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

The perception of inconveniences and interests to daily life performance of the elderly people qualified for secondary prevention program

This study used the Kihon Checklist, Daily Life Performance Checklist and Interest Checklist toward 337 healthy elderly persons in the community to examined their perception of inconveniences to daily life performance as well as the daily activities which they are ‘doing,’ ‘want to do’ and are ‘interested in doing.’ Among 377 healthy elderly participants, 20.0% were found to be qualified for the Secondary Prevention Program, 49.3% experienced inconvenience to ‘get up from the floor,’ 42.7% suffered inconvenience to do ‘weeding,’ 38.7% recognized inconvenience to ‘go up and down stairs,’ and 54.7% recognized ‘forgetfulness.’ Both the qualified and the unqualified elderly were ‘interested in’ and ‘want to do’ ‘haiku,’ ‘painting and writing picture-letters,’ ‘calligraphy,’ and besides ‘dance’ and ‘volunteer’ were drawn as the daily life performance that the qualified persons for the Secondary Prevention Program are ‘interested in doing’ and ‘want to do.’ The perception of inconveniences and interests to daily life performance of the elderly people qualified for secondary prevention program

Durability investigation of burner rig of Yb2SiO5 environmental barrier coatings

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System Design of an Autonomous Underwater Robot “DaryaBird”

Various kinds of robots have been developed parallel with the progress of computers and information processing technology, and the operations in the extreme environments, such as disaster areas, space and ocean, are getting one of the practical solutions for those hazardous missions. The underwater robots are one of the extreme environment robots and expected as one of solutions for underwater activities i.e., maintenance of underwater structures, observations, scientific research, where research area is getting wide and deep and also underwater structures are getting large-scale and deep-depth. Their efficiencies have been investigated during recent decades and are proven by ocean experiments. However, the robotic system including the support vessels is still big scale, and not so easy to handle by a few researchers. In this paper, we describe the design of an underwater robot “DaryaBird” developed aiming at handy, small underwater robots which can be operated by a few researchers. In addition, experimental results and mission strategies for AUVC 2010 are reported.AUVSI & ONR\u27s 13th AUVSI 2010 : Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) North America 2010, Aug 24-27, 2010, Denver, CO., US

High-Dispersion Spectroscopic Observations of Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) with the Subaru Telescope

Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) was one of the Oort cloud comets and dynamically new. This comet was broken at its perihelion passage on UT 2013 November 28.1 (at Rh ~ 17 solar radius). We observed the comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) on UT 2013 November 15 with the High Dispersion Spectrograph (HDS) mounted on the Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Its heliocentric and geocentric distances were 0.601 and 0.898 AU, respectively. We selected the slit size of 0”.5 x 9”.0 on the sky to achieve the spectral resolution of R = 72,000 from 550 to 830 nm. The total exposure time of comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) was 1200 seconds. We detected many emission lines caused from radicals (e.g., CN, C2, NH2), ions (H2O+), atoms ([OI] and Na I) and also many unidentified lines in the spectra. We report the (1) the ortho-to-para abundance ratios (OPRs) of water and ammonia estimated from the high-dispersion spectra of H2O+ and NH2, (2) the green-to-red line ratio of forbidden oxygen emissions, (3) the isotopic ratios of C2 (the carbon isotopic ratio from Swan band) and CN (the carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios from red band), (4) the sodium-to-continuum ratio of comet C/2012 S1 (ISON). </HTML