This paper investigates the effects of group interaction in a storytelling situation for children using two robots: a reader robot and a listener robot as a side-participant. We developed a storytelling system that consists of a reader robot, a listener robot, a display, a gaze model, a depth sensor, and a human operator who responds and provides easily understandable answers to the children’s questions. We experimentally investigated the effects of using a listener robot and either one or two children during (...) a storytelling situation on the children’s preferences and their speech activities. Our experimental results showed that the children preferred storytelling with the listener robot. Although two children obviously produced more speech than one child, the listener robot discouraged the children’s speech regardless of whether one or two were listening. (shrink)

Background: Advocacy is an important role of psychiatric nurses because their patients are ethically, socially, and legally vulnerable. This study of Japanese expert psychiatric nurses’ judgments of interventions for patient advocacy will show effective strategies for ethical nursing practice and their relationship with Japanese culture. Objectives: This article explores Japanese psychiatric nurses’ decision to intervene as a patient advocate and examine their ethical, cultural, and social implications. Research design: Using semi-structured interviews verbatim, themes of the problems that required interventions were (...) inductively summarized by a qualitative analysis and their contexts and nursing judgments were examined. Participants and research context: The participants were 21 nurses with 5 or more years of experience in psychiatric nursing. Ethical considerations: The research was approved by Institutional Review Board of research site and study facilities. The participants gave written informed consent. Findings: Analysis of 45 cases showed that nurses decided to intervene when surrounding people’s opinions impeded patients’ safety, healthcare professionals’ policies impeded patients’ decision-making, own violent behaviors impeded treatment and welfare services for patients, own or families’ low acceptance of illness impeded patients’ self-actualization, inappropriate treatment or care impeded patients’ liberty, and their families abused patients’ property. Discussion: To solve conflicts between patients and their surrounding people, the nurses sought reconciliation between them, which is in accordance with Japanese cultural norms respecting harmony. When necessary, however, they protected patients’ rights against cultural norms. Therefore, their judgments cannot be explained by cultural norms alone. Conclusion: The findings indicate that the nurses’ judgments were based on respect for patients’ rights apart from cultural norms, and they first sought solutions fitting the cultural norms before other solutions. This seems to be an ethical, effective strategy if advocates know the culture in depth. (shrink)

Under certain conditions, the cell cycle can be arrested for a long period of time. Vertebrate oocytes are arrested at G2 phase, while somatic cells arrest at G0 phase. In both cells, nuclei have lost the ability to initiate DNA synthesis. In a pair of recently published papers,1,2 Méchali and colleagues and Coué and colleagues have clarified how frog oocytes prevent untimely DNA synthesis during the long G2 arrest. Intriguingly, they found only Cdc6 is responsible for the inability of immature (...) oocytes to replicate DNA. Cdc6 is a key component for replication licensing, and for G0 cells to re‐enter the proliferative stage. Strikingly similar strategies for preventing the untimely replication in both cells suggest that the suppression of replication licensing is a universal mechanism for securing the prolonged arrest of the cell cycle. BioEssays 25:313–316, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Research has documented the influence of ALS patients families’ attitudes on patients’ decision to accept or reject TIV, a treatment that in many cases will allow them to live long enough to experience locked-in syndrome ; under Japanese law the use of a ventilator cannot be terminated once it is essential to a patient’s survival, so to choose TIV means to choose the possibility of entering a locked-in state. Previous studies have not, however, elucidated the changes in family members’ attitudes (...) that take place after they receive pertinent information about the social systems and services available to them. This study aims to fill this gap by collecting and analyzing patients’ and family members’ narratives. In Japan, about 30% of ALS patients utilize TIV. This rate is much higher than in most other developed countries. Patients’ narratives illuminate the psychological and especially the contextual factors of their decision-making. Many Japanese patients who currently use a ventilator say that their family members encouraged them to prolong their lives through ventilation. These family members have done so because patients are able to use long-term ventilation for only ¥1000 per month, and can also access the latest communication devices and round the clock caregiver services in their homes at very low cost. Japanese caregivers who are supported by social systems and services including communication assistance, empowering factors such as patients’ associations, care provided by people outside the patient’s family, and a public nursing care system are able to encourage patients to decide to use longterm ventilation. (shrink)

In Book One of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume seems to acknowledge the existence of both internal and external worlds, in which perceptions, objects, and bodies, exist. In particular, Hume seems directly to affirm the existence of extra-mental bodies, when he says at the beginning of the section "Of scepticism with regard to the senses," "We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in theexistence of body? but 'tis in vain to ask, whether there be body or (...) not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings" (T 1.4.2.1; SBN 187).1 Furthermore, he thinks that the existence of body must be taken for granted because it is "an affair of too great importance to be trusted to our .. (shrink)

