This study investigates the effect of socio-ecological networks on the willingness to communicate in English among Japanese people. Previous studies have shown that relational mobility, which is defined as the availability of opportunities to choose new relationship partners, positively affects the WTC in English for Japanese people. However, the network structure of the variables of relational mobility and its effects have not been revealed yet. The present study conducted network analysis with 474 Japanese university students and found the two clusters (...) that correspond to the dimensions of relational mobility in the partial correlation network. Three variables regarding opportunities to meet new people and leave current relationships positively affected the WTC in English; one had a negative effect. Centrality indices, such as nodes strength, betweenness, and closeness, revealed the centrality of several variables in the network. Bootstrapping methods showed the trustworthiness of the estimated network structure and centrality indices as well as edges and variables whose effects differed significantly from that of others. Contrary to the regression analysis results, the network analysis findings can help us understand the in-depth effect of relational mobility on the WTC in a second language, which will prove useful for intervention studies. (shrink)

量子力学、あるいはその発展史を扱った書物は、洋の東西を問わず、枚挙に暇がない。しかし、原著論文に逐一あたり、原著者と直接交流し、様々な議論を戦わせた後にその成果を採り入れて、まさに肉声をもって語り得た ものは極めて少ない。本書は、自らも量子力学基礎論において偉大な業績を挙げた著者が、研究者としての溢れる情熱と、歴史家としての冷徹な分析とを、相矛盾させることなく交えて、量子力学の本質を抉りだした、類い 稀な「複眼の書」である。伝説の物理学者が残した、全ての物理学徒必読、科学史家必携の名著。.

SummaryThis paper explores how nineteenth-century Liverpool became such an advanced city with regard to public timekeeping, and the wider impact of this on the standardisation of time. From the mid-1840s, local scientists and municipal bodies in the port city were engaged in improving the ways in which accurate time was communicated to ships and the general public. As a result, Liverpool was the first British city to witness the formation of a synchronised clock system, based on an invention by Robert (...) Jones. His method gained a considerable reputation in the scientific and engineering communities, which led to its subsequent replication at a number of astronomical observatories such as Greenwich and Edinburgh. As a further key example of developments in time-signalling techniques, this paper also focuses on the time ball established in Liverpool by the Electric Telegraph Company in collaboration with George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal. This is a particularly significant development because, as the present paper illustrates, one of the most important technologies in measuring the accuracy of the Greenwich time signal took shape in the experimental operation of the time ball. The inventions and knowledge which emerged from the context of Liverpool were vital to the transformation of public timekeeping in Victorian Britain. (shrink)

In the context of the telegraphic distribution of Greenwich time, while the early experiments, the roles of successive Astronomers Royal in its expansion, and its impacts on the standardization of time in Victorian Britain have all been evaluated, the attempts of George Biddell Airy and his collaborators in constructing the Royal Observatory's time signals as the authoritative source of standard time have been underexplored within the existing historical literature. This paper focuses on the wide-ranging activities of Airy, his assistant astronomers, (...) telegraph engineers, clockmakers and others, which served to increase the reliability of the Royal Observatory's time service between the 1850s and 1870s. Airy and his collaborators aimed to mechanize and automate their telegraphic time distribution system in order to improve its accuracy and reliability. The accomplishment of such technological innovations was disseminated via public lectures, journal articles and correspondence with experts, secondary distributors of standard time and the general public. These communications were used to build public trust in the Greenwich time service. However, the unexplored archival material used in the present paper provides fresh insight into the unstable nature of the Greenwich time system, including its clear limits in terms of its scale of automation and degree of accuracy. (shrink)

Children of about 2 years of age occasionally make scale errors, e.g., they may attempt to fit their body into extremely small objects. Although previous studies have suggested that immature cognitive abilities may be responsible for these errors, the mechanism of scale error production is unclear. Because we assumed that obtaining characteristics of scale error behavior in the context of play would give us more useful indications concerning individual differences in producing scale errors, we examined how children engage in scale (...) error behavior in relation to other types of play behavior, such as pretending, during the scale error task. The results indicate that children who produced scale errors exhibited less pretend play with miniature toys and tended to refuse to play with miniature toys more often than those who did not produce any scale errors during the task. Moreover, among the children who produced scale errors, the children who produced more scale errors were less likely to touch the miniature objects and less likely to perform pretending actions than those who produced fewer scale errors. These results suggest that pretense play is deeply related to a lower production, or no production, of scale errors. Some immature cognitive abilities underlining pretense play can be assumed to be related to the production of scale error. In conclusion, this study is one of the first to demonstrate empirically significant relationships between children’s scale error production and pretend behaviors, although further studies are necessary to understand the mechanisms. (shrink)

