How do the Japanese about their native philosophy, Shinto, a decade and a half after its abolishment as a state religion by the Western Allies? // What is its relationship to Buddhism, and particularly to Zen? // How modern can this very ancient creed ever be? // These are some of the questions considered in this study by Dr. Chikao Fujisawa, who specialized in the study of traditional Japanese philosophy and its effect on modern society. // Zen and Shinto (...) is a strong plea to rectify the steps taken to eradicate Shinto, the very substance of Japanese life and thought. At the same time, it offers new insight into the amazing adaptability of the Japanese psyche--its depth, vitality and universality--and its remarkable capacity to assimilate foreign thought and ideas, and thus contribute to the world's hope for permanent peace. // Dr. Chikao Fujisawa was a Japanese philosopher and historian, and he lectured on the topics at Nihon University. He believed in preserving Japanese customs, and as such he was a strong supporter of reintroducing Shinto and Zen traditions to Japan's youth. (shrink)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) handles policy search problems: searching a mapping from state space to action space. However RL is based on gradient methods and as such, cannot deal with problems with multimodal landscape. In contrast, though Genetic Algorithm (GA) is promising to deal with them, it seems to be unsuitable for policy search problems from the viewpoint of the cost of evaluation. Minimal Generation Gap (MGG), used as a generation-alternation model in GA, generates many offspring from two or more parents (...) selected from a population. Therefore, evaluating policies of generated offspring requires much trial and error (i.e. interaction between an agent and an environment). In this paper, we incorporate importance sampling into the framework of MGG in order to reduce the cost of evaluation on policy search. The proposed techniques are applied to Markov Decision Process (MDP) with multimodal landscape. The experimental results show that these techniques can reduce the number of interaction between an agent and an environment, and also mean that MGG and importance sampling are good for each other. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an extension of the Minimal Generation Gap (MGG) to reduce the number of fitness evaluation for the real-coded GAs (RCGA). When MGG is applied to actual engineering problems, for example applied to optimization of design parameters, the fitness calculating time is usually huge because MGG generates many children from one pair of parents and the fitness is calculated by repetitive simulation or analysis. The proposed method called Saving MGG reduces the number of fitness evaluation by (...) estimating the promising degrees of children using individual distribution and fitness information of population, and selecting children based on the promising degree before evaluating the fitness. Experimental results show that RCGA with Saving MGG can provide large reducing effects on 20 or 30 dimensional Sphere functions, Rosenbrock functions, ill-scaled Rosenbrock functions, and Rastrigin function. (shrink)

During the last years the demand for regionally and culturally harmonised machine design is increasingly on the agenda. The problem of localising products like machine tools instantly poses the question for new procedures that allow including the regional and cultural adaptations into the design processes of machine tool companies. How to transform the general insight into the necessity of culture- and region-adapted technologies and how to embed it into a design procedure comprising applicable design attributes is the crucial problem addressed. (...) The paper shows in an exemplary way how ambiguous design attributes can eventually be embodied in a prototype design. (shrink)

In recent years drastic shifts in the paradigms of politics, economics and technologies have occurred throughout the world. The shifts in these three fields are all related. It is our responsibility to investigate these shifts from the aspects of society and mankind for the prosperity of future generations. For this, societies should share with each other their wisdom and knowledge in an effort to plan for the future.

福澤諭吉‐丸山眞男らの近代日本理解を批判。通説を覆す気鋭の問題作!徳川期は旧弊なる儒教社会であり、明治はそこから脱皮し西洋化する―という通説は誤りである!明治以降、国民が、実は虚妄であるところの“主体 化”によって“序列化”し、天皇中心の思想的枠組みを構築する論理を明快に暴き出す野心作である。.

The mystery of the rise of the affirmative, declarative (periphrastic) use of do in the thirteenth century and its decline by the start of the eighteenth century remains one of the principal unsolved problems for linguists working in historical research. Some of the main arguments on the origins of do discuss the needs of poetic rhyme (e.g., Engblom 1938), the positioning of the adverb (e.g., Ogura 1993), the elimination of awkward consonant clusters (e.g., Stein 1990), and the ambiguities of (...) object referents in questions (Hudson 1997), much of the earlier historical research relying on hypotheses relating to internal problems of the system. The present study examines the early causative origins of do, viewed from a diachronic, construction-based approach, and offers an explanation in which the reanalysis and subsequent loss of do as a declarative, affirmative auxiliary took place via a process known as hyperanalysis (Croft 2000), resulting in the gradual process of co-lexicalization of the causative verb meaning within the semantics of the main verb across an ever-increasing range of main verb environments. (shrink)