Voici un ouvrage qui aborde la question de l'exercice du pouvoir de mani re originale: l'auteur fonde sa r flexion sur une relecture d' pisodes bibliques qu'il analyse et dont il tire des principes applicables l' poque contemporaine. L'examen est la fois pr cis et personnel: Nicod me Sako reprend l'histoire de grands personnages de l'Ancien Testament, comme Joseph ou la reine Esther et en interpr te la port e universelle. Il tudie galement des l ments de la nature et (...) montre qu'elle propose, elle aussi, des mod les suivre pour pr parer un monde revenu aux vraies sources de la sagesse et de l'intelligence de ce qui nous entoure. travers cette lecture, l'auteur d gage les caract ristiques qui permettront de tracer le portrait d'un homme d'Etat responsable et soucieux de procurer son peuple la paix et la prosp rit, inspir donc par la sagesse divine: un recours et un espoir dans le monde d chir dans lequel nous vivons. (shrink)

戦乱の世に仁義道徳を主張して学団を組織し、志士仁人の道を説いた中国古代の思想家・孔子と、民国初期の植民地化という危機を背景に、国民性の改革をめざした魯迅。中国史の豊かな素養を背景に、彼らの活動に共通す る「教育」という側面に着目し、国家と社会の「教育」に生涯を掛けたその思想と行動を浮き彫りにする。.

The external worlds do not objectively exist for living systems because these worlds are unknown from within systems. How can they escape solipsism to survive and reproduce as open systems? Living systems must construct their hypothetical models of external entities in the form of their internal structures to determine how to change states (i.e., sense and act) appropriately to achieve a favorable probability distribution of the events they experience. The model construction involves the generation of symbols referring to external entities. (...) This paper attempts to provide a new view that living systems are an inverse-causality operator. Inverse causality (IC) is an algorithmic process that generates symbols referring to external reality states based on a given data sequence. For applying this logical model involving if–then entailments to living systems involving material interactions, the cognizers-system model was employed to represent the IC process; here, living systems were modeled as a subject of cognition and action. A focal subject system is described as a cognizer composed of sub-cognizers, such as a sensor, a signal transducer, and an effector. Analysis using this model proposes that living systems invented the “measurers” for conducting IC operations through their evolution. (shrink)

This article deals with the semantics of “double-access” sentences. They are defined as English sentences which have a past tense morpheme in the matrix clause and a present tense morpheme in a subordinate clause in the immediate scope of the matrix past tense. They receive a very peculiar interpretation, which we will refer to as a “double-access interpretation.” The episode described in the embedded clause makes reference to two times: the time referred to by the matrix predicate and the utterance (...) time of the whole sentence. Previous studies on this construction are largely descriptive and do not attempt to analyze it formally, with one important exception. Abusch (1991) addresses the problems connected with the construction and proposes that double-access interpretations involvede re attitudes about intervals. Her proposal contains an important insight and provides one possible account of the double-access construction. My proposal was independently developed at approximately the same time as Abusch's and offers an alternative explanation for the phenomena. I consider a series of hypotheses and conclude that double-access readings involvede re attitude reports about state individuals. This account is couched in an eventuality-based framework and employs the techniques proposed by Cresswell and von Stechow (1982). In order to yield the desired reading, the tense must first adjoin to the complement S, then to the matrix S, leaving two traces in the process. (shrink)

The present paper studies self-awareness and introduces some self-awareness related incidents. It then describes the relationship between self-awareness and consciousness and explains the MoNAD, a neural network circuit developed by the authors that capably describes the phenomena of self-awareness and consciousness. A model of self-awareness is then presented. This self-awareness model is a parallel network system in which multiple independent MoNADs communicate with one another. In experiments with robots, three test robots were used: (1) a self-image robot reflected in a (...) mirror, (2) another robot, and (3) a cable-connected robot behaving as commanded by the self-robot. The reactions of the three test robots to the self-robot were compared to investigate the self-awareness of the self-robot. The experiments have shown that the conditions required for the self-robot to interpret the test robot to be part of itself are: (1) the test robot must return a reaction within a certain period of time that is inte.. (shrink)

