A method for visualising possible contexts

This paper presents a method for visualising possible sequences of information. Possible sequences of information segments, called contexts, scenarios, narratives, or story tellings, have been used as a tool for exploring and stimulating thinking about possible events, assumptions relating to these events, and courses of actions, i.e. chances for a broad range of information designers from public audiences searching on the internet to analysts and policy makers. Thanks to the search technology, it has become easier to obtain information that a person is looking for, however, it is a laborious task to grab an overview of information space so that an information designer can find contextually relevant information pieces and sequence them into contextually meaningful ways. In this research, we design and develop a series of generative systems that visualises possible contexts. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

Understanding the experience of interactive art: Iamascope in Beta_space

This paper describes a study into the situated experience of interactive art. The study was conducted with audiences of the artwork Iamascope and is framed by the four categories of embodied experience that have been proposed by its artist Sidney Fels. The video-cued recall method we employed was shown to reveal rich detail about situated interactive art experience. The results provide a detailed account of how the categories of embodiment manifest themselves in audience experience and lead to the proposal of a blueprint for the trajectory of interaction produced by Iamascope which may be generalisable to other interactive artworks

Buzz Tweet Classification Based on Text and Image Features of Tweets Using Multi-Task Learning

This study investigates social media trends and proposes a buzz tweet classification method to explore the factors causing the buzz phenomenon on Twitter. It is difficult to identify the causes of the buzz phenomenon based solely on texts posted on Twitter. It is expected that by limiting the tweets to those with attached images and using the characteristics of the images and the relationships between the text and images, a more detailed analysis than that of with text-only tweets can be conducted. Therefore, an analysis method was devised based on a multi-task neural network that uses both the features extracted from the image and text as input and the buzz class (buzz/non-buzz) and the number of “likes (favorites)” and “retweets (RTs)” as output. The predictions made using a single feature of the text and image were compared with the predictions using a combination of multiple features. The differences between buzz and non-buzz features were analyzed based on the cosine similarity between the text and the image. The buzz class was correctly identified with a correctness rate of approximately 80% for all combinations of image and text features, with the combination of BERT and VGG16 providing the highest correctness rate

Did Social Interactions Shape the Reflective Mind?

In recent decades, considerable attention has been paid to the roles played by social factors in the evolution of the human mind. Prominent theorists like David Geary and Keith Stanovich argue that various forms of social interactions have been the main factor behind the evolution of our reflective mind or, as it is called by the dual-process theory, System 2. In this paper I will argue that this account may be challenged by the studies of emotional intelligence (EI) and the neuroimaging studies of strategic thinking. First, only modest correlations would exist between the scores of the EI and IQ tests (a substitute measure for the reflective mind), suggesting that the ability of social / emotional management may not be as closely related to the reflective mind as those theorists would assume. Second, neurological studies found that the brain areas responsible for strategic thinking, which involves the ability of social management, hardly overlap with those activated for reflective thinking. I will conclude that social interactions may have played a less prominent role in the evolution of the reflective mind than currently assumed

Trend Prediction Based on Multi-Modal Affective Analysis from Social Networking Posts

This paper propose a method to predict the stage of buzz-trend generation by analyzing the emotional information posted on social networking services for multimodal information, such as posted text and attached images, based on the content of the posts. The proposed method can analyze the diffusion scale from various angles, using only the information at the time of posting, when predicting in advance and the information of time error, when used for posterior analysis. Specifically, tweets and reply tweets were converted into vectors using the BERT general-purpose language model that was trained in advance, and the attached images were converted into feature vectors using a trained neural network model for image recognition. In addition, to analyze the emotional information of the posted content, we used a proprietary emotional analysis model to estimate emotions from tweets, reply tweets, and image features, which were then added to the input as emotional features. The results of the evaluation experiments showed that the proposed method, which added linguistic features (BERT vectors) and image features to tweets, achieved higher performance than the method using only a single feature. Although we could not observe the effectiveness of the emotional features, the more emotions a tweet and its reply match had, the more empathy action occurred and the larger the like and RT values tended to be, which could ultimately increase the likelihood of a tweet going viral

