Product recommendation system is realized by applying business rules acquired by data maining techniques. Business rules such as demographical patterns of purchase, are able to cover the groups of users that have a tendency to purchase products, but it is difficult to recommend products adaptive to various personal preferences only by utilizing them. In addition to that, it is very costly to gather the large volume of high quality survey data, which is necessary for good recommendation based on personal preference (...) model. A method collecting kansei information automatically without questionnaire survey is required. The constructing personal preference model from less favor data is also necessary, since it is costly for the user to input favor data. In this paper, we propose product recommendation system based on kansei information extracted by text mining and user's preference model constructed by Category-guided Adaptive Modeling, CAM for short. CAM is a feature construction method that can generate new features constructing the space where same labeled examples are close and different labeled examples are far away from some labeled examples. It is possible to construct personal preference model by CAM despite less information of likes and dislikes categories. In the system, retrieval agent gathers the products' specification and user agent manages preference model, user's likes and dislikes. Kansei information of the products is gained by applying text mining technique to the reputation documents about the products on the web site. We carry out some experimental studies to make sure that prefrence model obtained by our method performs effectively. (shrink)

In the study of reference assignment, the question of what pragmatic criteria are used to evaluate the resulting interpretation seems not yet to have been properly dealt with. This paper addresses the issue by examining factors which affect the acceptability of various cases of bridging reference. It demonstrates that even highly successful accounts of reference assignment which place major emphasis on accessibility factors, e.g. the accessibility of candidate referents and the accessibility of contextual assumptions, must nonetheless involve some pragmatic criterion (...) with which hearers can evaluate the resulting interpretation. Moreover, it argues that the pragmatic criterion used in reference assignment is not the truth-based one, which has been widely accepted, but the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance proposed by Sperber and Wilson. Various accounts are tested against a wide range of examples on which I have conducted experimental tests with several sets of subjects. (shrink)

Comparative studies of DNA sequences provide opportunities for testing the neutral and the selection theories of molecular evolution. In particular, the separate estimation of the numbers of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions is a powerful tool for detecting selection of the latter. The difference in the patterns of these two types of substitutions of mammalian genes turned out to be in accord with the slightly deleterious or nearly neutral mutation theory for nonsynonymous changes. Interaction systems at the amino acid level were (...) suggested to be responsible for such nearly neutral, or very weak, selection. Synonymous substitutions are not strictly neutral, but because of their minute effect, random drift predominates such that the rate of substitution is only slightly less than the completely neutral prediction. It was concluded that the strictly neutral theory has not held up as well as the nearly neutral theory, yet remains invaluable as a null hypothesis for detecting selection. On the other hand, the main difference between the nearly neutral and the traditional selection theories is that the former predicts rapid evolution in small populations, whereas the latter predicts rapid evolution in large populations. (shrink)

From the distance of four decades, it may be hard to recall or to imagine the time when doing history was felt to be profoundly dissonant, even antithetical to doing theory. This was in no small pa...

The aim of this study was to review the typical factors related to physician’s liability in obstetrics and gynecology departments, as compared to those in internal medicine and surgery, regarding a breach of the duty to explain.

BackgroundA physician's duty to provide an adequate explanation to the patient is derived from the doctrine of informed consent and the physician's duty of disclosure. However, findings are extremely limited with respect to physicians' specific explanatory behaviours and what might be regarded as a breach of the physicians' duty to explain in an actual medical setting. This study sought to identify physicians' explanatory behaviours that may be related to the physicians' legal liability.MethodsWe analysed legal decisions of medical malpractice cases between (...) 1990 and 2009 in which the pivotal issue was the physician's duty to explain (366 cases). To identify factors related to the breach of the physician's duty to explain, an analysis was undertaken based on acknowledged breaches with regard to the physician's duty to explain to the patient according to court decisions. Additionally, to identify predictors of physicians' behaviours in breach of the duty to explain, logistic regression analysis was performed.ResultsWhen the physician's explanation was given before treatment or surgery (p = 0.006), when it was relevant or specific (p = 0.000), and when the patient's consent was obtained (p = 0.002), the explanation was less likely to be deemed inadequate or a breach of the physician's duty to explain. Patient factors related to physicians' legally problematic explanations were patient age and gender. One physician factor was related to legally problematic physician explanations, namely the number of physicians involved in the patient's treatment.ConclusionThese findings may be useful in improving physician-patient communication in the medical setting. (shrink)

The time when Guerras civiles de Granada was written produced a long process of assimilation and acculturation for the moriscos. The occurrences in this process mark the narrative tone of each part of the work, which is, more than a mere reflection of the epoch, an appeal to the contemporaries for consideration of the moriscos’ cause. The first part hints at the same direction as El Abencerraje and the second, Libros plúmbeos.

