村上春樹『ノルウェイの森』論 : 反復(リプリーズ)する物語と音楽

本稿は第七回村上春樹国際シンポジウム（二〇一八年五月二七日 於・淡江大学）における口頭発表「音楽を奏でる者たち―『ノルウェイの森』における「共鳴」―」に基づくものである

ZnSTe coherently grown onto GaP substrates by molecular beam epitaxy using ZnS buffer layers

ZnS1-xTex epitaxial layers with x ~ 0.06, nearly lattice-matched to GaP substrates, have been grown by molecular beam epitaxy. Direct growth of the layers onto the substrates results in poor crystal quality, showing no sign of coherent growth. This seems to be due to alloy composition deviation at the initial stage of the growth. To avoid the problem, a thin coherent ZnS buffer layer has been inserted at the ZnSTe/GaP interface. With the buffer layers, coherent growth of ZnSTe layers is achieved and the crystal quality has been improved

Sound collection systems using a crowdsourcing approach to construct sound map based on subjective evaluation

This paper presents a sound collection system that uses crowdsourcing to gather information for visualizing area characteristics. First, we developed a sound collection system to simultaneously collect physical sounds, their statistics, and subjective evaluations. We then conducted a sound collection experiment using the developed system on 14 participants. We collected 693,582 samples of equivalent Aweighted loudness levels and their locations, and 5,935 samples of sounds and their locations. The data also include subjective evaluations by the participants. In addition, we analyzed the changes in sound properties of some areas before and after the opening of a large-scale shopping mall in a city. Next, we implemented visualizations on the server system to attract users’ interests. Finally, we published the system, which can receive sounds from any Android smartphone user. The sound data were continuously collected and achieved a specified result

A Method for suppresion of defects in zigzag bending of sheet metal

This study presents methods for suppression of defects observed in zigzag bending of sheet-metal or plate. This type of bending is widely used in industry for manufacturing structural parts in automobiles. Although it is easily conducted by press forming using upper and lower dies which have zigzag shape, it often has defects, such as spring-back and dents. A series of finite element analyses and experiments were conducted for suppression of the defects in two-place bending, which has three segments. As a result, it is revealed that that the distance between two bending positions is dominant for occurrence of the dents and that the dent area was able to be reduced by selecting the optimum moving direction of the upper die. It is also revealed that the cause of spring-back is elastic recovery of the straight segments instead of the bent parts against engineers' and technicians'' intuition, and that there is an optimum moving direction of the upper die for the least spring-back. Furthermore, another realistic method for suppression of spring-back was suggested for four-place bending

Cluster Entropy: Active Domain Adaptation in Pathological Image Segmentation

The domain shift in pathological segmentation is an important problem, where a network trained by a source domain (collected at a specific hospital) does not work well in the target domain (from different hospitals) due to the different image features. Due to the problems of class imbalance and different class prior of pathology, typical unsupervised domain adaptation methods do not work well by aligning the distribution of source domain and target domain. In this paper, we propose a cluster entropy for selecting an effective whole slide image (WSI) that is used for semi-supervised domain adaptation. This approach can measure how the image features of the WSI cover the entire distribution of the target domain by calculating the entropy of each cluster and can significantly improve the performance of domain adaptation. Our approach achieved competitive results against the prior arts on datasets collected from two hospitals.Comment: Accepted by IEEE ISBI'2

Catecholamines Facilitate Fuel Expenditure and Protect Against Obesity via a Novel Network of the Gut-Brain Axis in Transcription Factor Skn-1-deficient Mice

AbstractTaste signals and nutrient stimuli sensed by the gastrointestinal tract are transmitted to the brain to regulate feeding behavior and energy homeostasis. This system is referred to as the gut-brain axis. Here we show that both brush cells and type II taste cells are eliminated in the gastrointestinal tract of transcription factor Skn-1 knockout (KO) mice. Despite unaltered food intake, Skn-1 KO mice have reduced body weight with lower body fat due to increased energy expenditure. In this model, 24-h urinary excretion of catecholamines was significantly elevated, accompanied by increased fatty acid β-oxidation and fuel dissipation in skeletal muscle and impaired insulin secretion driven by glucose. These results suggest the existence of brain-mediated energy homeostatic pathways originating from brush cells and type II taste cells in the gastrointestinal tract and ending in peripheral tissues, including the adrenal glands. The discovery of food-derived factors that regulate these cells may open new avenues the treatment of obesity and diabetes.Research ContextTaste signals and nutrient stimuli sensed by the gastrointestinal tract are transmitted to the brain to regulate feeding behavior and energy homeostasis along the gut-brain axis. We propose the concept that taste-receiving cells in the oral cavity and/or food-borne chemicals-receiving brush cells in the gut are involved in regulation of the body weight and adiposity via the brain. The discovery of food-derived factors that regulate these cells may open new avenues for the treatment of obesity and diabetes

Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey for An Optical Counterpart of GW170817

We perform a $z$-band survey for an optical counterpart of a binary neutron star coalescence GW170817 with Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam. Our untargeted transient search covers $23.6$ deg$^2$ corresponding to the $56.6\%$ credible region of GW170817 and reaches the $50\%$ completeness magnitude of $20.6$ mag on average. As a result, we find 60 candidates of extragalactic transients, including J-GEM17btc (a.k.a. SSS17a/DLT17ck). While J-GEM17btc is associated with NGC 4993 that is firmly located inside the 3D skymap of GW170817, the other 59 candidates do not have distance information in the GLADE v2 catalog or NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED). Among 59 candidates, 58 are located at the center of extended objects in the Pan-STARRS1 catalog, while one candidate has an offset. We present location, $z$-band apparent magnitude, and time variability of the candidates and evaluate the probabilities that they are located inside of the 3D skymap of GW170817. The probability for J-GEM17btc is $64\%$ being much higher than those for the other 59 candidates ($9.3\times10^{-3}-2.1\times10^{-1}\%$). Furthermore, the possibility, that at least one of the other 59 candidates is located within the 3D skymap, is only $3.2\%$. Therefore, we conclude that J-GEM17btc is the most-likely and distinguished candidate as the optical counterpart of GW170817.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in PASJ (Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan