Objective: To clarify whether long time constant is useful for detecting the after-slow activity of epileptiform discharges : sharp waves and spikes and for differentiating EDs from sharp transients.Methods: We employed 68 after-slow activities preceded by 32 EDs and 36 Sts from 52 patients with partial and generalized epilepsy defined by visual inspection. High-frequency activity associated with the apical component of EDs and Sts was also investigated to endorse two groups. After separating nine Sts that were labeled by visual inspection (...) but did not fulfill the amplitude criteria for after-slow of Sts, 59 activities were analyzed about the total area of after-slow under three TCs.Results: Compared to Sts, HFA was found significantly more with the apical component of EDs. The total area of after-slow in all 32 EDs under TC 2 s was significantly larger than those under TC 0.3 s and 0.1 s. Conversely, no significant differences were observed in the same parameter of 27 Sts among the three different TCs. Regarding separated nine Sts, the total area of after-slow showed a similar tendency to that of 27 Sts under three different TCs.Significance: These results suggest that long TC could be useful for selectively endorsing after-slow of EDs and differentiating EDs from Sts. These findings are concordant with the results of the HFA analysis. Visual inspection is also equally good as the total area of after-slow analysis. (shrink)

In Kagaku no Sekai to Kokoro no Tetsugaku, Mr.Michio Kobayashi features on Descartes' theory of minds as "subjecitive-active consciousness", and defends it against the materialist movement. I show that Kobayashi's method has a difficulty for defending existence of our minds because Descartes didn't allow the scientific investigation of our mental experience from outside,and so cannot appropriately grasp the significance of other minds.

