720 research outputs found
A successful model of regional healthcare information exchange in Japan: Case Study in Kagawa Prefecture
No full textIn this study, we focused on analysis of healthcare data exchange over the network. For the advance of broadband capability development, many governments expect online medical information exchange between medical institutions. Japanese government also has tried to deploy ICT in the healthcare field. In Japan, many healthcare ICT projects started, but almost of all the projects face many issues and failed to continue. This situation caused us to clarify the success factor of healthcare information exchange network. For inspecting the success factors, we analyzed information access of healthcare systems in Kagawa prefecture of Japan. Kagawa prefecture is one of the most advance areas for healthcare information technology. We analyzed four medical ICT projects in Kagawa prefecture: K-MIX, Critical Pathway for Diabetes, E-prescription, and PHR. In addition, we inspected characteristics of exchanged data in the network, and stakeholder involved in these projects. This analysis lets us find various types of healthcare ICT projects. Characteristic of data processed in the projects caused differences of characteristic of the projects. On the other hand, multiple systems process same data, though the project does not share the data itself. Considering various types of medical information exchanges projects, we propose classification and standard format of exchanged data according to their characteristic are critical for efficient business deployment. --e-Health,regional healthcare information exchange,EHR
Datasets produced by SCALE-GM in QBO-like oscillation experiments.
No full textData produced by SCALE-GM and used in the manuscript submitted to the AMS journal Monthly Weather Review.
Authors:
Hiroki Kashimura, Hisashi Yashiro, Seiya Nishizawa, Hirofumi Tomita, Kensuke Nakajima, Masaki Ishiwatari, Yoshiyuki O. Takahashi, and Yoshi-Yuki Hayashi
Corresponding Author:
Hiroki Kashimura ([email protected])
Manuscript Title:
Dependence of a QBO-like oscillation on time-step intervals in a non-hydrostatic general circulation model
See README.txt for more details
The rise of temporary employment in Japan: Legalisation and expansion of a non-regular employment form
No full textThis discussion paper examines the institutionalization process of a non-regular employment form especially focusing on the establishment of the temporary dispatching work (haken) system. The institutionalization process of the haken system can be divided into three periods: delegalisation (1947-86), legalisation (1986-99), and diffusion (1999-). Declining labor strength, the emergence of deregulation bodies, and the changing attitude of the Ministry of Labor (MHLW) characterize the legal developments. Together with the liberalization of private job placement and the expansion of fixed-term contract work, temporary work became an important sources of flexible and skilled labor, and expanded more rapidly than other employment forms in the late 90s. In this development, temporary help firms started to reframe their business as 'personnel services,' and have positioned themselves to replace the traditional firm-internal supply of mobile employees such as shukkô and tenseki with external dispatched employees of temporary help firms. --Japan,temporary work,non-regular employment,labor market,(de-)regulation
What to bid and when to stop
No full textNegotiation is an important activity in human society, and is studied by various disciplines, ranging from economics and game theory, to electronic commerce, social psychology, and artificial intelligence. Traditionally, negotiation is a necessary, but also time-consuming and expensive activity. Therefore, in the last decades there has been a large interest in the automation of negotiation, for example in the setting of e-commerce. This interest is fueled by the promise of automated agents eventually being able to negotiate on behalf of human negotiators.Every year, automated negotiation agents are improving in various ways, and there is now a large body of negotiation strategies available, all with their unique strengths and weaknesses. For example, some agents are able to predict the opponent's preferences very well, while others focus more on having a sophisticated bidding strategy. The problem however, is that there is little incremental improvement in agent design, as the agents are tested in varying negotiation settings, using a diverse set of performance measures. This makes it very difficult to meaningfully compare the agents, let alone their underlying techniques. As a result, we lack a reliable way to pinpoint the most effective components in a negotiating agent.There are two major advantages of distinguishing between the different components of a negotiating agent's strategy: first, it allows the study of the behavior and performance of the components in isolation. For example, it becomes possible to compare the preference learning component of all agents, and to identify the best among them. Second, we can proceed to mix and match different components to create new negotiation strategies., e.g.: replacing the preference learning technique of an agent and then examining