Optimization-Based Construction of Quadrilateral Table Cartograms

A quadrilateral table cartogram is a rectangle-shaped figure that visualizes table-form data; quadrilateral cells in a table cartogram are transformed to express the magnitude of positive weights by their areas, while maintaining the adjacency of cells in the original table. However, the previous construction method is difficult to implement because it consists of multiple operations that do not have a unique solution and require complex settings to obtain the desired outputs. In this article, we propose a new construction for quadrilateral table cartograms by recasting the construction as an optimization problem. The proposed method is formulated as a simple minimization problem to achieve mathematical clarity. It can generate quadrilateral table cartograms with smaller deformation of rows and columns, thereby aiding readers to recognize the correspondence between table cartograms and original tables. In addition, we also propose a means of sorting rows and/or columns prior to the construction of table cartograms to reduce excess shape deformation. Applications of the proposed method confirm its capability to output table cartograms that clearly visualize the characteristics of datasets

On cosmic-ray production efficiency at supernova remnant shocks propagating into realistic diffuse interstellar medium

Using three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics simulations, we show that the efficiency of cosmic-ray (CR) production at supernova remnants (SNRs) is over-predicted if it could be estimated based on proper motion measurements of H$\alpha$ filaments in combination with shock-jump conditions. Density fluctuations of upstream medium make shock waves rippled and oblique almost everywhere. The kinetic energy of the shock wave is transferred into that of downstream turbulence as well as thermal energy which is related to the shock velocity component normal to the shock surface. Our synthetic observation shows that the CR acceleration efficiency as estimated from a lower downstream plasma temperature, is overestimated by 10-40%, because rippled shock does not immediately dissipate all upstream kinetic energy.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in ApJ; the paper with full resolution images is http://www.phys.aoyama.ac.jp/~ryo/papers/shimoda2015.pd

Identification of Geographical Segmentation of the Rental Apartment Market in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area (Short Paper)

It is often said that the real estate market is divided geographically in such a manner that the value of attributes of real estate properties is different for each area. This study proposes a new approach to the investigation of the geographical segmentation of the real estate market. We develop a price model with many regional explanatory variables, and implement the generalized fused lasso - a regression method for promoting sparsity - to extract the areas where the valuation standard is the same. The proposed method is applied to rental data of apartments in the Tokyo metropolitan area, and we find that the geographical segmentation displays hierarchal patterns. Specifically, we observe that the market is divided by wards, railway lines and stations, and neighbourhoods

Breeding in "Wagyu" Cattle as Improved Beef Breeds

Japanese native cattle, including improved breeds, are generally called "Wagyu". They have been kept for one thousand or more years in Japan and used as cultivating and transporting labour. Some of them had been crossbred by European breeds in the late 19 th century or in the first decade of the 20th century. They were then divided into four breeds, namely Japanese Black, Japanese Brown, Japanese Poll and Japanese Shorthorn. Some of the breeds have included many line bred strains. Since about 1960 their use has been limited to the beef only, for their role of labour have been replaced by cultivating machines, breding of the beef producing character in "Wagyuu" cattle had started then. Official progeny tests and performance tests of sires have rapidly improved daily gain and meat quality. But the results of official progeny tests have not accurately represent-ed the genetic ability of sires, which are show in the least-squares analysis of variance for marketing carcass of the sons. It is necessary to collect much date from marketing carcasses, in order to genetically analyse the data and to select sires using the results of this analysis. Heritability estimates and genetic correlation calculated by many workers in Japan were summarized in this paper. In Japan, the unit price of the carcass varies greatly according to the marbling score ; therefore, most cows are tend to be mated to sires that have proved their excellent marbling ability. Most of these sires are the offsprings of only limmited sires belonging to a few strains. It is feared that a cow in a few generations might be related to every potential, desirable mate. Inbreeding depression might delay improvement. Then the author recommends to developing several strains in "Wagyu" cattles, and to mate them rotationally