The Effects of Central Grants on Decentralized Social Programs: Post]2005 School Expense Assistance in Japan

This study examines the effects of central matching grants for the School Expense Assistance (SEA) in the midst of increasing child poverty in Japan. The 2005 reform replaced SEA grants with increases in general revenues through the system of Local Allocation Tax (LAT). By exploiting the facts that the replaced grants were closed]ended and that LAT disbursements were not made to every locality, we could not only identify the effects of the matching grants but also decompose the effects into price and income effects. We show that the 2005 change indeed suppressed SEA expenditures. The loss of matching grants reduced per]recipient SEA benefits by about JPN\5,000 (US56) for first]year elementary school students and JPN\12,000 (US133) for first]year junior high school students. The loss also reduced recipient percentage among students by 1.2-2.1 percentage points from 11.52 percent in 2004, although the eligibility criteria were barely affected.school expense assistance,fiscal transfers, differnce-in-difference, Japan

Effect of instructive visual stimuli on neurofeedback training for motor imagery-based braincomputer interface

Event-related desynchronization (ERD) of the electroencephalogram (EEG) from the motor cortex is associated with execution, observation, and mental imagery of motor tasks. Generation of ERD by motor imagery (MI) has been widely used for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) linked to neuroprosthetics and other motor assistance devices. Control of MI-based BCIs can be acquired by neurofeedback training to reliably induce MI-associated ERD. To develop more effective training conditions, we investigated the effect of static and dynamic visual representations of target movements (a picture of forearms or a video clip of hand grasping movements) during the BCI training. After 4 consecutive training days, the group that performed MI while viewing the video showed significant improvement in generating MI-associated ERD compared with the group that viewed the static image. This result suggests that passively observing the target movement during MI would improve the associated mental imagery and enhance MI-based BCIs skills

Mean curvature flow for generating discrete surfaces with piecewise constant mean curvatures

Piecewise constant mean curvature (P-CMC) surfaces are generated using the mean curvature flow (MCF). As an extension of the known fact that a CMC surface is the stationary point of an energy functional, a P-CMC surface can be obtained as the stationary point of an energy functional of multiple patch surfaces and auxiliary surfaces between them. A new formulation is presented for the MCF as the negative gradient flow of the energy functional for multiple patch continuous surfaces, which are further discretized so as to determine the change in the vertex positions of triangular meshes on the surface as well as along the internal boundaries between patches. Numerical examples show that multiple patch surfaces approximately reach the specified mean curvatures through the proposed method, which can diversify the options for the shape design using CMC surfaces

Modulation of event-related desynchronization during kinematic and kinetic hand movements

Background Event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) is a relative power decrease/increase of electroencephalogram (EEG) in a specific frequency band during physical motor execution and mental motor imagery, thus it is widely used for the brain-computer interface (BCI) purpose. However what the ERD really reflects and its frequency band specific role have not been agreed and are under investigation. Understanding the underlying mechanism which causes a significant ERD would be crucial to improve the reliability of the ERD-based BCI. We systematically investigated the relationship between conditions of actual repetitive hand movements and resulting ERD. Methods Eleven healthy young participants were asked to close/open their right hand repetitively at three different speeds (Hold, 1/3 Hz, and 1 Hz) and four distinct motor loads (0, 2, 10, and 15 kgf). In each condition, participants repeated 20 experimental trials, each of which consisted of rest (8–10 s), preparation (1 s) and task (6 s) periods. Under the Hold condition, participants were instructed to keep clenching their hand (i.e., isometric contraction) during the task period. Throughout the experiment, EEG signals were recorded from left and right motor areas for offline data analysis. We obtained time courses of EEG power spectrum to discuss the modulation of mu and beta-ERD/ERS due to the task conditions. Results We confirmed salient mu-ERD (8–13 Hz) and slightly weak beta-ERD (14–30 Hz) on both hemispheres during repetitive hand grasping movements. According to a 3 × 4 ANOVA (speed × motor load), both mu and beta-ERD during the task period were significantly weakened under the Hold condition, whereas no significant difference in the kinetics levels and interaction effect was observed. Conclusions This study investigates the effect of changes in kinematics and kinetics on resulting ERD during repetitive hand grasping movements. The experimental results suggest that the strength of ERD may reflect the time differentiation of hand postures in motor planning process or the variation of proprioception resulting from hand movements, rather than the motor command generated in the down stream, which recruits a group of motor neurons

Discrete Gaussian Curvature Flow for Piecewise Constant Gaussian Curvature Surface

A method is presented for generating a discrete piecewise constant Gaussian curvature (CGC) surface. An energy functional is first formulated so that its stationary point is the linear Weingarten (LW) surface, which has a property such that the weighted sum of mean and Gaussian curvatures is constant. The CGC surface is obtained using the gradient derived from the first variation of a special type of the energy functional of the LW surface and updating the surface shape based on the Gaussian curvature flow. A filtering method is incorporated to prevent oscillation and divergence due to unstable property of the discretized Gaussian curvature flow. Two techniques are proposed to generate a discrete piecewise CGC surface with preassigned internal boundaries. The step length of Gaussian curvature flow is adjusted by introducing a line search algorithm to minimize the energy functional. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical examples of generating various shapes of CGC surfaces

Il libro di Daniele e l'apocalittica ebraica antica

1. Un genere letterario e una visione del mondo. 2. La letteratura apocalittica ebraica. 3. Le radici dell'apocalittica ebraica. 4. Apocalittica, enochismo, qumranesimo. 5. Il libro di Daniele. 6. Le principali apocalissi non canoniche