whether this makes a difference. Such a procedure enables us to combine the individual components to systematically explore the space of possible negotiation strategies.To develop a compositional approach to evaluate and combine the components, we identify structure in most agent designs by introducing the BOA architecture, in which we can develop and integrate the different components of a negotiating agent. We identify three main components of a general negotiation strategy; namely a bidding strategy (B), possibly an opponent model (O), and an acceptance strategy (A). The bidding strategy considers what concessions it deems appropriate given its own preferences, and takes the opponent into account by using an opponent model. The acceptance strategy decides whether offers proposed by the opponent should be accepted.The BOA architecture is integrated into a generic negotiation environment called Genius, which is a software environment for designing and evaluating negotiation strategies. To explore the negotiation strategy space of the negotiation research community, we amend the Genius repository with various existing agents and scenarios from literature. Additionally, we organize a yearly international negotiation competition (ANAC) to harvest even more strategies and scenarios. ANAC also acts as an evaluation tool for negotiation strategies, and encourages the design of negotiation strategies and scenarios.We re-implement agents from literature and ANAC and decouple them to fit into the BOA architecture without introducing any changes in their behavior. For each of the three components, we manage to find and analyze the best ones for specific cases, as described below. We show that the BOA framework leads to significant improvements in agent design by wining ANAC 2013, which had 19 participating teams from 8 international institutions, with an agent that is designed using the BOA framework and is informed by a preliminary analysis of the different components.In every negotiation, one of the negotiating parties must accept an offer to reach an agreement. Therefore, it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When contemplating whether to accept an offer, the agent is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented before time runs out. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. We classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We propose new acceptance strategies and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions. We also provide insight into why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation scenario and the efficacy of acceptance conditions.Later, we adopt a more principled approach by applying optimal stopping theory to calculate the optimal decision on the acceptance of an offer. We approach the decision of whether to accept as a sequential decision problem, by modeling the bids received as a stochastic process. We determine the optimal acceptance policies for particular opponent classes and we present an approach to estimate the expected range of offers when the type of opponent is unknown. We show that the proposed approach is able to find the optimal time to accept, and improves upon all existing acceptance strategies.Another principal component of a negotiating agent's strategy is its ability to take the opponent's preferences into account. The quality of an opponent model can be measured in two different ways. One is to use the agent's performance as a benchmark for the model's quality. We evaluate and compare the performance of a selection of state-of-the-art opponent modeling techniques in negotiation. We provide an overview of the factors influencing the quality of a model and we analyze how the performance of opponent models depends on the negotiation setting. We identify a class of simple and surprisingly effective opponent modeling techniques that did not receive much previous attention in literature.The other way to measure the quality of an opponent model is to directly evaluate its accuracy by using similarity measures. We review all methods to measure the accuracy of an opponent model and we then analyze how changes in accuracy translate into performance differences. Moreover, we pinpoint the best predictors for good performance. This leads to new insights concerning how to construct an opponent model, and what we need to measure when optimizing performance.Finally, we take two different approaches to gain more insight into effective bidding strategies. We present a new classification method for negotiation strategies, based on their pattern of concession making against different kinds of opponents. We apply this technique to classify some well-known negotiating strategies, and we formulate guidelines on how agents should bid in order to be successful, which gives insight into the bidding strategy space of negotiating agents. Furthermore, we apply optimal stopping theory again, this time to find the concessions that maximize utility for the bidder against particular opponents. We show there is an interesting connection between optimal bidding and optimal acceptance strategies, in the sense that they are mirrored versions of each other.Lastly, after analyzing all components separately, we put the pieces back together again. We take