This article discusses what may be referred to as ``adjectival relatives''''in Japanese and related constructions in other languages (such asadjectival passives in English). The most intriguing characteristicof this construction is that the verb contained in it occurs in the pasttense form, but its primary role is to describe a state that obtains atthe local evaluation time, rather than the past event that producedthis state. In fact, in some cases, the putative event that presumablyproduced the target state is non-existent, and the (...) entire constructionreceives a purely stative interpretation. In other words, it is possiblefor an adjectival relative to describe a target state without having itstriggering event. The proposal I put forth in the article states that whatI refer to as an adjectival relative does not have a clausal structure.It rather has a verbal projection (technically a Tense Phrase, or TP). Mod(the modifier head) then combined with TP to yield a MP (modifierphrase), which denotes a property of states that appear to have resultedfrom an event the verb describes. In order to reach this conclusion, I adopttwo additional ideas: (i) Kratzer''s (1996) idea that the so-called externalargument of a verb is not really its argument at all; (ii) direct causationdoes not have to be overtly represented in natural language syntax (Bittner1999). Having incorporated these two ideas, the proposal explains therelation between the state that the adjectival relative describes and theputative event as a modal one, thereby accounting for the non-existenceof putative past events in some examples. (shrink)

Specificities of enzymes involved in plant specialized metabolism, including flavonoid biosynthesis, are generally promiscuous. This enzyme promiscuity has served as an evolutionary basis for new enzyme functions and metabolic pathways in land plants adapting to environmental challenges. This phenomenon may lead, however, to inefficiency in specialized metabolism and adversely affect metabolite‐mediated plant survival. How plants manage enzyme promiscuity for efficient specialized metabolism is, thus, an open question. Recent studies of flavonoid biosynthesis addressing this issue have revealed a conserved strategy, namely, (...) a homolog of chalcone isomerase with no catalytic activity binds to chalcone synthase, a key flavonoid pathway enzyme, to narrow (or rectify) the enzyme's highly promiscuous product specificity. Reducing promiscuity via specific protein–protein interactions among metabolic enzymes and proteins may be a solution adopted by land plants to achieve efficient operation of specialized metabolism, while the intrinsic promiscuity of enzymes has likely been retained incidentally. (shrink)

As the number of people affected by dementia increases rapidly, dementia has been transformed into an epidemic which endangers global health and wealth, and many populations are now living in what Jain terms a time of prognosis, in fear of the disease. Through its strong association with ageing and memory loss, dementia is conceived of as a linear decline into loss of self and death, and those with dementia as other. More significantly, imagined as a threat that signifies both a (...) loss of able-bodied workforce and a large population dependent on care and support, dementia inevitably feeds into the ‘crisis-of-care’ narrative that is prominent in many ageing societies. With one of the fastest ageing populations in the world, and an extremely low birth rate, the dementia prognosis is particularly acute in Japan and dementia is strongly linked to the idea of a ‘care crisis’. This situation has produced an increasing number of cultural representations of dementia and care and this paper considers three of these cultural texts, all rooted in the historical and cultural contexts in which they were produced: the novel The Twilight Years; the film Memories of Tomorrow; and the comic book Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days. The analysis concentrates upon their representations of care, seeing this as a space where the ethical relationship between self and other can be negotiated and where time with dementia can be imagined and re-imagined. The analysis of these texts from a feminist ethics perspective demonstrates the potential of popular and creative representations to interrogate and potentially expand the meanings of dementia, ageing and living in prognosis. (shrink)

