On the Income Taxation in Japan

日本では、戦後の税制の基礎となったシャウプ勧告で直接税中心主義が掲げられる。直接税は所得税と法人税であるが、シャウプ勧告では法人税については法人税を所得税の前取りと見なす法人擬制説の立場が示されたことから、基本的には所得税中心の税体系となった。個別間接税である物品税や相続税は所得税の補完と位置づけられた。1980年代の税制改革論では、「直間比率の是正」も大きなかけ声となり、物品税等の個別間接税に替えて一般的な間接税である消費税が導入される。税体系の中での間接税の比重は高まっているが、所得税は依然として重要な基礎税である。近年、配偶者控除などの控除制度のあり方を巡って、政府税制調査会でも集中的に議論が行われるようになった

Deterministic and stochastic processes generating alternative states of microbiomes

微生物叢のゆらぎと安定性 --多種細菌群集の「代替状態」と制御可能性--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2024-02-29.The structure of microbiomes is often classified into discrete or semi-discrete types potentially differing in community-scale functional profiles. Elucidating the mechanisms that generate such “alternative states” of microbiome compositions has been one of the major challenges in ecology and microbiology. In a time-series analysis of experimental microbiomes, we here show that both deterministic and stochastic ecological processes drive divergence of alternative microbiome states. We introduced species-rich soil-derived microbiomes into eight types of culture media with 48 replicates, monitoring shifts in community compositions at six time points (8 media × 48 replicates × 6 time points = 2304 community samples). We then confirmed that microbial community structure diverged into a few state types in each of the eight medium conditions as predicted in the presence of both deterministic and stochastic community processes. In other words, microbiome structure was differentiated into a small number of reproducible compositions under the same environment. This fact indicates not only the presence of selective forces leading to specific equilibria of community-scale resource use but also the influence of demographic drift (fluctuations) on the microbiome assembly. A reference-genome-based analysis further suggested that the observed alternative states differed in ecosystem-level functions. These findings will help us examine how microbiome structure and functions can be controlled by changing the “stability landscapes” of ecological community compositions

Marketization and Reorganization of Lifestyles in Russia

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to clarify the relationship between processes of socioeconomic transformation and the reorganization of people's lifestyles. Here, lifestyle is conceived in terms of household structure and employment and labour practices. We analyse lifestyle change based on the interrelationship between the market, government, and traditional social and cultural factors. In all these aspects, the marketization of lifestyles can be observed in Russia. However, government policy and traditional factors prevent marketization from penetrating Russian lifestyle deeply and therefore support stable lives for Russian people. These traditional factors originate in everyday Russian life or institutions, and so they continue to exist over the long term in the face of marketization of lifestyles. However, this also means it is difficult to increase worker motivation and labour productivity in Russia

Social impact of the global economic crisis in Russia”,

Abstract: This paper explains the impact of the global economic crisis on Russian society after the latter half of 2008 focusing on the labour market function and the response of various economic actors. It is indicated that in Russia unique labour market adjustment exists and still functions in the current economic crisis, the crisis had a certain impact on the life of ordinary Russians and that the response to the crisis mainly involves reduction of expenses and increase in savings. Thus, unique adjustment function of the Russian labour market suppresses the impact of the economic crisis on the workers and they did not express their discontent in the form of strikes

Trans-Bilayer Ion Conduction by Proline Containing Cyclic Hexapeptides and Effects of Amino Acid Substitutions on Ion Conducting Properties

Several ion channel forming cyclic peptides have been reported over the past two decades and various ion conducting mechanisms have been proposed. In this article, we report on amino acid substitutions in cyclic hexapeptides and their effects on the ion conducting properties of these peptides. Cyclic hexapeptides, cyclo(Pro-Xxx-Yyy)2, containing two Pro residues, were used as the main framework. The substitution is performed at the Xxx positions with cationic/hydrophilic Lys or hydrophobic Leu. Yyy positions were substituted with D-Phe, D-Ala, or Gly. The peptides which were absent Lys residues showed ion conducting profiles with clear transitions of electric currents, whereas the peptides containing Lys residues tended to exhibit spiky or burst-like profiles. These profiles were altered single state profiles by the protection of ε-amino groups with aromatic protecting groups. The protected analogs exhibited significant decrease in ion conductance. These results indicated that peptides containing Lys conduct ions without forming ring stacked tube-like structure. Ion channel properties were also affected by conformational changes of the cyclic peptides induced by substitution of the Yyy positions. Enhancement of intramolecular β-turn structures of cyclic peptides tended to decrease their ion conductance values

Latent Relation Language Models

In this paper, we propose Latent Relation Language Models (LRLMs), a class of language models that parameterizes the joint distribution over the words in a document and the entities that occur therein via knowledge graph relations. This model has a number of attractive properties: it not only improves language modeling performance, but is also able to annotate the posterior probability of entity spans for a given text through relations. Experiments demonstrate empirical improvements over both a word-based baseline language model and a previous approach that incorporates knowledge graph information. Qualitative analysis further demonstrates the proposed model's ability to learn to predict appropriate relations in context