all BOA components accumulated so far, including the best ones, and combine them all together to explore the space of negotiation strategies.We compute the contribution of each component to the overall negotiation result, and we study the interaction between components. We find that combining the best agent components indeed makes the strongest agents. This shows that the component-based view of the BOA architecture not only provides a useful basis for developing negotiating agents but also provides a useful analytical tool. By varying the BOA components we are able to demonstrate the contribution of each component to the negotiation result, and thus analyze the significance of each. The bidding strategy is by far the most important to consider, followed by the acceptance conditions and finally followed by the opponent model.Our results validate the analytical approach of the BOA framework to first optimize the individual components, and then to recombine them into a negotiating agent
Sustainable Development, Education and Learning: The Challenge of Inclusive, Quality Education for All
No full textReview of the book authored by Victoria W. Thoresen, Agenda Publishing, 202
Sustainable Development, Education and Learning: The Challenge of Inclusive, Quality Education for All
No full textReview of the book authored by Victoria W. Thoresen, Agenda Publishing, 202
幼児のコンピュータゲーム遊びの潜在的教育機能に関する実証的研究 : メディア・リテラシー形成の観点から
No full text広島大学(Hiroshima University)博士(教育学)Pedagogydoctora
Sustainable Development, Education and Learning: The Challenge of Inclusive, Quality Education for All
No full textReview of the book authored by Victoria W. Thoresen, Agenda Publishing, 202
The automorphism groups of the vertex operator algebras V+L: general case
No full textIn this article, we give a method of calculating the automorphism groups of the vertex operator algebras V+L associated with even lattices L. For example, by using this method we determine the automorphism groups of V+L for even lattices of rank one, two and three, and even unimodular lattices.
The author was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellowships for Young Scientists and COE grant of Hokkaido University
A novel furanone-containing antibacterial system for improved dental restoratives
No full textThe furanone derivatives and their constructed polymers were synthesized, characterized and formulated into dental glass-ionomer cement (GIC) and resin composite for improved antibacterial properties. Compressive strength (CS) and S. mutans viability were used to evaluate the mechanical strength and antibacterial activity of the restoratives. Fuji II LC cement and P60 were used as control. The specimens were conditioned in distilled water at 37 °C for 24 h prior to testing. The effects of loading, saliva and aging on CS and S. mutans viability were investigated. The antibacterial effect of the furanone derivative on other bacteria was also studied. Chapter 2 describes how we studied and evaluated the formulated antibacterial glass-ionomer cement by incorporating the synthesized furanone derivative-containing polymer into the formulation. The results show that all the formulated furanone-containing cements showed a significant antibacterial activity, accompanying with an initial CS reduction. Increasing loading significantly enhanced antibacterial activity but reduced the initial CS of the formed cements. The derivative showed a broad antibacterial spectrum on bacteria including S. mutans, lactobacillus, S. aureus and S. epidermidis. Human saliva did not affect the antibacterial activity of the cement. The long-term aging study indicates that the cements may have a long-lasting antibacterial function. Chapter 3 describes how we studied and evaluated the formulated antibacterial resin composite by incorporating the synthesized furanone derivative into the basic resin formulations. The results show that the modified resin composites showed a significant antibacterial activity without substantially decreasing the mechanical strengths. With 5 to 30% addition of the furanone derivative, the composite kept its original CS unchanged but showed a significant antibacterial activity with a 16-68% reduction in the S. mutans viability. Further, the antibacterial function of the new composite was not affected by human saliva. The aging study indicates that the composite may have a long-lasting antibacterial function. In summary, we have developed a novel furanone-containing antibacterial system for dental restoratives. Both glass-ionomer cement and resin composite have demonstrated significant antibacterial activities. The modified experimental glass-ionomer cement is a promising system because the reduced strength of the cement with addition of the furanone-containing polymer is still above those demonstrated by original commercial cement Fuji II LC. The modified resin composite shows nearly no reduction in mechanical strength after incorporation of the antibacterial furanone derivative. It appears that both experimental cement and resin composite are clinically attractive dental restoratives that can be potentially used for long-lasting restorations due to their high mechanical strength and permanent antibacterial function
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