This article reviews recent findings that bear on the mechanism(s) of tumor‐specific Lyt‐1+2− T cell‐mediated tumor eradication in vivo A tumor‐immune Lyt‐1+2− T cell subset has been identified which is distinct from T cells mediating in vitro cytotoxicity (Lyt‐1+2+/1−2+). The Lyt‐1+2− cells have a crucial role in rejecting tumor cells when adoptively transferred into T cell‐deprived B cell mice. This indicates that Lyt‐1+2− T cells do not necessarily require recruitment of the host's cytotoxic T cell precursors for implementation of in (...) vivo immunity. Instead, this T cell subset exerts its anti‐tumor effect in collaboration with macrophages as shown with an in vivo tumor cell culture system utilizing a diffusion chamber. A pathway of Lyt‐1+2− T cell‐macrophage interaction leading to tumor cell killing is discussed in terms of its probable relevance to the eradication of tumor cell masses consisting of tumor cells expressing quantitatively and/or qualitatively different tumor antigens. (shrink)

A sense of agency (SoA) is the experience of subjective awareness regarding the control of one’s actions. Humans have a natural tendency to generate prediction models of the environment and adapt their models according to changes in the environment. The SoA is associated with the degree of the adaptation of the prediction models, e.g., insufficient adaptation causes low predictability and lowers the SoA over the environment. Thus, identifying the mechanisms behind the adaptation process of a prediction model related to the (...) SoA is essential for understanding the generative process of the SoA. In the first half of the current study, we constructed a mathematical model in which the SoA represents a likelihood value for a given observation (sensory feedback) in a prediction model of the environment and in which the prediction model is updated according to the likelihood value. From our mathematical model, we theoretically derived a testable hypothesis that the prediction model is updated according to a Bayesian rule or a stochastic gradient. In the second half of our study, we focused on the experimental examination of this hypothesis. In our experiment, human subjects were repeatedly asked to observe a moving square on a computer screen and press a button after a beep sound. The button press resulted in an abrupt jump of the moving square on the screen. Experiencing the various stochastic time intervals between the action execution button-press) and the consequent event square jumping caused gradual changes in the subjects' degree of their SoA. By comparing the above theoretical hypothesis with the experimental results, we concluded that the update (adaptation) rule of the prediction model based on the SoA is better described by a Bayesian update than by a stochastic gradient descent. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the history and current state of research activities into medical expert systems (MES) in Japan. A brief review of expert systems' work over the last ten years is provided and here is a discussion on future directions of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in medicine, which we expect the Japanese AI community in medicine (AIM) to undertake.

This chapter provides the rationale for applying a systems approach to language pedagogy; presents a case study in which soft systems methodology, a type of soft systems approach, was applied to language curriculum development; and attempts to manage language teaching research from a communicative perspective. In doing so, it argues that language pedagogy is a complex phenomenon in which various factors affect one another in complex ways. By referring to language teaching research that investigates the nature of the factors of (...) language pedagogy, it also argues that due to lack of communication among the research areas in the field, each of the discrete research topics has been discussed individually within the confines of those research areas, often resulting in the so-called silo effect. (shrink)

황우석 교수 사건을 종합적으로 분석한 책이 나왔다. 『황우석의 나라』는 황 교수 사태가 요동칠 때 에서 기자생활을 한 이성주가 현장을 지켜보고 이를 분석한 책이다. 저자는 7년 동안 의학팀장을 맡았고 2004년 8월부터 1년 동안 미국 존스홉킨스대에서 연수를 하고 귀국한 뒤 4개월 동안 과학 및 의학 분야의 곁에서 황 교수 사태가 요동치는 현장을 지켜보았다. 이 책은 황우석 사건 보도와 관련해 알려지지 않은 언론계의 현장 이야기, 과학계의 분위기, 황우석의 로비 실태 등을 생생하게 보여준다. 또 이번 사태가 발생하기 이전의 각종 기사를 분석해 언론이 무비판적으로 보도한 (...) 황 교수의 업적이 얼마나 허점투성이인지 설득력 있게 제시하고 있다. 동시에 19세기 말 프랑스를 뒤흔들었던 ‘드레퓌스 사건’과 마찬가지로 언론이 줄기세포처럼 똬리를 틀고 있다고 진단하고 언론의 본질과 역할에 대해 문제를 제기한다. 저자는 제2의 황우석 사건을 예방하기 위해 연구비 심사제도 개선, 연구비에서 간접비의 비중 강화, 언론의 에디터제 도입 등 세세한 대안도 내놓고 있다. (shrink)