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

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

Ejecta Size Distribution Resulting from Hypervelocity Impact of Spherical Projectiles on CFRP Laminates

AbstractThe size distributions of ejecta resulting from projectile perforation of CFRP (carbon fiber reinforced plastic) laminates were examined. The shape of the ejecta cone and the debris cloud was observed using a high-speed video camera. The ejecta fragments were collected from the test chamber after impact experiments. The number of fragments ejected on the front side of the target was altered by the impact velocity. Conversely, regardless of impact velocity, the number of fragments ejected on the rear side of the target was almost the same.The results were also compared with the results of NASA's breakup model. The slope on the cumulative number distribution curve of characteristic length, LC, was almost the same as that of NASA's breakup model. The area-to-mass ratio distribution of ejecta fragments from CFRP laminates ranged within and above the area surrounded by ±3σ of NASA's breakup model

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