"The American Drawing-Book" by American author John G. Chapman. 2 In addition to these texts, many other books on drawing and the natural sciences were quoted. These textbooks adopted a pragmatic approach, using a "progressive method" in which students were taught to draw easy subjects and gradually moved to more difficult ones.The next significant change came in the form of calls for nationalism, as a reaction to the wave of Westernization early in the Meiji period. Educationalcircles underwent a shift toward nationalist education, and the art worldexperienced a resurgence in traditional Japanese art led by the American Ernest Fenollosa and Tenshin Okakura, among others. Reflecting this trend, a large number of brush painting textbooks were written, and an authorization system similar to the one currently in effect was adopted. The ZugaTorishirabe Gakari [the Committee for the Study of Drawing] was launched in 1885, and then reorganized in 1887, at which time it was renamed the Tokyo Fine Arts School (currently the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). The education offered at this new institution placed a strong emphasis on purely Japanese elements.In 1903, the Elementary School Order was revised and government-designated textbooks were issued. This system remained in force from 1904 until 1947. The debate surrounding pencil drawing and brush painting continued, and two types of texts were issued — a Enpitsuga Tehon [pencil drawing copybook] and a Mohitsuga Tehon [brush painting copybook] — either of which could be used by the instructor. Both copybooks had similar configurations, with copying as the basic theme, and using a progressive study method. Drawing was still an optional subject in ordinary elementary schoolsat the... (shrink)

昨今の脳神経科学的知見からは、刑法的な責任も再検討を迫られる。現代的な視点から法哲学と法理論の融合を試みる「法倫理学」へ。.

Narrative Representation Theory, an evolved framework of Verse Analysis, has come into existence with the mission of explaining the operation of macro-systemic structure that could be hardwired in the brain. Based on the analyses of creoles or archetypal human languages, the theory puts forward the premise stating that the fundamental design of the human language faculty possesses the computational system for internalized discourse. The theory preserves the principles of Quint-patterning, Idea-formatting, N-ary-branching and X-numbering, complying respectively with the hierarchical orderings of (...) constituency, the atomic elements of componentiality, the linear sequences of precedence and the specific measurement of terminal nodes. NRT tells that the macro-system of narrative superstructure must have emerged autonomously, yet links closely with the micro-system of phonology, morphology and syntax. This article explores for the first time scientific insights into the nature of human language, referring to recent research on the right cerebrum as well as on the prefrontal lobes of the brain, the relationship between mental disorders and their genetic deficiencies, and the investigations of human evolution during the period 200,000–40,000 years BP. All the converging evidence in biological sciences reinforces the hypothesis that the narrative superstructure of language faculty manifests as an inherent linguistic capacity in our mind. (shrink)

The mitotic spindle contains the machinery responsible for sister chromatid segregation. It is composed of a complex and dynamic array of microtubules, which are nucleated from the spindle poles. Studies of yeast spindle functions by molecular genetic analysis and by in vitro functional analysis have identified proteins that are mitosis‐specific and present at very low concentrations in the cell, and have revealed the molecular bases of several processes required for the formation and functioning of the mitotic spindle. Here I review (...) the current knowledge of the processes that are common to most eukaryotes: microtubule nucleation at the spindle poles, bipolar spindle assembly, maintenance of the spindle structure, chromosome attachment to the spindle and chromosome separation on the spindle. (shrink)

The intermediate logics have been classified into slices (cf. Hosoi [1]), but the detailed structure of slices has been studied only for the first two slices (cf. Hosoi and Ono [2]). In order to study the structure of slices, we give a method of a finer classification of slices & n (n 3). Here we treat only the third slice as an example, but the method can be extended to other slices in an obvious way. It is proved that each (...) subslice contains continuum of logics. A characterization of logics in each subslice is given in terms of the form of models. (shrink)

There are a number of different forms of inter-organisational collaborative arrangements between universities at international, national and sub-national levels. This paper focuses on a particular form of inter-university collaboration mechanisms, which represents one of the key recent policy developments in Scotland. Research pooling initiatives are a regional response to create international research excellence and regional relevance by ‘pooling’ specific areas of research excellences that are seen to be of strategic importance to Scotland universities across the region. Research pooling initiatives as (...) networks can be seen as strategic processes. Universities share resources and research facilities among selective partners and recruit professors and research students internationally by branding their subject areas together. This multi-scalar institutional development is set against the background of devolution and globalisation of science, technology and innovation policy on the one hand, and changing national higher education policies in the UK on the other. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field. Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges in the arts and beyond. (...) Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life. The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly. (shrink)