The nucleolus is a region of the nucleus with high protein density and it acts as a ribosome factory. The nucleolus contains a distinct region of the genome, the ribosomal RNA gene repeats (rDNA) that supply ribosomal RNA (rRNA) molecules. The rDNA is the most‐abundant gene and occupies a large part of the genome, for example, there are thousands of rDNA copies in the genomes of plant cells. Therefore, it is natural to suppose that the condition of the rDNA, such (...) as its stability, might affect cellular functions. Here I would like to propose a new model regarding the roles of the rDNA and nucleolus. The key point of this model is that they act to preserve genome stability and trigger aging. BioEssays 30:267–272, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

We show that in the [Formula: see text] extension of a certain Chang-type model of determinacy, if [Formula: see text], then the restriction of the club filter on [Formula: see text] Cof[Formula: see text] to HOD is an ultrafilter in HOD. This answers Question 4.11 of [O. Ben-Neria and Y. Hayut, On [Formula: see text]-strongly measurable cardinals, Forum Math. Sigma 11 (2023) e19].

To investigate the cognitive processes underlying creative inspiration, we tested the extent to which viewing or copying prior examples impacted creative output in art. In Experiment 1, undergraduates made drawings under three conditions: copying an artist's drawing, then producing an original drawing; producing an original drawing without having seen another's work; and copying another artist's work, then reproducing that artist's style independently. We discovered that through copying unfamiliar abstract drawings, participants were able to produce creative drawings qualitatively different from the (...) model drawings. Process analyses suggested that participants' cognitive constraints became relaxed, and new perspectives were formed from copying another's artwork. Experiment 2 showed that exposure to styles of artwork considered unfamiliar facilitated creativity in drawing, while styles considered familiar did not do so. Experiment 3 showed that both copying and thoroughly viewing artwork executed using an unfamiliar style facilitated creativity in drawing, whereas merely thinking about alternative styles of artistic representation did not do so. These experiments revealed that deep encounters with unfamiliar artworks—whether through copying or prolonged observation—change people's cognitive representations of the act of drawing to produce novel artwork. (shrink)

Long time delay before lasing in a II-VI laser diode has been observed. Due to this delay, a nominal threshold current increases as the width of applied current pulse becomes shorter. This delay is attributed to the internal Q switching caused by the balance of injected carriers, temperature rise and gain-guiding. By fitting the calculated data to the experimental ones, rates of refractive index change with carrier concentration and with temperature have been estimated.

For a robot to cohabit with people, it should be able to learn people’s nonverbal social behavior from experience. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning method for recognizing gestures used in interaction and communication. Our method enables robots to learn gestures incrementally during human–robot interaction in an unsupervised manner. It allows the user to leave the number and types of gestures undefined prior to the learning. The proposed method (HB-SOINN) is based on a self-organizing incremental neural network (...) and the hidden Markov model. We have added an interactive learning mechanism to HB-SOINN to prevent a single cluster from running into a failure as a result of polysemy of being assigned more than one meaning. For example, a sentence: “Keep on going left slowly” has three meanings such as, “Keep on (1)”, “going left (2)”, “slowly (3)”. We experimentally tested the clustering performance of the proposed method against data obtained from measuring gestures using a motion capture device. The results show that the classification performance of HB-SOINN exceeds that of conventional clustering approaches. In addition, we have found that the interactive learning function improves the learning performance of HB-SOINN. (shrink)

The book includes some examples of cultural evolutionary studies on archaeological remains in Japan.

The causes of prehistoric inter-group violence have been a subject of long-standing debate in archaeology, an- thropology, and other disciplines. Although population pressure has been considered as a major factor, due to the lack of available prehistoric data, few studies have directly examined its effect so far. In the present study, we used data on skeletal remains from the middle Yayoi period of the Japanese archipelago, where archaeologists argued that an increase of inter-group violence in this period could be explained (...) by a population-pressure hy- pothesis. We quantitatively examine the effect of population pressure on the frequency of inter-group violence by compiling an exhaustive data set. We collected demographic information based on burial jars (kamekan) and the frequency of violence based on the ratio of injured individuals. The results are consistent with the hypothesis, i. e., high population density can promote inter-group violence. (shrink)