Proceedings of The Symposium on Applied Mathematics : Wavelet, Chaos and Nonlinear PDEs

Proceedings of The Symposium on Applied Mathematics : Wavelet, Chaos and Nonlinear PDEs / Edited by KIYOSHI MIZOHATA. The Symposium on Applied Mathematics. 18-20 September 1997. The Conference Hall of MIZUTA Memorial Library Josai University

Towards gender mainstreaming trade unions in Japan and Germany: the impact of expanding part-time employment in the 1990s

"In vielen Industriegesellschaften haben sich die Beschäftigungsformen zunehmend diversifiziert durch eine anwachsende Zahl atypischer Beschäftigungsformen, die sowohl Teilzeitarbeit wie Leiharbeit einschließen und mit einer Feminisierung des Beschäftigungssystems einhergehen. Insbesondere seit den 1990er Jahren sehen sich die Gewerkschaften genötigt, auf diesen Wandel zu reagieren. Ansatzpunkt dieses Beitrags sind die aus der Gender-Perspektive wahrgenommenen Veränderungen in der Arbeitsmarktpolitik und den Organisationsstrukturen gewerkschaftlicher Dachverbände in Japan (Rengo) und Deutschland (DGB). Vor dem Hintergrund der verschiedenartigen Systeme industrieller Beziehungen werden die Rekrutierungs- und Gleichbehandlungspolitik beider Gewerkschaftsbünde seit den 1990er Jahren untersucht. Auf der Grundlage dieser Analyse argumentiert der Beitrag, dass die Zukunft der Gewerkschaftsbewegung beider Länder in der Förderung von Gender-Politik, der Verwirklichung der Gleichstellung und der Neuevaluierung des Konzepts der 'Arbeit' sowie der Vereinbarung von Tarifverträgen, mit denen diese Maßnahmen implementiert werden, zu suchen ist." (Autorenreferat)"In many industrialized countries, employment types have increasingly diversified due to a rise in the number of irregular workers, including part-timers and dispatched workers, along with the feminization of employment. Particularly since the 1990s, trade unions have been urged to take necessary measures for this diversification. This paper aims to analyze the transition of trade unions' employment policies and their organizational structure from gender perspectives, focusing on the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengo) in Japan and German Trade Union Federation (DGB) in Germany, and examines the issues of labour movements and their new possibilities. Specifically, considering the differences in the framework of industrial relations in Japan and Germany, the paper analyzes the policies on unionization and equal treatment after the 1990s. On the basis of this analysis, the paper points out that the future of labour movements in Japan and Germany can be sought in further promotion of gender policies, the realization of equal treatment, re-evaluation of the concept of 'labour', and the implementation of collective agreements stipulating all these." (author's abstract

Object Affordances Potentiate Responses but Do Not Guide Attentional Prioritization

Handled objects automatically activate afforded responses. The current experiment examined whether objects that afford a response are also prioritized for attentional processing in visual search. Targets were pictures of coffee cups with handles oriented either to the right or the left. Subjects searched for a target, a right-handled vs. left -handled coffee cup, among a varying number of distractor cups oriented in the opposite direction. Responses were faster when the direction of target handle and the key press were spatially matched than mismatched (stimulus -response compatibility (SRC) effect), but object affordance did not moderate slopes of the search functions, indicating the absence of attentional prioritization effect. These findings imply that handled objects prime afforded responses without influencing attentional prioritization

Theoretical Analysis of Primal-Dual Algorithm for Non-Convex Stochastic Decentralized Optimization

In recent years, decentralized learning has emerged as a powerful tool not only for large-scale machine learning, but also for preserving privacy. One of the key challenges in decentralized learning is that the data distribution held by each node is statistically heterogeneous. To address this challenge, the primal-dual algorithm called the Edge-Consensus Learning (ECL) was proposed and was experimentally shown to be robust to the heterogeneity of data distributions. However, the convergence rate of the ECL is provided only when the objective function is convex, and has not been shown in a standard machine learning setting where the objective function is non-convex. Furthermore, the intuitive reason why the ECL is robust to the heterogeneity of data distributions has not been investigated. In this work, we first investigate the relationship between the ECL and Gossip algorithm and show that the update formulas of the ECL can be regarded as correcting the local stochastic gradient in the Gossip algorithm. Then, we propose the Generalized ECL (G-ECL), which contains the ECL as a special case, and provide the convergence rates of the G-ECL in both (strongly) convex and non-convex settings, which do not depend on the heterogeneity of data distributions. Through synthetic experiments, we demonstrate that the numerical results of both the G-ECL and ECL coincide with the convergence rate of the G-ECL

Free Will and the Divergence Problem

This paper presents what the authors call the ‘divergence problem’ regarding choosing between different future possibilities. As is discussed in the first half, the central issue of the problem is the difficulty of temporally locating the ‘active cause’ on the modal divergent diagram. In the second half of this paper, we discuss the ‘second-person freedom’ which is, strictly, neither compatibilist negative freedom nor incompatibilist positive freedom. The divergence problem leads us to two hypothetical views (i.e. the view of single-line determination and that of one-off chance), and these views bring humans closer to the afree side – i.e. outside of the contrast between being free and being unfree. The afree side is greatly different from the ordinary human side. This paper tries to secure the second-person freedom as a substitute for the ordinary human freedom while preventing the divergence problem from arising

Tranformation of Mutualistic Fungal Acremonium Endophyte

Conditions have been developed for transforming protoplast of the Acremonium endophyte by PEG 4000 and electroporation. Transformation by PEG exhibited a higher number of tranformants than by electroporation. Intregation of iaaM gene into the genome was examined by PCR and Southern blot hybridization analysis. PCR product showed that transformants banded at around 1.7 kb corresponding to the size of iaaM gene. Hybridizationn of the digest of genomic DNA with iaaM gene as DNA probe showed that the number of hybridized band signals was different between tranformant and non-transformant. These result might indicate that PEG is an effective method for the transformation of Acremonium endopyhte and that there are repeated copies of the iaaM homologous sequences in the genome of Acremonium. Key words: Acremonium sp., endhophyte, transformation, iaaM gene, hph gen

Early Visual Perception Potentiated by Object Affordances: Evidence From a Temporal Order Judgment Task

Perceived objects automatically potentiate afforded action. Object affordances also facilitate perception of such objects, and this occurrence is known as the affordance effect. This study examined whether object affordances facilitate the initial visual processing stage, or perceptual entry processes, using the temporal order judgment task. The onset of the graspable (righthandled) coffee cup was perceived earlier than that of the less graspable (left-handled) cup for right-handed participants. The affordance effect was eliminated when the coffee cups were inverted, which presumably conveyed less affordance information. These results suggest that objects preattentively potentiate the perceptual entry processes in response to their affordances