Intervention studies on sedentary older adults have demonstrated that commencing physical exercise at an older age has a positive effect on brain structure. Although this suggests that older athletes with lifelong sports training have larger gray matter volume in some brain regions compared to age-matched non-athletes, evidence in the literature is scarce. Moreover, it remains unclear whether a larger GMV is associated with training intensity or period of training in life. To address these gaps in the literature, we compared regional (...) brain GMV between 24 older athletes and 24 age-matched non-athletes. The period of sports training and the current training time of the athletes were assessed. Both groups were evaluated for physical activity intensity as well as cognitive and motor performance. Although no group differences were noted in cognitive and motor performance, athletes reported higher physical activity intensity than non-athletes. Whole-brain structural analysis revealed a significantly larger GMV in several brain regions in athletes. Notably, the GMV of the precuneus in athletes was positively correlated with earlier commencement of sports training and training duration but was negatively correlated with current training time. Our findings demonstrate that early-commenced and continued sports training predicts structural maintenance of the precuneus in old age. Our results also suggest that excessive training time in old age may have a negative impact on the GMV of the precuneus; thereby delineating how the precuneus is associated with lifelong sports training in older athletes. (shrink)

This paper describes an automatic monitoring system that constantly checks partial update in Web pages and notifies them to a user. While one of the most important advantages of the WWW is update of Web pages, we need to constantly check them out and this task takes much cognitive load. Thus applications to automatically check update of Web pages have been developed, however they can not deal with partial update like update in a particular cell in a table in a (...) Web page. Hence we developed a automatic monitoring system that checks such partial update. A user can give a system regions in which he/she wants to know the update in a Web page as training examples, and it is able to learn rules to identify the partial update by classification learning. By this learning, a user do not need to directly describe the rules. We implemented our system and some executed examples were presented. (shrink)

This paper explores the time-inconsistency problem of audience costs in international disputes. The nature of democracy makes it difficult for leaders to back down from earlier diplomatic positions in an international dispute, out of fear of domestic political costs. Few studies have addressed the temporal aspect of such costs. This study argues that election timing impinges on the extent to which the audience cost mechanism works, and consequently, on state conflict behavior. While competitive elections are central to the political accountability (...) inherent in a democracy, voters typically lack enough opportunities to punish unsatisfactory leaders in a timely way, because of fixed election timing, and also may disregard foreign policy missteps that occurred in the distant past. Democratic leaders therefore have an incentive to choose strategically, with the electoral calendar in mind, when selecting a form of conflict behavior. Leaders can retreat from their demands without paying high audience costs when the upcoming election is in the distant future. To test this argument, the authors conduct a natural experiment featuring territorial disputes between Russia and two Baltic republics – Estonia and Latvia. Despite the commonalities in the disputes, as well as in their political systems and socioeconomic backgrounds, the governments of the two Baltic countries showed a sharp contrast in their diplomatic decisions. This paper argues that only the temporal gap in electoral timing can explain this variation, imparting the ironical implication that frequent democratic elections can obstruct peaceful conflict resolutions, and that excessive democratization may well hinder the very goal of peace. (shrink)

Environmental, physiological, and pathological stimuli induce the misfolding of proteins, which results in the formation of aggregates and amyloid fibrils. To cope with proteotoxic stress, cells are equipped with adaptive mechanisms that are accompanied by changes in gene expression. The evolutionarily conserved mechanism called the heat shock response is characterized by the induction of a set of heat shock proteins (HSPs), and is mainly regulated by heat shock transcription factor 1 (HSF1) in mammals. We herein introduce the mechanisms by which (...) HSF1 tightly controls the transcription of HSP genes via the regulation of pre‐initiation complex recruitment in their promoters under proteotoxic stress. These mechanisms involve the stress‐induced regulation of HSF1‐transcription complex formation with a number of coactivators, changes in chromatin states, and the formation of phase‐separated condensates through post‐translational modifications. (shrink)

