The Nature of Inventive Activities: Evidence from a Data-Set of the Okouchi Prizes and a Comparison with the R&D 100 Awards

This paper conducts preliminary analysis on technological innovation by using prize and award data sets: the Okouchi Prizes and the R&D 100 Awards. It aims to outline longitudinal patterns of award-winning industries, organizational type, and inter-organizational collaboration. First, it shows that most awards in the 1960s were given in the area of electric appliances. The iron and steel industry was the second leading prize winner of the Okouchi Prizes. Meanwhile, the segment of transportation equipment, one of the Japan’s leading industries, fared poorly. Looking at the R&D 100 Awards, this segment’s presence has increased in Japan, while it has decreased in the U.S. since the 1970s. Lastly, the inter-organizational collaboration ratio was higher in Japan than in the U.S. until the 1980s. However, the U.S. showed an increase in the collaboration ratio starting in the 1980s, when the ratio dramatically dropped in Japan.

Reform of Procedure about Civil Remedies for Victims of Slander on the Internet in Japan

In recent years, suicides caused by slander on the Internet have become a major social problem in Japan. However, the procedure for disclosure of sender’s information, which is used to prepare for filing a lawsuit claiming damages against the wrongdoer, had problems regarding the structure of the procedure and the subject of disclosure. Therefore, the Act on Limitation of Liability of Providers was amended in 2021. This paper provides an overview of this amendment

Non-Abelian Discrete Symmetries in Particle Physics

We review pedagogically non-Abelian discrete groups, which play an important role in the particle physics. We show group-theoretical aspects for many concrete groups, such as representations, their tensor products. We explain how to derive, conjugacy classes, characters, representations, and tensor products for these groups (with a finite number). We discussed them explicitly for $S_N$, $A_N$, $T'$, $D_N$, $Q_N$, $\Sigma(2N^2)$, $\Delta(3N^2)$, $T_7$, $\Sigma(3N^3)$ and $\Delta(6N^2)$, which have been applied for model building in the particle physics. We also present typical flavor models by using $A_4$, $S_4$, and $\Delta (54)$ groups. Breaking patterns of discrete groups and decompositions of multiplets are important for applications of the non-Abelian discrete symmetry. We discuss these breaking patterns of the non-Abelian discrete group, which are a powerful tool for model buildings. We also review briefly about anomalies of non-Abelian discrete symmetries by using the path integral approach.Comment: 179 pages, 8 figures, section 15 is changed, some references are adde

Competition, knowledge spillover, and innovation: technological development of semiconductor lasers, 1960- 1990

Knowledge plays an important role in economic growth. The role of technological knowledge significantly increased after the Industrial Revolution. Firms internalised technological knowledge in their R&D laboratories and placed knowledge creation in a central position in their business strategies. Both the stock and flow of technological knowledge and the tight interaction among science and engineering became indispensable to the competitive advantage of industry, as well as modern economic growth. Directing its attention to knowledge creation and spillover, this thesis scrutinises the development of semiconductor lasers from 1960 to 1990. The semiconductor laser became one of the most important developments in the optoelectronics industry underlying the drastic changes that took place during the last half of the twentieth century in information technology, and it has become the most widely used laser since the 1980s. Reviewing the optoelectronics industry in the U.S. and Japan, the Japan Technology Evaluation Center (JTEC) found that “Japan clearly led in consumer optoelectronics, that both countries were competitive in communications and networks, and that the United States held a clear lead in custom optoelectronics.” “Japan’s lead in high-volume consumer optoelectronics and related technologies gave it a dominant share of the overall global optoelectronics market.” This thesis explores how the patterns of comparative advantages emerged, which were indicated by the JTEC report. How did Japanese firms gain technological competitiveness in high volume product markets? How did the U.S. firms come to be competitive in niche markets? Through scrutinizing patent data, it examines the engineers’ network, mobility, and the pattern of technological choice in R&D competition. Introducing the two different types of knowledge--current technological domain specific knowledge and lateral utilization knowledge--it showed how different patterns of knowledge spillover emerged and resulted in the different paths of technological development in the U.S. and Japan. Based on the high star-engineers’ mobility and the well developed research network, the U.S. firms tended to spin off from their parent firms and targeted niche markets. Therefore, knowledge spillover emerged in the areas where semiconductor laser technology was applied and exploited to fill untapped markets. In contrast, the pattern of competition of Japanese firms induced knowledge spillovers to enhance the development of core semiconductor laser technology instead of exploiting niche product markets

