HD Physiology Project-Japanese efforts to promote multilevel integrative systems biology and physiome research.

The HD Physiology Project is a Japanese research consortium that aimed to develop methods and a computational platform in which physiological and pathological information can be described in high-level definitions across multiple scales of time and size. During the 5 years of this project, an appropriate software platform for multilevel functional simulation was developed and a whole-heart model including pharmacokinetics for the assessment of the proarrhythmic risk of drugs was developed. In this article, we outline the description and scientific strategy of this project and present the achievements and influence on multilevel integrative systems biology and physiome research

Exploring Regional Development of Digital Humanities Research: A Case Study for Taiwan

This study analyzed references and source papers of the Proceedings of 2009-2012 International Conference of Digital Archives and Digital Humanities (DADH), which was held annually in Taiwan. A total of 59 sources and 1,104 references were investigated, based on descriptive analysis and subject analysis of library practices on cataloguing. Preliminary results showed historical materials, events, bureaucracies, and people of Taiwan and China in the Qing Dynasty were the major subjects in the tempo-spatial dimensions. The subject-date figure depicted a long-low head and short-high tail curve, which demonstrated both characteristics of research of humanities and application of technology in digital humanities. The dates of publication of the references spanned over 360 years, which shows a long time span in research materials. A majority of the papers (61.41%) were single-authored, which is in line with the common research practice in the humanities. Books published by general publishers were the major type of references, and this was the same as that of established humanities research. The next step of this study will focus on the comparison of characteristics of both sources and references of international journals with those reported in this article.Comment: 25 pages, 10 tables, 5 figure

Cross-cultural representations of musical shape

In cross-cultural research involving performers from distinct cultural backgrounds (U.K., Japan, Papua New Guinea), we examined 75 musicians' associations between musical sound and shape, and saw pronounced differences between groups. Participants heard short stimuli varying in pitch contour and were asked to represent these visually on paper, with the instruction that if another community member saw the marks they should be able to connect them with the sounds. Participants from the U.K. group produced consistent symbolic representations, which involved depicting the passage of time from left-to-right. Japanese participants unfamiliar with English language and western standard notation provided responses comparable to the U.K. group's. The majority opted to use a horizontal timeline, whilst a minority of traditional Japanese musicians produced unique responses with time represented vertically. The last group, a non-literate Papua New Guinean tribe known as BenaBena, produced a majority of iconic responses which did not follow the time versus pitch contour model, but highlighted musical qualities other than the parameters intentionally varied in the investigation, focusing on hue and loudness. The participants' responses point to profoundly different 'norms' of musical shape association, which may be linked to literacy and to the functional role of music in a community