Transitioning from a company of individual contributors to an organization of leaders of leaders can be relatively straightforward. The organization must embrace the idea that leadership resides within every employee and continually cultivate leadership skills and abilities. It must anticipate that individuals will lose their bearings and reassure them that getting back in balance is only a thought away. For many, the shift to leaders of leaders requires daily leaps of faith rooted in wisdom; it also challenges ingrained individual or (...) cultural thinking habits. (shrink)

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) are invaluable neuroscientific tools for unveiling human neural dynamics in three dimensions (space, time, and frequency), which are associated with a wide variety of perceptions, cognition, and actions. MEG/EEG also provides different categories of neuronal indices including activity magnitude, connectivity, and network properties along the three dimensions. In the last 20 years, interest has increased in inter-regional connectivity and complex network properties assessed by various sophisticated scientific analyses. We herein review the definition, computation, short history, (...) and pros and cons of connectivity and complex network (graph-theory) analyses applied to MEG/EEG signals. We briefly describe recent developments in source reconstruction algorithms essential for source-space connectivity and network analyses. Furthermore, we discuss a relatively novel approach used in MEG/EEG studies to examine the complex dynamics represented by human brain activity. The correct and effective use of these neuronal metrics provides a new insight into the multi-dimensional dynamics of the neural representations of various functions in the complex human brain. (shrink)

This study employs fMRI to examine the neural substrates of response to cognitive training in healthy old adults. Twenty Japanese healthy elders participated in a 4-week program and practiced a verbal articulation task on a daily basis. Functional connectivity analysis revealed that in comparison to age- and education-matched controls, elders who received the cognitive training demonstrated increased connectivity in the frontotemporal regions related with language and memory functions and showed significant correlations between the behavioral change in a linguistic task and (...) connectivity in regions for goal-oriented persistence and lexical processing. The increased hippocampal connectivity was consistent with previous research showing efficacious memory improvement and change in hippocampal functioning. Moreover, the increased intra-network connectivity following cognitive training suggested an improved neural differentiation, in contrast to the inter-network activation pattern typical in the aging brain. This research not only validates the relationship of functional change in the frontal and temporal lobes to age-associated cognitive decline but also shows promise in turning neural change toward the right direction by cognitive training. (shrink)

Original source :「委員会の論理」『世界文化』[Culture du monde], n° 13, janvier 1936, 2–17 ; n° 14, février 1936, 16–33 ; n° 15, mars 1936, 12–25. Repris dans nmz 1 : 46–108. La version des œuvres complètes présente un certain nombre de variantes par rapport à la première publication en 1936. « La logique des comités » a été traduit en espagnol par Agustín J. Zavala. Je remercie vivement Saitō Takako pour sa relecture et ses précieuses remarques.

Prenant appui sur l’œuvre du philosophe japonais Nakai Masakazu (1900-1952), cet article expose une conception de la photographie qui permet de sortir le déploiement technique de l’horizon des fins catastrophiques. Il s’en dégage les linéaments d’une philosophie qu’on peut qualifier à proprement parler de photographique où se mêlent des schémas issus du bouddhisme et de la théorie marxienne du reflet.

Since the end of the 1970s, the Japanese concept of ma has often been used in the west to signify an aesthetics of distance. This paper is a reverse exploration whose aim is to understand how this term appeared in the critical discourse in Europe, but also in Japan with philosopher Nakai Masakazu. It shows that this concept is a recent elaboration of Japanese thought, which emerged from a dialogue with German phenomenology and Heidegger in particular.

This paper situates Watsuji Tetsurō’s philosophical conception of “climate” within the context of both its historical development and its critical reception by Watsuji’s Kyoto School peers. Part one moves across lecture notes, articles, and book editions to historicize and contextualize climate within its four aspects of development: cultural history, hermeneutic phenomenology, “relational in-betweenness,” and socio-historical development. Part two develops critical responses to each of these four aspects by Watsuji’s Kyoto School peers: Nishida Kitarō, Miki Kiyoshi, Hayashi Tatsuo, Tosaka Jun, and (...) Nakai Masakazu. It ends by briefly considering how these historical and critical considerations might serve as guideposts for contemporary philosophical reconstructions of climate. (shrink)