Weight function method for precise determination of top quark mass at Large Hadron Collider

We propose a new method to measure a theoretically well-defined top quark mass at the LHC. This method is based on the "weight function method," which we proposed in our preceding paper. It requires only lepton energy distribution and is basically independent of the production process of the top quark. We perform a simulation analysis of the top quark mass reconstruction with $t\bar{t}$ pair production and lepton+jets decay channel at the leading order. The estimated statistical error of the top quark mass is about $0.4$ GeV with an integrated luminosity of $100$ fb$^{-1}$ at $\sqrt{s}=14$ TeV. We also estimate some of the major systematic uncertainties and find that they are under good control.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, version to appear in PL

The Nature of Inventive Activities : Evidence from a Data-Set of R&D Awards

This paper presents an exploratory study on the characteristics of inventive activities as captured on the basis of the analysis of a data-set of R&D awards. Our data source is the "R&D 100 Awards" competition organized by the journal Research and Development. Since 1963, the magazine (which at that time was called Industrial Research) has been awarding this prize to 100 most technologically significant new products available for sale or licensing in the year preceding the judgment. The jury is composed of university professors, industrial researchers and consultants with a certified level of competence in the specific areas they are called to asses. The main criteria for assessment are: i) technological significance (i.e., whether the product can be considered a major breakthrough), ii) competitive significance (i.e., how the product compares to rival solutions available on the market). Throughout the years, key breakthroughs inventions such as Polacolor film (1963), the flashcube (1965), the automated teller machine (1973), the halogen lamp (1974), the fax machine (1975), the liquid crystal display (1980), the printer (1986), the Kodak Photo CD (1991), the Nicoderm antismoking patch (1992), Taxol anticancer drug (1993), lab on a chip (1996), and HDTV (1998) have received the prize. We use these data to study the shifts in the distribution of innovative activities across countries, sectors and types of institutions and the changes in the sources of inventive activities over time. Our preliminary findings show: i) the emergence of a challenge to US technological leadership from other rival nations such as Japan and Germany, ii) the critical role of scientific instrumentation as a powerful source of technological breakthroughs, iii) a change in the institutional arrangements where innovative activities take place, from individual corporations, to partnerships increasingly involving public research organizations and universities, iv) a large chunk of inventive activities undertaken without patent protection.

M-Estimation based on quasi-processes from discrete samples of Levy processes

We consider M-estimation problems, where the target value is determined using a minimizer of an expected functional of a Levy process. With discrete observations from the Levy process, we can produce a "quasi-path" by shuffling increments of the Levy process, we call it a quasi-process. Under a suitable sampling scheme, a quasi-process can converge weakly to the true process according to the properties of the stationary and independent increments. Using this resampling technique, we can estimate objective functionals similar to those estimated using the Monte Carlo simulations, and it is available as a contrast function. The M-estimator based on these quasi-processes can be consistent and asymptotically normal

Studies on an antifibrinolytic agent trans-AMCHA

Lysis of fibrin was first recognized by MORGAGNI in 1769, observing a liquid blood in a patient of acute death, and the phenomenon was named as fibrinolysis by DASTRE in 1893. In 1937, MACFARLANE recognized in a patient after cholecystectomy that the blood clot was lysed completely in the following morning. Since then, much attention has been paid clinically on fibrinolysis and it has been said to occur in case receiving a large amount of blood transfusion, shock, cancer, obstetric diseases, hemophilia, various drug poisonings, allergic diseases, after irradiation and after the operations of lung, pancreas and prostate. In our department, also, the similar phenomenon was recognized often in association with cardiac surgery using the artificial heart-lung machine, and a difficulty in hemostasis was encountered postoperatively. We have been studying, therefore, on fibrinolysis in open heart surgery.</p