En el tiempo cuando se escribió Guerras civiles de Granada se produjo un largo proceso de asimilación y aculturación de los moriscos. Los acontecimientos en dicho proceso marcan el tono narrativo de cada parte de la obra, que es, más que el mero reflejo de la época, llamamiento a la sociedad contemporánea para invitarla a reflexionar sobre la causa morisca. La primera parte apunta la misma dirección que la de El Abencerraje y la segunda, la de los Libros plúmbeos.

The success of the London 2012 Paralympic Games not only revealed new public possibilities for the disabled, but also thrust the debates on the relationship between elite Paralympians and advanced prosthetic technology into the spotlight. One of the Paralympic stars, Oscar Pistorius, in particular became celebrated as ‘the Paralympian cyborg’. Also prominent has been Aimee Mullins, a former Paralympian, who became a globally successful fashion model by seeking to establish a new bodily aesthetic utilizing non-organic body parts. This article examines (...) how the modern discourse of prostheses has shifted from the made-up and camouflaged body to the empowered and exhibited body to create a new cultural sensitivity in terms of body image – prosthetic aesthetics. Prosthetic aesthetics oscillates between two polarized sensitivities: attractiveness/‘coolness’, which derive from the image of a perfect human-machine synthetic body, and from abjection/the uncanny, which is evoked by the actual materiality of the lived body incorporating a lifeless human-made body part. (shrink)

Speakers often construct their utterances based on the immediately co-present utterances of dialogue partners. They array their linguistic resources parallel to their partners' and activate resonance. Based on the theories of dialogic syntax and cognitive linguistics, this study undertakes to explain how speakers activate resonance and how parallelism contributes to constructing linguistic forms as well as to shaping the ongoing flow of conversation. Three phases of resonance activation are illustrated in relation to cognitive processes: parallelism constituted with extension of multiple (...) categories in synthesis; parallelism meeting or failing the previous speaker's intention due to schematization; and parallelism achieved as a consequence of priming through schematization and extension. It is concluded that linguistic forms develop in the ongoing flow of socially coordinated cognition, where patterns emerge through activation of mapping relations between linguistic elements. This process is anchored in speakers' concepts of grammatical equivalences, ability of categorization, and grasp of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

In the study of reference assignment, the question of what pragmatic criteria are used to evaluate the resulting interpretation seems not yet to have been properly dealt with. This paper addresses the issue by examining factors which affect the acceptability of various cases of bridging reference. It demonstrates that even highly successful accounts of reference assignment which place major emphasis on accessibility factors, e.g. the accessibility of candidate referents and the accessibility of contextual assumptions, must nonetheless involve some pragmatic criterion (...) with which hearers can evaluate the resulting interpretation. Moreover, it argues that the pragmatic criterion used in reference assignment is not the truth-based one, which has been widely accepted, but the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance proposed by Sperber and Wilson. Various accounts are tested against a wide range of examples on which I have conducted experimental tests with several sets of subjects. (shrink)

Stance is inherent in conversational interaction and is interactional in nature. When speakers take a stance, they pay attention to both prior stances and stance relations, as well as to the anticipated consequences of their stancetaking. They manage stance relations as a way of dealing with the “sociocognitive relations” of intersubjectivity (Du Bois 2007). Using the dialogic framework proposed by Du Bois, this paper shows that the discourse marker Well in American English works as a resource for the management of (...) relationships among stances. With its referential and grammatical flexibility, it is uniquely characterized as a meta-stance marker because, rather than indexing a specific stance, it negotiates and regulates stance relations. Well is analyzed in two contextual categories: first, at stance divergence among utterances, and second, at stance shifts embedded in topic shift. (shrink)

Stance is inherent in conversational interaction and is interactional in nature. When speakers take a stance, they pay attention to both prior stances and stance relations, as well as to the anticipated consequences of their stancetaking. They manage stance relations as a way of dealing with the “sociocognitive relations” of intersubjectivity. Using the dialogic framework proposed by Du Bois, this paper shows that the discourse marker well in American English works as a resource for the management of relationships among stances. (...) With its referential and grammatical flexibility, it is uniquely characterized as a meta-stance marker because, rather than indexing a specific stance, it negotiates and regulates stance relations. Well is analyzed in two contextual categories: first, at stance divergence among utterances, and second, at stance shifts embedded in topic shift. (shrink)

