Rapid identification of sound direction in blind footballers

Earlier studies have demonstrated that blind footballers are more accurate in identifying sound direction with less front–back confusion than sighted and blind non-football playing individuals. However, it is unknown whether blind footballers are faster than sighted footballers and nonathletes in identifying sound direction using auditory cues. Here, the present study aimed to investigate the auditory reaction times (RTs) and response accuracy of blind footballers during auditory RT tasks, including the identification of sound direction. Participants executed goal-directed stepping towards the loudspeaker as quickly and accurately as possible after identifying the sound direction. Simple, two-choice, and four-choice auditory RT tasks were completed. The results revealed that blind footballers had shorter RTs than sighted footballers in the choice RT tasks, but not in the simple RT task. These findings suggest that blind footballers are faster in identifying sound direction based on auditory cues, which is an essential perceptual-cognitive skill specific to blind football

AMS 14C Dates and Major Element Composition of Glass Shards of Late Pleistocene Tephras on Tanegashima Island, Southern Japan

Four late Pleistocene tephra layers—Tane I (Tn1), II (Tn2), III (Tn3), and IV (Tn4) in ascending order—are intercalated between widespread tephras, Kikai-Tozurahara (K-Tz: 95 ka) and Aira-Tn (AT: 30 cal kBP), on Tanegashima Island, in southern Japan. Paleolithic ruins such as the Yokomine C and Tatikiri archaeological sites were excavated from the loam layer between the Tn4 and Tn3 tephras. To refine the chronological framework on the island, we conducted accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating for 2 paleosol and 6 charcoal samples related with the late Pleistocene tephras and the Yokomine C archaeological site. The obtained 14C dates are consistent with the stratigraphy in calendar years, 33 cal kBP for Tn4, 40 cal kBP for Tn3, and 50 cal kBP for Tn2 and Tn1. The charcoal dates from Yokomine C, 32–38 cal kBP, not only constrain the age of Tn4 and Tn3 ashes, but also serve as a possible date for the site. We also measured the major element compositions of volcanic glass shards with EDS-EPMA to characterize these tephras. Although we could not find a possible correlative for Tn3 and Tn4 ashes using major element oxides of the glass shards, i.e. 75–76 wt% in SiO2, the glass chemistry obtained in this study will be valuable in correlating these tephras with their source volcanoes in the near future.The Radiocarbon archives are made available by Radiocarbon and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact [email protected] for further information.Migrated from OJS platform February 202

ASKMi: A Japanese Question Answering System based on Semantic Role Analysis

This paper introduces a Japanese question answering system called ASKMi (Answer Seeker/Knowledge Miner). We describe its system components with an emphasis on the Question Analyzer, which performs Sematic Role Analysis for answer type recognition, query expansion and document constraint generation. Semantic Role Analysis is a rule-based, language-independent technique for mapping textual fragments to arbitrary labels which we call semantic roles. To our knowledge, ASKMi is the first Japanese QA system that can perform query expansion and document constraint generation depending on what the answer types are. We are currently participating at the second Japanese QA track (NTCIR-4 QAC2), and this paper includes preliminary evaluations using the first standard Japanese QA test collection called QAC1. The Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of ASKMi is currently around 0.5-0.7, which suggests that it is a competitive system