William James criticizes Hume for failing to adhere to the strictly empiricist method when he postulates discrete constituents of experience—which Hume calls perceptions—thereby making our experience a train of disconnected pieces. James argues that the discontinuity of experience in Hume results in part from his failure to recognize the immediate presence of relations in experience.1 Emphasizing a continuity and unity of experience, James thus differentiates his empiricism from Hume's as being radical in the sense that it recognizes relations as 'real' (...) parts of experience just as are things that are experienced to be so related.2 This raises a question concerning the experiential status of relations in Hume: is .. (shrink)

In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume seems to use the term "object" to refer to different things in different contexts, including impressions, ideas, perceptions, and bodies. Does he ever use the term "external bodies" to refer to things in the extra-mental world? I argue that what Hume means by external bodies when he affirms their existence is not externally existing, material objects that are somehow presented to the mind or presented in impressions. Rather, the bodies that Hume affirms are, (...) at bottom, no different from perceptions, but they can be distinguished from merely internal perceptions like pain or pleasure in terms of their "different relations, connexions, and durations" (T 1.2.6.9; SBN 68). I conclude that in order to be consistent, given the various statements he makes throughout Book One of the Treatise, Hume must reject the philosopher's doctrine of double existence of perceptions and objects and affirm only the existence of perceptions, sometimes conceived as internally existing and mind-dependent and sometimes conceived as existing outside and independent of the mind. (shrink)

William James criticizes Hume for failing to adhere to the strictly empiricist method when he postulates discrete constituents of experience — which Hume calls perceptions — thereby making our experience a train of disconnected pieces. James argues that the discontinuity of experience in Hume results in part from his failure to recognize the immediate presence of relations in experience. Emphasizing a continuity and unity of experience, James thus differentiates his empiricism from Hume's as being radical in the sense that it (...) recognizes relations as ‘real’ parts of experience just as are things that are experienced to be so related. This raises a question concerning the experiential status of relations in Hume: is James correct in accusing Hume of failing to notice the experiential reality of relations? Does Hume deny the experiential reality of relations entirely? Or does Hume downplay the experiential reality of relations and come to take them merely as products of the imagination, hence not ‘real,’ for certain theoretical reasons? (shrink)

In the Appendix to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume famously retracts his account of personal identity by confessing that it involves a profound problem he cannot solve, which I have elsewhere identified and called the Bundling Problem. Neither of the two possible solutions that Hume himself considers in the Appendix is a viable option for him by his own lights, which might suggest that any successful account of a unified self must go beyond the empirical framework. In this paper, (...) I argue that we can find a strictly empiricist solution to Hume's problem in William James. I attempt to show that James's descriptions of our experience are phenomenologically more detailed and faithful to how experience is undergone from the first-person perspective, which allows him to explain our belief in an identical, unified self solely on empirical grounds. James finds unity and continuity right in the content of the stream of experience itself. A detailed investigation of James's accounts reveals that Hume's fundamental problem does not stem merely from his lack of empirical resources but, more importantly, from his tacit abandonment of the professed empiricist methodology. (shrink)

There are remarkable parallels between Hume and Nagarjuna in their denial of substantiality and independence in objects and their subsequent attitude toward our ordinary world. Acknowledging a deep-rooted human tendency to take objects as independent entities, they both argue that there is nothing intrinsic in those objects that make them unitary and independent, and that those characters are, strictly speaking, merely fictitious, mental constructs. They nonetheless affirm the existence of our ordinary world as real. Although their main purposes of the (...) philosophical inquiry are different (epistemological for Hume, and soteriological for Nagarjuna), their accounts of the nature of our world allow us to accept it in the way we ordinarily believe with the deeper understanding of it. It is only in this world where we think, act, and interact with others that an epistemology grounded in human sentiment and experience (for Hume) or humans liberation (for Nagarjuna) is possible. (shrink)

Initially Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) and later Bell shed light on the non-local properties exhibited by subsystems in quantum mechanics. Separately, Kochen and Specker analyzed sets of measurements of compatible observables and found that a consistent coexistence of these results is impossible, i.e., quantum indefiniteness of measurement results. As a consequence, quantum contextuality, a more general concept compared to non-locality, leads to striking phenomena predicted by quantum theory. Here, we report neutron interferometric experiments which investigate entangled states in a (...) single-particle system: entanglement is, in this case, achieved not between particles, but between degrees of freedom i.e., between spin, path, and energy degrees of freedom. Appropriate combinations of the spin analysis and the position of the phase shifter in the interferometer allow an experimental verification of the violation of a Bell-like inequality. In addition, state tomography, tomographic analysis of the density matrix of a quantum system, and Kochen-Specker-like phenomena are presented to characterize neutrons’ entangled states and their peculiarity. Furthermore, a coherent energy manipulation scheme is accomplished with a radio-frequency (RF) spin-flipper. This scheme allows the (total) energy degree of freedom to be entangled: the remarkable behavior of a triply entangled GHZ-like state is demonstrated. (shrink)

