LEARNING A LANGUAGE OF TWO ALPHABETS: PRACTICAL APROACHES IN HIRAGANA AND KATAKANA ACQUISITION FOR BEGINNER LEARNERS OF JAPANESE LANGUAGE

The Japanese language has a 128  million speakers and has around 4 million learners in the world. In Ecuador, however, there are only six institutions offer Japanese classes to 150 learners. This small number of learners may be due in part to geographic and cultural distance, as well as the economic and political circumstances separating Ecuador and Japan. Furthermore, the uniqueness of the linguistic characteristics of Japanese is also a major factor influencing learner reluctance. One of the principal characteristics of this language is its three writing systems: hiragana, katakana and kanji. This paper outlines the linguistic characteristics of Japanese, focusing on hiragana, katakana and kanji, and sets out the difficulties which learners experience in this area. In the second part, with reference to these characteristics, the study introduces class activities to show how learners may acquire the basic characters of the writing systems as an important first step in learning Japanese, with the aim of reducing the burden on the language acquisition process. Through this research, the importance of peer-learning and collaboration between learners and teachers is highlighted as a means of facilitating approaches to the teaching and learning of Japanese

Choquet integrals, Hausdorff content and fractional operators

It is shown that the fractional integral operator $I_{\alpha}$, $0<\alpha<n$, and the fractional maximal operator $M_{\alpha}$, $0\le\alpha<n$, are bounded on weak Choquet spaces with respect to Hausdorff content. We also investigate these operators on Choquet-Morrey spaces. These results are extensions of the previous works due to Adams, Orobitg and Verdera, and Tang. The results for the fractional integral operator $I_{\alpha}$ are essentially new.Comment: 12 page

InstructDoc: A Dataset for Zero-Shot Generalization of Visual Document Understanding with Instructions

We study the problem of completing various visual document understanding (VDU) tasks, e.g., question answering and information extraction, on real-world documents through human-written instructions. To this end, we propose InstructDoc, the first large-scale collection of 30 publicly available VDU datasets, each with diverse instructions in a unified format, which covers a wide range of 12 tasks and includes open document types/formats. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization performance on VDU tasks, we design a new instruction-based document reading and understanding model, InstructDr, that connects document images, image encoders, and large language models (LLMs) through a trainable bridging module. Experiments demonstrate that InstructDr can effectively adapt to new VDU datasets, tasks, and domains via given instructions and outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and ChatGPT without specific training.Comment: Accepted by AAAI2024; project page: https://github.com/nttmdlab-nlp/InstructDo

軟組織による外耳道閉鎖症例での軟骨伝導

A hearing aid using cartilage conduction (CC) has been proposed as an alternative to bone conduction (BC) hearing aids. The transducer developed for this application is lightweight, requires a much smaller fixation force than a BC hearing aid, and is more convenient to use. CC can be of great benefit to patients with fibrotic aural atresia. Fibrotic tissue connected to the ossicles provides an additional pathway (termed fibrotic tissue pathway) for sound to reach the cochlea by means of CC. To address the function of fibrotic tissue pathway, BC and CC thresholds were measured in six ears with fibrotic aural atresia. The relationship between the CC thresholds and the results of computed tomography was investigated. In the ears with the presence of a fibrotic tissue pathway, the CC thresholds were lower than the BC thresholds at 0.5 and 1.0 kHz. At 2.0 kHz, no significant difference was observed between the BC and CC thresholds. The current findings suggest that sound in the low to middle frequency range is transmitted more efficiently by CC via a fibrotic tissue pathway than BC. The development of hearing devices using CC can contribute to rehabilitation, particularly in patients with fibrotic aural atresia.博士（医学）・甲621号・平成26年3月17

Bridging Pico-to-Nanonewtons with a Ratiometric Force Probe for Monitoring Nanoscale Polymer Physics Before Damage

Understanding the transmission of nanoscale forces in the pico-to-nanonewton range is important in polymer physics. While physical approaches have limitations in analyzing the local force distribution in condensed environments, chemical analysis using force probes is promising. However, there are stringent requirements for probing the local forces generated before structural damage. The magnitude of those forces corresponds to the range below covalent bond scission (from 200 pN to several nN) and above thermal fluctuation (several pN). Here, we report a conformationally flexible dual-fluorescence force probe with a theoretically estimated threshold of approximately 100 pN. This probe enables ratiometric analysis of the distribution of local forces in a stretched polymer chain network. Without changing the intrinsic properties of the polymer, the force distribution was reversibly monitored in real time. Chemical control of the probe location demonstrated that the local stress concentration is twice as biased at crosslinkers than at main chains, particularly in a strain-hardening region. Due to the high sensitivity, the percentage of stressed force probes was estimated to be more than 1000 times higher than the activation rate of a conventional mechanophore.Comment: 21 pages and 5 figures in the main text, and 73 pages and 68 figures in the supplementary material

Photo-induced Tellurium segregation in MoTe2\mathrm{MoTe_2}

We report on the coherent phonon spectroscopy of polymorphic $\mathrm{MoTe_2}$ single crystals using a femtosecond-pulsed laser to investigate the relationship between structural phase transitions and photo-thermal effects induced by high-density laser excitation. Even when a femtosecond pulsed laser was used, which generally induces fewer heat accumulation effects than the case for a CW laser, tellurium segregation was observed in coherent phonon spectra with increasing excitation density, while no structural phase transition among polymorphs of $\mathrm{MoTe_2}$ was observed. The use of higher photon-energy excitation, however, was found to suppress tellurium segregation.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, accepted for Physica Status Solidi (RRL) - Rapid Research Letter

Bridging pico-to-nanonewtons with a ratiometric force probe for monitoring nanoscale polymer physics before damage

ピンと張られた分子鎖を定量する「羽ばたき型蛍光Force Probe」の開発 --高分子材料の中で力のかかった分子鎖の比率を蛍光イメージングで計測する--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-01-14.Understanding the transmission of nanoscale forces in the pico-to-nanonewton range is important in polymer physics. While physical approaches have limitations in analyzing the local force distribution in condensed environments, chemical analysis using force probes is promising. However, there are stringent requirements for probing the local forces generated before structural damage. The magnitude of those forces corresponds to the range below covalent bond scission (from 200 pN to several nN) and above thermal fluctuation (several pN). Here, we report a conformationally flexible dual-fluorescence force probe with a theoretically estimated threshold of approximately 100 pN. This probe enables ratiometric analysis of the distribution of local forces in a stretched polymer chain network. Without changing the intrinsic properties of the polymer, the force distribution was reversibly monitored in real time. Chemical control of the probe location demonstrated that the local stress concentration is twice as biased at crosslinkers than at main chains, particularly in a strain-hardening region. Due to the high sensitivity, the percentage of the stressed force probes was estimated to be more than 1000 times higher than the activation rate of a conventional mechanophore