Seismic Velocity Structure in and around the Japanese Island Arc Derived from Seismic Tomography Including NIED MOWLAS Hi-net and S-net Data

Japanese Islands are composed of four plates, with two oceanic plates subducting beneath the two continental plates. In 2016 the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED) Seafloor Observation Network for Earthquakes and Tsunamis along the Japan Trench (S-net) started seismic observation of the offshore Hokkaido to Boso region in the Pacific Ocean, and Dense Oceanfloor Network System for Earthquakes and Tsunamis (DONET) was transferred to NIED. We add the NIED S-net and DONET datasets to NIED high-sensitivity seismograph network (Hi-net) and full range seismograph network (F-net) datasets used in the previous study and obtain the three-dimensional seismic velocity structure beneath the Pacific Ocean as well as Japanese Islands. NIED S-net data dramatically improve the resolution beneath the Pacific Ocean at depths of 10–20 km because the seismic stations are located above the earthquakes and on the east side of the Japan Trench. We find a NS high-Vp zone at depths of 20–30 km. The 2018 Eastern Iburi earthquake occurred below the northern part of this high-V zone. The coseismic slip plane of the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake has low Vp/Vs, but its large slip region has high Vp. The broad low-Vp/Vs region may play a role in large earthquake occurrence

Association between Mammographic Breast Density and Lifestyle in Japanese Women

A high mammographic breast density is considered to be a risk factor for breast cancer. However, only a small number of studies on the association between breast density and lifestyle have been performed. A cross-sectional study was performed using a survey with 29 questions on life history and lifestyle. The breast density on mammography was classified into 4 categories following the BI-RADS criteria. The subjects were 522 women with no medical history of breast cancer. The mean age was 53.3 years old. On multivariate analysis, only BMI was a significant factor determining breast density in premenopausal women (parameter estimate, －0.403;p value, 0.0005), and the density decreased as BMI rose. In postmenopausal women, BMI (parameter estimate, －0.196;p value, 0.0143) and number of deliveries (parameter estimate, －0.388;p value, 0.0186) were significant factors determining breast density;breast density decreased as BMI and number of deliveries increased. Only BMI and number of deliveries were identified as factors significantly influencing breast density. BMI was inversely correlated with breast density before and after menopause, whereas the influence of number of deliveries on breast density was significant only in postmenopausal women in their 50 and 60s

Supporting Analysis of Future-related Information in News Archives and the Web

A lot of future-related information is available in news articles or Web pages. This information can however differ to large extent and may fluctuate over time. It is therefore difficult for users to manually compare and aggregate it, and to re-construct the most probable course of future events. In this paper we approach a problem of automatically generating summaries of future events related to queries using data obtained from news archive collections or from the Web. We propose two methods, explicit and implicit future-related information detection. The former is based on analyzing the context of future temporal expressions in documents, while the latter relies on detecting periodical patterns in historical document collections. We present a graph-based visualization of future-related information and demonstrate its usefulness through several examples

Evaluation of the effect of remanufacturing diesel particulate filters to minimize environmental impacts

Exhaust gas purification is required for the operation of heavy machinery, e.g., construction machinery which mainly uses diesel engines. Precious metals such as the platinum group are used in catalysts for this purpose, which heavily impacts the environment. In this study, the authors evaluated the potential of remanufacturing diesel particulate filters (DPF) to reduce these impacts. Climate change indicators, i.e., global warming potential (GWP), and resource consumption were evaluated.As a result, the environmental impacts of new product manufacturing, particularly resource production and the manufacturing process, were quantitatively estimated to be significant, while the environmental impacts of the remanufacturing process, product delivery, and disposal of the used products were significantly lower. In addition, 47% of the GWP and 50% of the resource consumption were reduced using remanufactured diesel particulate filters compared with using only new diesel particulate filters

Multi-lingual Analysis of Future-related Information on the Web

Abstract — Future prediction is one of the crucial activities of humans. In this paper, we report the results of exploratory analysis of future-related information on the Web in three different languages: English, Japanese and Polish. We focus on the future-related information which is grounded in time, that is, the information on events whose expected occurrence dates are already known. Our datasets are constructed by crawling search engine indices. We investigate multiple aspects of future-related information in web pages across different languages such as its amount, time span, topics, associated sentiment levels as well as the relation to the future-related content in news articles