Background:Protecting the dignity of elderly residents of facilities and providing dignified care can be difficult. Although attempts have been made from several aspects, dignity is considered an area in which less real impact has been made in both theory and practice.Objective:The objective of this study is to characterize the concept of dignity in care for elderly subjects in residential facilities from a practical perspective through concept synthesis.Research design:This study includes in-depth interviews with residents of elderly facilities and a literature review.Participants (...) and research context:A total of 12 residents of seven facilities in three prefectures in Japan were recruited via purposive sampling, and 27 interviews were conducted. Each digitally recorded interview was transcribed verbatim. The interview data were analyzed based on hermeneutic phenomenological research. The literature was searched using PubMed, CINAHL, and Web of Science with combinations of terms such as dignity, elderly, and residential facilities and then selected according to the predefined inclusion criteria. The descriptions about dignity in the included studies were divided into codes and compared with the results of the interviews.Ethical considerations:This study was approved by the institutional review board of Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Medicine.Findings and discussion:There were 1728 data codes for the interviews from which four themes were generated. In the literature review, 3716 titles were searched, and 28 articles were selected. Combining these results, five following themes and a conceptual matrix were obtained: individual dignity not affected by others; dignified care in a narrow sense; elements of the staff side; dignity in relation to family members, friends, society, and other residents; and dignity in relation to nursing care facilities and the nursing care system.Conclusion:According to the established matrix, we must consider the role of the care system, facility, family, and society in providing care with dignity and the individual dignity to residents and dignity in daily care. (shrink)

Taking a Darwinian approach, we propose that people reason to detect free-riders on the Wason Selection task with the sharing-rule; If one receives the resource, one is an in-group member (standard), or If one is an in-group member, one receives the resource (switched). As predicted, taking the resource-provider's perspective, both undergraduates and children (11 to 12 years old) checked for the existence of out-group members taking undeserved resource. Changing the perspective to that of the resource-recipient did not alter the selection (...) pattern in undergraduates, although the prediction was that another type of free-riding -failure to share by resource-provider- would be checked as well. However, by removing confounding factors in the materials, both undergraduates and children checked for both types of free-riding, which fully supports the prediction. These results indicate that the sharing-rule elicits a thematic content effect that cannot be explained by preceding deontic reasoning theories. (shrink)

In 1997, the Japanese Diet revised the Bank of Japan law thereby granting the central bank greater independence in monetary policy making. The revision was an attempt by Japan's political class to weaken the authority of the powerful Ministry of Finance over the central bank and augment its own influence. The Bank of Japan, however, gained more autonomy than politicians ever intended, leading to frequent confrontations between the government and the central bank over monetary policy. This paper explores the new (...) strategic relationship that emerged between the Bank of Japan and government and the nature of monetary policy implemented in the post-reform period. We demonstrate that several factors contributed to the Bank's unexpected ability to enhance its independence: the astute leadership of the first post-reform governor Hayami Masaru; the Bank's ability to turn politicization of monetary policy to its advantage; and its pursuit of a strategy achieved by augmenting its own research capacity. On a theoretical level, our findings show that the passage of a new legal framework only marks the completion of one stage of institutional change and the start of the next; post-enactment politics have as much importance as pre-enactment politics in shaping outcomes. In the post-enactment phase, various factors, including the state of the economy and informal institutions or processes, matter greatly and may shift the direction of institutional change away from the intended path. (shrink)

To understand the public opinion concerning the genethics in culturally different populations, we conducted two focus groups in Japan, with one focus group each in China and Panama between April 2008 and August 2009. Generally, the participants in Japan were more cautious to disclose their personal thinking in a clear manner. Most participants in China and Panama hoped to have children free from any genetic disease if at all possible. The major difference between China and Panama seems to be whether (...) or not they will accept the issue of genetic abortion. Compared to China and Panama, fewer participants accepted a reprogenetics procedure in Japan. ―A goal of genetic counseling is to reduce the number of patients of genetic disease‖ is supported to a greater degree in China and Panama than in Japan. Most participants in China as well as Panama, and fewer participants in Japan accepted the concept of sharing genetic information with relatives, even though it is useful for preventing a possible genetic risk. The difference of the answers for the questions is depending on the cultural and value diversity in each country, while some of them are related into a paucity of knowing the principle of biogenetics. Education as to medical genetics and the principle of bioethics is most important to make genetics more accessible to the general public. (shrink)