Although corruption is ubiquitous, attitudes toward it differ among countries. Until the 1997 OECD Convention, the U.S. had been one of the only two countries with an explicit extraterritorial anti-bribery law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977. The FCPA employs a two-pronged approach to control the supply side of corruption: (1) anti-bribery provisions; and (2) accounting (books and record and internal controls) provisions. I offer evidence, albeit indirect, to show that the FCPA had limited success. The OECD Convention (...) adopts the same two-pronged approach, but, since it is a multilateral treaty, is likely to be more successful provided that enforcement is vigorous enough. The signatory nations effectively form a cartel to reduce the cost of doing business. As with any cartel, however, each multinational corporation has an incentive to deviate. Thus, the mutual enforcement of the agreement is crucial for its success. However, the two-pronged approach is not sufficient, since internal control does not adequately monitor decisions made at the top level. I argue that the two lessons drawn from the U.S. experience are: (1) law enforcement must be credible; and (2) internal controls alone are not sufficient. Stronger and more effective corporate governance within an appropriate regulatory framework is needed to ensure that multinational corporations conduct their business in an ethical manner. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 114-121 [Access article in PDF] Art as Part of Daily Life - A Cross-cultural Dialogue between Art and People If encounters with art and artists become part of daily life in a small rural community, and if aesthetic experiences are perceived by its local residents as part of their daily lives, what kinds of humanistic, cultural, and social change take place in (...) the community and in the people involved? By living together in a residential community, and by showing and sharing the process of art making, to what extent can aesthetic, cultural, and social issues and concerns expressed by artists be interpreted by local residents? These are the main issues addressed in this essay. 1 The artistic and aesthetic education provided in the community gradually opened up a dialogue not only between foreign artists as guests and Japanese spectators as hosts, but also between art and people, culture and culture, and people and people within the local community. Outline of the Project The Cultural Exchange House, situated in Yamaguchi prefecture, has accommodated about forty artists-in-residence from abroad for over ten years. The forty artists who have stayed there include painters, potters, sculptors, photographers, pianists, musicians, composers, poets, and writers. Artists are responsible for their travel and living expenses. The use of the house is provided without charge and the needs of the artists are met by volunteers. About half of the artists have been German and the rest from Britain, Belgium, United States, Holland, and Australia. Male and female artists have been nearly equally represented.Beginning with three, there are now sixteen volunteers who felt that the creation of a cultural environment, or more specifically the creation of access to the world of art was important for the community. They saw the need for the local community to provide children and adults with aesthetic experiences that could enrich their internal and external worlds. Increasing numbers of children were leaving the community to attend schools and get jobs, with little possibility of returning. The volunteers felt that one of their roles was to educate children and their parents so that they could encounter values different from their own, develop self-confidence, and take pride in the local community which had such cultural opportunities. They assumed that art could open people's minds to the world outside their existing cultural framework, and that it would be valuable to have artists from the outside world as their neighbors and friends. [End Page 114] Benefits of the Project There are already extensive formal grants available to foreign artists in cities such as Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. However, the people who came to Yamaguchi said that they were especially attracted to life in a rural community; they hoped to experience the "real life" of the Japanese. Since the projectcould offer no grants for travel and other daily expenses, the communitydecided that they had little hope of attracting well-known artists. Instead, they invited younger lesser-known artists with potential, who did not mind the limited conditions and who welcomed a new cultural experience which might stimulate or broaden their approach to art. The contract stated that the artists should participate in cultural exchange programs, such as visiting schools and community centers to hold art workshops, and also, at the end of their stay, to share their experiences of the residency in the form of an exhibition or a concert. The degree to which this contract was kept varied. In general, the artists fulfilled the local people's expectations by holding workshops with children and adults, and did not mind having concerts in the town gymnasium or exhibitions at the community center. Foreign artists had an opportunity to reflect in a quiet environment and further their art. They were also stimulated by the encounter with the culture and people, and felt at home in the Cultural Exchange House.The house is relatively large with more than ten rooms; a dining room,kitchen, toilet, an outside bathroom, a separate studio space, and a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 114-121 [Access article in PDF] Art as Part of Daily Life - A Cross-cultural Dialogue between Art and People If encounters with art and artists become part of daily life in a small rural community, and if aesthetic experiences are perceived by its local residents as part of their daily lives, what kinds of humanistic, cultural, and social change take place in (...) the community and in the people involved? By living together in a residential community, and by showing and sharing the process of art making, to what extent can aesthetic, cultural, and social issues and concerns expressed by artists be interpreted by local residents? These are the main issues addressed in this essay. 1 The artistic and aesthetic education provided in the community gradually opened up a dialogue not only between foreign artists as guests and Japanese spectators as hosts, but also between art and people, culture and culture, and people and people within the local community. Outline of the Project The Cultural Exchange House, situated in Yamaguchi prefecture, has accommodated about forty artists-in-residence from abroad for over ten years. The forty artists who have stayed there include painters, potters, sculptors, photographers, pianists, musicians, composers, poets, and writers. Artists are responsible for their travel and living expenses. The use of the house is provided without charge and the needs of the artists are met by volunteers. About half of the artists have been German and the rest from Britain, Belgium, United States, Holland, and Australia. Male and female artists have been nearly equally represented.Beginning with three, there are now sixteen volunteers who felt that the creation of a cultural environment, or more specifically the creation of access to the world of art was important for the community. They saw the need for the local community to provide children and adults with aesthetic experiences that could enrich their internal and external worlds. Increasing numbers of children were leaving the community to attend schools and get jobs, with little possibility of returning. The volunteers felt that one of their roles was to educate children and their parents so that they could encounter values different from their own, develop self-confidence, and take pride in the local community which had such cultural opportunities. They assumed that art could open people's minds to the world outside their existing cultural framework, and that it would be valuable to have artists from the outside world as their neighbors and friends. [End Page 114] Benefits of the Project There are already extensive formal grants available to foreign artists in cities such as Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. However, the people who came to Yamaguchi said that they were especially attracted to life in a rural community; they hoped to experience the "real life" of the Japanese. Since the projectcould offer no grants for travel and other daily expenses, the communitydecided that they had little hope of attracting well-known artists. Instead, they invited younger lesser-known artists with potential, who did not mind the limited conditions and who welcomed a new cultural experience which might stimulate or broaden their approach to art. The contract stated that the artists should participate in cultural exchange programs, such as visiting schools and community centers to hold art workshops, and also, at the end of their stay, to share their experiences of the residency in the form of an exhibition or a concert. The degree to which this contract was kept varied. In general, the artists fulfilled the local people's expectations by holding workshops with children and adults, and did not mind having concerts in the town gymnasium or exhibitions at the community center. Foreign artists had an opportunity to reflect in a quiet environment and further their art. They were also stimulated by the encounter with the culture and people, and felt at home in the Cultural Exchange House.The house is relatively large with more than ten rooms; a dining room,kitchen, toilet, an outside bathroom, a separate studio space, and a... (shrink)

日本伝統の精神文化を考察しつつ、現代におけるそのありようを模索する興味深い論考.

「論理」と「合理性」は文化が作る。日・米・仏・イランの思考表現スタイルからその原理を読み解く。.

In searching for an appropriate utility function in the expected utility framework, we formulate four properties that we want the utility function to satisfy. We conduct a search for such a function, and we identify Pareto utility as a function satisfying all four desired properties. Pareto utility is a flexible yet simple and parsimonious two-parameter family. It exhibits decreasing absolute risk aversion and increasing but bounded relative risk aversion. It is applicable irrespective of the probability distribution relevant to the prospect (...) to be evaluated. Pareto utility is therefore particularly suited for catastrophic risk analysis. A new and related class of generalized exponential (gexpo) utility functions is also studied. This class is particularly relevant in situations where absolute risk tolerance is thought to be concave rather than linear. (shrink)