Speakers often construct their utterances based on the immediately co-present utterances of dialogue partners. They array their linguistic resources parallel to their partners¿ and activate resonance. Based on the theories of dialogic syntax and cognitive linguistics, this study undertakes to explain how speakers activate resonance and how parallelism contributes to constructing linguistic forms as well as to shaping the ongoing flow of conversation. Three phases of resonance activation are illustrated in relation to cognitive processes: (a) parallelism constituted with extension of (...) multiple categories in synthesis; (b) parallelism meeting or failing the previous speaker¿s intention due to schematization; and (c) parallelism achieved as a consequence of priming through schematization and extension. It is concluded that linguistic forms develop in the ongoing flow of socially coordinated cognition, where patterns emerge through activation of mapping relations between linguistic elements. This process is anchored in speakers¿ concepts of grammatical equivalences, ability of categorization, and grasp of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. By Seth Jacobowitz. Harvard East Asian Monographs, vol. 387. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 299. $39.95.

Following the Body & Society special issue, Skin Matters: Thinking Through the Body’s Surfaces, Tomoko Tamari conducted an interview with the special issue editor, Marc Lafrance. He argues for the skin as an interface, which both resists and reinforces binary oppositions. Lafrance is particularly interested in the relationship between the skin and subjectivity, focusing on those who are suffering from traumatic stigmatizing experiences. This theme is also elaborated in the debates around the issue of human-made skin in ‘regenerative medicine’. (...) He argues that while the development of medical technology for human-made organic skin tends often to be welcomed, the actual experience of face-transfer patients following skin graft surgeries is one of physical and psychological hardship along with a complex sense of self-wholeness and ‘reflexive embodiment’. Reflexivity is also an important phenomenon encouraged by the media and social media, which constantly feature representations of the skin. (shrink)

This study aims to disentangle the often-confounded effects of input frequency and morphophonological complexity in the acquisition of inflection, by focusing on simple and complex verb forms in Japanese. Study 1 tested 28 children aged 3;3–4;3 on stative and simple past forms, and Study 2 tested 30 children aged 3;5–5;3 on completive and simple past forms, with both studies using a production priming paradigm. Mixed effects models for children's responses were built to test the prediction that children's verb use is (...) explained by the relative bias in input frequency between the two inflectional forms. Although Study 1 did not show a significant effect of input bias, Study 2, which corrected for this problem, yielded the predicted relationship. These findings suggest that input frequency effects, at the level of different inflectional forms of the same verb stem, hold even after controlling for morphophonological complexity. (shrink)

This piece focuses on the work of Juhani Pallasmaa who introduces phenomenological aspects of kinesthetic and multisensory perception of the human body into architecture theory. He argues that hand-drawing is a vital spatial and haptic exercise in facilitating architectural design. Through this process, architecture can emerge as the very ‘material’ existence of human embodied ‘immaterial’ emotion, feelings and wisdom. Hence, for Pallasmaa, architecture can be seen as an artistic practice, which entails multisensory and embodied thought in order to establish the (...) sense of being in the world. (shrink)

This interview focuses on the history and current developments of cultural studies in Japan. Shunya Yoshimi is one of the leading figures in cultural studies in Japan since its introduction in the mid-1990s. He is currently engaged in the task of developing cultural studies in Asia with younger generations of scholars and to this end has helped established a new type of cultural movement, Cultural Typhoon, as well as contributing to expand Asian cultural studies networks, such as Inter Asia Cultural (...) Studies. He argues that cultural studies has been questioning the relationship between meaning and power in everyday life through a variety of concrete and practical fields. In fact, he argues, it is inevitable for cultural studies to ask questions about the politics, if we in cultural studies are to develop actual knowledge of cultural production and consumption today. Hence, it is essential to investigate the micro-politics of bodies in relation to macro-political processes. In the case of Japan, working on cultural studies within an existing discipline also means engaging in experiments, which ultimately could have the potential to undermine existing disciplines from within. (shrink)

This book attempts to elucidate Japanese religious experiences by presenting an innovative interpretation of the oldest existing text of Japanese myth, the Kojiki. Iwasawa offers new insights into Japanese mythology regarding the relationship between the human and the divine.