Experiment with public deployment of the semantic service matchmaker to a UDDI registry for a year is described in this paper. UDDI is a standard registry for Web Services, but, its search functionality has been limited to a keyword search. Therefore, we propose an enhancement of UDDI, called Matchmaker, that supports semantic service capability discovery. Since September 2003, we have deployed the Matchmaker in one of four official UDDI registries operated by NTT-Communications. In this paper, we first introduce the Matchmaker, (...) and illustrate client tools which lower the threshold of use of semantics. Then, we evaluate this experiment by benchmarks in terms of its performance and functionality. Finally, we discuss user requirements obtained by two ways: questionnaire and observation of search behavior. (shrink)

This study aims to unveil the process of whistleblowing. Two nursing staff members who worked in a psychiatric hospital convicted of large-scale wrongdoing were interviewed. Data were analyzed using a modified grounded theory approach. Analysis of the interviews demonstrated that they did not decide to whistleblow when they were suspicious or had an awareness of wrongdoing. They continued to work, driven by appreciation, affection, and a sense of duty. Their decision to whistleblow was ultimately motivated by firm conviction. Shortly after (...) whistleblowing, wavering emotions were observed, consisting of a guilty conscience, fear of retribution, and pride, which subsequently transformed to stable emotions containing a sense of relief and regret for delayed action. It is necessary for nurses to recognize that their professional responsibility is primarily to patients, not to organizations. Nurses should also have professional judgment about appropriate allegiance and actions. (shrink)

This study introduces an enigmatic construction in Japanese called chūshakuteki nibun-renchi ‘annotative dual-clause juxtaposition’ (ADCJ), exemplified below: Hiro wa, dare ni au no ka, resutoran o yoyakushita. top who dat meet nmlz int restaurant acc reserved Lit. ‘Hiro, (I wonder) who (he) will meet, reserved a restaurant.’ This construction is ubiquitous and yet little known even in Japanese linguistics circles. Because the matrix predicate of ADCJ cannot semantically accommodate such a component as dare ni au no ka ‘who (he) will (...) meet’ above, this paper argues that ADCJ is parenthetical, a construct that should be recognized as an essential element of verbal communication and, in turn, a determining factor in how utterances are to be formed and interpreted. This construction is dissimilar to any other type of parentheticals hitherto reported in the literature. What is so special about it is its merger of portraying two situations through abduction and expressing the entire circumstance in a single communicative unit. For example, in the above example, the parenthetical element explains why the speaker wishes to convey the matrix statement. From an interactional perspective, the primary function of ADCJ is to highlight the speaker’s intellectual and communicative involvement in the depicted scene. This style of communication, when compared with an ‘objective’ and apathetic description, is likely to induce more earnest reactions from the hearer or reader and, consequently, promote a more favorable continuation of the conversation or reading. This paper advocates a wide-ranging examination of thetical grammar (Kaltenböck et al. 2011), for which detailed analyses of constructions such as ADCJ that traditional syntactic/semantic theories cannot capture are indispensable. (shrink)

「日本語の哲学」を目指すとは、いったいどんなことなのか。―少なくともそれは、古代ギリシャに始まった西洋の哲学をただ日本語で受容する、ということではないはずである。かつて和辻哲郎が挑んだその課題は、いま 、もっとも挑戦しがいのあるテーマとして研究者を待ちかまえている。ここに展開するのは、パルメニデス、デカルト、ハイデッガーといった哲学者たちと、「日本語」をもって切りむすぶ、知的バトルの数々である。これ までに類を見ない知的冒険の姿がここにある。.

In recent papers the authors have discussed the dynamical properties of “large Poincaré systems” (LPS), that is, nonintegrable systems with a continuous spectrum (both classical and quantum). An interesting example of LPS is given by the Friedrichs model of field theory. As is well known, perturbation methods analytic in the coupling constant diverge because of resonant denominators. We show that this Poincaré “catastrophe” can be eliminated by a natural time ordering of the dynamical states. We obtain then a dynamical theory (...) which incorporates a privileged direction of time (and therefore the second law of thermodynamics). However, it is only in very simple situations that this time ordering can be performed in an “extended” Hilbert space. In general, we need to go to the Liouville space (superspace) and introduce a time ordering of dynamical states according to the number of particles involved in correlations. This leads then to a generalization of quantum mechanics in which the usual Heisenberg's eigenvalue problem is replaced by a complex eigenvalue problem in the Liouville space. (shrink)