We study how changes in unemployment risk affect firms’ productivity and whether firm-initiated policies can mitigate the moral hazard problem created by increases in unemployment insurance benefits that might decrease workers’ incentives to work hard. We focus on state-specific changes in UIB levels as a quasi-natural experiment. While a large body of research has examined UIBs, including their effect on unemployed workers, few studies investigate whether UIBs have any impact on a firm’s overall productivity. Using data on firm-level total factor (...) productivity and state-level UIBs, we find a negative association between productivity and UIBs. We also find that the negative association is weaker for firms with higher employee-welfare indices than for firms with lower indices, suggesting that the adverse effect of higher UIBs on productivity is mitigated by policies that benefit workers’ welfare. More specifically, we find that among policies that are under the umbrella of corporate social responsibility, a subset of employee-welfare policies are more effective in managing moral hazard problems than other policies. (shrink)

難解な「論理」に潜む西田の「個」の思想を読み解くことで、現代哲学における西田哲学の可能性を明らかにする。.

ニヒリズムの輻輳した歴史性を主題化するにあたり著者は、ハイデッガーの「存在歴史的思惟」を手がかりとしつつ、仏教の問題境域において「始源的なもの」がどのように追究されてきたかを論じる。そして“布施”の考 察を通して、仏教の伝統のなかに現代世界の閉塞状況を打破する新たな「自己」の成立が、いま明らかにされる。現代のニヒリズムを解明し、ニヒリズムを引き受けニヒリズムを生き抜く、宗教哲学的思索の書。.

This paper focuses on how human complex imitation and its developmental processes are related to the abilities for action representation, acquisition of symbols, and language. After overviewing the characteristics of imitation in chimpanzees and humans, I propose a model of imitation emphasizing how these two species differ in the ways they process visual-motor information. These differences may in turn contribute to core interspecies differences in higher-order cognitive functions, not only for bodily imitation but for action understanding through complex referential information (...) from faces, sharing symbols, and language. This ‘developmental-comparative’ approach reveals the development of species-specific intelligences, and shows what is shared and not shared between humans and other primates. In doing so, we can obtain a more complete understanding of the emergence of the ‘language-ready brain’ in relation to its biological and evolutionary foundations. (shrink)

本研究は、史料的裏付けにもとづく、東アジア三地域における気の思想・文化の歴史や内容、特徴を明らかにし、東アジアにおける気の総合的・体系的研究の基礎を構築している。.

In his book Bad Beliefs, Neil Levy defends the engineering of our epistemic environment by removing epistemic pollutions and by nudging people through second-order evidence. Although we agree with his core ideas, in this commentary, we aim at supplementing his approach in light of the participation of the general public in science. In the first part, we argue that the issue of participatory epistemic injustice in the scientific community remains unaddressed in Levy’s discussion and that addressing the issue is equal (...) to removing an epistemic pollution. In the second part, we address the issue of transparency in nudging. Here, we discuss the significance of public engagement in controlling the system of nudges to respect our rational and autonomous choices. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractYeast mitochondria frequently mutate, and some dysfunctional mitochondria out-compete wild-type versions. The retrograde response enables yeast to tolerate dysfunction, but also produces ribosomal DNA circles (ERCs). We propose that ERC accumulation increases expression of the rDNA antisense gene, TAR1, which counteracts spread of respiration-deficient mitochondria in matings with wild-type yeast.

科学技術と社会の間に、「新たな関係」を構築する。原発事故、気候工学、ゲノム編集、...現代に生じるさまざまな課題にどう取り組むか?科学技術社会論(STS)は、日ごろあたりまえと考えられている事柄の見え 方を変える力をもつ。イノベーション論や科学技術政策との関係もふくめて問い直す。.

Genetic Algorithms(GAs) are effective approximation algorithms which focus on “hopeful area” in the searching process. However, in harder problems, it is often very difficult to maintain a favorable trade-off between exploitation and exploration. All individuals leave the big-valley including the global optimum, and concentrate on another big-valley including a local optimum often. In this paper, we define such a situation on conventional GAs as the “UV-phenomenon”, and suggest UV-structures as hard landscape structures that will cause the UV-phenomenon. We introduce a (...) test function which has explicit UV-structures, and show UV-phenomenon caused by them. Next we analyze Fletcher and Powell function to confirm our hypothesis. Finally we propose a novel framework of GAs which can cope with UV-structures. (shrink)

Political developments in Japan from the latter part of 2000 to the year 2001 were highlighted by the executive transition from unpopular Yoshiro Mori to exceptionally popular Junichiro Koizumu as the nation's leader.

Kei Yoshida’s recent book Philosophy of the Social Sciences: An Introduction is the first introductory textbook on the philosophy of the social sciences written in Japanese. It concisely expounds on a wide range of topics in the discipline, while its explication of those topics is not impartial or neutral as the author himself says. This paper gives a critical review of the book. The first half of it briefly overviews and assesses the book as a whole. The latter half of (...) the paper reconstructs the gist of the author’s exposition of the naturalism/interpretivism debate and criticizes it. (shrink)