One truly significant development in scholarship in recent decades has been the maturing of intercultural studies. Intercultural studies in philosophy have their origins in the comparative study of religions that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pioneering practitioners include Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, and James Frazer among others. By the second half of the twentieth century, these traditions were further refined and extended by such notable figures as Gerardus van der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade. However, acceptance (...) of what is now called “intercultural philosophy” was not immediately forthcoming. In 1962, Edward Conze observed that the “rapid growth of communications has brought Eastern and Western cultures face to face. So far European, and particularly British, philosophers have reacted by becoming more provincial than ever before.” Although Conze believed philosophers could not remain provincial forever, he allowed that in his day the omens were “most unpropitious.” His point was not that Western philosophy should simply include non-Western philosophers in the conversion but, rather, that non-Western philosophies, beyond their own intrinsic worth, would provide a valuable service to Western philosophy by exposing its “latent presuppositions” to sustained examination and questioning. Put differently, if the activity of philosophy is understood as public discourse in a community of inquiry, then the philosophical conversation of mankind could only be enriched by inclusion of other voices. (shrink)

Body & Society started in 1995. The journal has been continuously exploring and problematizing critical issues which have been opening up new horizons in the field of body studies. As an interdisciplinary journal, it has engaged with a wider range of innovative approaches to the body, which includes sociology, cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, history, science and technology studies, sensory studies and media studies. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Body & Society, managing editor Tomoko Tamari invited Professor Bryan (...) S Turner, who was one of the journal’s founders (with Mike Featherstone), to reflect on the academic and historical background of Body & Society along with his own academic trajectory over the last 40 years. (shrink)

The interview is a follow-up from Samantha Frost’s article, ‘The Attentive Body’, in Body & Society 26. Tomoko Tamari invites Frost to explore her interest in ‘biocultural creatures’, with its focus on ‘bodies’ responsive self-transformation’ in epigenetic processes, and unfolds Peirce’s account of the index for understanding meaning-making in biological processes. Tamari also introduces Katherine Hayles’s notion of ‘cognitive nonconscious’ to raise the question of the possible theoretical and mechanical similarities/discrepancies between epigenetic processes in organisms and the meaning-making process (...) in computational systems. Drawing on Jacob von Uexkull’s notion of ‘umwelt’ and introducing Yoshimi Kawade’s remarks on a living being’s subjective orientation in environments, a further question about ‘intention’ and ‘subjectivity’ enables Frost to further unpack her notion of ‘the attentive self’ and discuss its relation to ‘intentionality’ and ‘referentiality’ in epigenetic processes. Finally, Samantha Frost mentions her current projects on the connection between ‘attention-as-responsive-self-transformation’ and ‘mode-of-living-as-form-of-life’. (shrink)

The Fukushima catastrophe has led to important practical and conceptual shifts in contemporary Japanese architecture which in turn has led to a re-evaluation of the influential 1960s Japanese modern architecture movement, Metabolism. The Metabolists had the ambition to create a new Japanese society through techno-utopian city planning. The new generation of Japanese architects, after the Fukushima event, no longer seek evolutionally social change; rather, the disaster has made them re-consider what architecture is and what architects can do for people who (...) had everything snatched from them by technology and nature. Drawing on the architectural projects of Tange Kenzo and Metabolists in the 1960s and Ito Toyo’s ‘Home-for-All project’ in 2011, the paper explores this major paradigm shift in Japanese architectural theory and practices. (shrink)

Although Japan had its own distinctive ‘pre-history’ of cultural studies, which produced some excellent research on popular culture, which can be traced back to the 1920s, the current state of cultural studies has been criticized by conventional mainstream academics; whereas the younger generation has been attracted by cultural studies as a new academic trend. An important new development in cultural studies in Japan is Cultural Typhoon. This new movement seeks to avoid institutionalization and create an alternative academic public sphere alongside (...) broadened cultural practices, social activities and political interventions. Cultural studies in Japan can be seen as a part of a new diversity in cultural studies, which has some potentialities to move beyond the academy and open new dialogical spaces for communication and cultural intervention. (shrink)

Tense/aspect morphology on verbs is often thought to depend on event features like telicity, but it is not known how speakers identify these features in visual scenes. To examine this question, we asked Japanese speakers to describe computer‐generated animations of simple actions with variation in visual features related to telicity. Experiments with adults and children found that they could use goal information in the animations to select appropriate past and progressive verb forms. They also produced a large number of different (...) verb forms. To explain these findings, a deep‐learning model of verb production from visual input was created that could produce a human‐like distribution of verb forms. It was able to use visual cues to select appropriate tense/aspect morphology. The model predicted that video duration would be related to verb complexity, and past tense production would increase when it received the endpoint as input. These predictions were confirmed in a third study with Japanese adults. This work suggests that verb production could be tightly linked to visual heuristics that support the understanding of events. (shrink)