A Military History of Japan: From the Age of the Samurai to the 21st Century, by John T. Kuehn

Japan is at an inflection point. Depending on how particular peoples and nations view this enigmatic country, it now either is turning away from rightly enforced demilitarization and back toward the more martial and expansionist policies of its past, or is working to become a security provider concomitant with its economic power

Estimating Nonresponse Bias in Mail Surveys

Valid predictions for the direction of nonresponse bias were obtained from subjective estimates and extrapolations in an analysis of mail survey data from published studies. For estimates of the magnitude of bias, the use of extrapolations led to substantial improvements over a strategy of not using extrapolations

FAIR principles and the IEDB: short-term improvements and a long-term vision of OBO-foundry mediated machine-actionable interoperability.

The Immune Epitope Database (IEDB), at www.iedb.org, has the mission to make published experimental data relating to the recognition of immune epitopes easily available to the scientific public. By presenting curated data in a searchable database, we have liberated it from the tables and figures of journal articles, making it more accessible and usable by immunologists. Recently, the principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability have been formulated as goals that data repositories should meet to enhance the usefulness of their data holdings. We here examine how the IEDB complies with these principles and identify broad areas of success, but also areas for improvement. We describe short-term improvements to the IEDB that are being implemented now, as well as a long-term vision of true 'machine-actionable interoperability', which we believe will require community agreement on standardization of knowledge representation that can be built on top of the shared use of ontologies

Brief vs. comprehensive descriptions in measuring intentions to purchase

Introduction: In forecasting demand for expensive consumer goods, direct questioning of potential consumers about their future purchasing plans has had considerable predictive success [1, 2, 4]. Any attempt to apply such intention to purchase methods to forecast demand for proposed products or services must determine some way to convey product information to the potential consumer [3]. Indeed, all the prospective consumer knows about the product or service is what he may infer from the information given to him by the researcher. This paper presents a study of the effect upon intention to purchase of this seemingly crucial element—the extent and type of description of the new service. How extensive must the description of the new service be in order to measure intention to purchase

An Improved Private Mechanism for Small Databases

We study the problem of answering a workload of linear queries $\mathcal{Q}$, on a database of size at most $n = o(|\mathcal{Q}|)$ drawn from a universe $\mathcal{U}$ under the constraint of (approximate) differential privacy. Nikolov, Talwar, and Zhang~\cite{NTZ} proposed an efficient mechanism that, for any given $\mathcal{Q}$ and $n$, answers the queries with average error that is at most a factor polynomial in $\log |\mathcal{Q}|$ and $\log |\mathcal{U}|$ worse than the best possible. Here we improve on this guarantee and give a mechanism whose competitiveness ratio is at most polynomial in $\log n$ and $\log |\mathcal{U}|$, and has no dependence on $|\mathcal{Q}|$. Our mechanism is based on the projection mechanism of Nikolov, Talwar, and Zhang, but in place of an ad-hoc noise distribution, we use a distribution which is in a sense optimal for the projection mechanism, and analyze it using convex duality and the restricted invertibility principle.Comment: To appear in ICALP 2015, Track