Prototypical Reasoning About Species and the Species Problem

The species problem is often described as the abundance of conflicting definitions of _species_, such as the biological species concept and phylogenetic species concepts. But biologists understand the notion of species in a non-definitional as well as a definitional way. In this article I argue that when they understand _species_ without a definition in their mind, their understanding is often mediated by the notion of _good species_, or prototypical species, as the idea of ``prototype'' is explicated in cognitive psychology. This distinction helps us make sense of several puzzling phenomena regarding biologists' dealing with species, such as the fact that in everyday research biologists often behave as if the species problem is solved, while they should be fully aware that it is not. I also briefly discuss implications of this finding, including that some extant attempts to answer what the nature of species is have an inadequate assumption about how the notion of species is represented in biologists' minds

Relationship between the severity of pre-frailty and the degree of adaptation of Ninjin’yoeito (NYT) on pre-frailty

With the global trend towards longer life expectancies, there’s an increasing emphasis on not just living longer, but also maintaining health and wellbeing into older age. This study explores the efficacy of Ninjin’yoeito (NYT) in the early stages of frailty, a critical period for preventive interventions. Taking account of the knowledge gap regarding the association between early frailty and NYT, we use data from workplace health checkups to examine the relationship between pre-frailty severity and NYT adaption. The objective of our research is to enhance the comprehension of early treatments using NYT to prevent the progression of frailty. A total of 314 employees of the Kyoto Industrial Health Association who received workplace health checkups between November 2021 and March 2023 and consented to this study were included in the analysis. Information on gender, age, body mass index (BMI), NYT-specific symptoms assessment, the Japanese version of the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12), and the Kihon Checklist (KCL) were obtained. The correlation analysis revealed that there was a strong positive correlation between the number of applicable NYT indications and the GHQ-12 score (r = 0.5992, p < 0.0001). Similarly, a moderate positive correlation was observed between the number of applicable NYT indications and the KCL score (r = 0.5030, p < 0.0001). In the multivariate analysis, both GHQ-12 (β = 0.49, SE = 0.06, t = 7.66, 95% CI: 0.36 to 0.62, p = 0.000) and KCL (β = 0.54, SE = 0.12, t = 4.29, 95% CI: 0.29 to 0.79, p = 0.000) showed significant positive associations with the variance in the number of applicable NYT indications, indicating that higher scores on these measures were related to a greater number of indications. NYT has the potential to be utilized not only as a therapeutic intervention for frailty, but also as a preventive measure

Herbal Medicine Ninjin'yoeito in the Treatment of Sarcopenia and Frailty

Frailty and sarcopenia have recently gained considerable attention in terms of preventive care in Japan, which has an ever-increasing aging population. Sarcopenia is defined as atrophy of skeletal muscles caused by the age-related decrease in growth hormone/insulin-like growth factor and sex hormones. The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare reports that frailty can lead to impairment of both mental and physical functioning. Chronic diseases such as diabetes and dementia may underlie frailty. It is important to prevent progression of frailty and extend the healthy lifespan. In herbal medicine practice, including Japanese Kampo medicine, “Mibyo,” a presymptomatic state, has long been recognized and may be applicable to frailty. Kampo medicines may include several medicinal plants and are thought to have the potential to improve symptoms of frailty, such as loss of appetite and body weight, fatigue, and sarcopenia, as well as anxiety, depression, and cognitive decline. Ninjin'yoeito (Ren Shen Yang Ying Tang) is the most powerful Kampo medicine and has been widely applied to palliative care of cancer patients. This review includes recent anti-aging studies and describes the effects and mechanisms of Ninjin'yoeito (Ren Shen Yang Ying Tang) when used for frailty or to extend a healthy life expectancy

Comparison between single-muscle evaluation and cross-sectional area muscle evaluation for predicting the prognosis in patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma: a retrospective cohort study

IntroductionThe most effective method of assessing sarcopenia has yet to be determined, whether by single muscle or by whole muscle segmentation. The purpose of this study was to compare the prognostic value of these two methods using computed tomography (CT) images in patients with oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC).Materials and methodsSex- and age-adjusted Cox proportional hazards models were employed for each parameter of sarcopenia related to overall survival, disease-free survival, and disease-specific survival. Harrell’s concordance index was calculated for each model to assess discriminatory power.ResultsIn this study including 165 patients, a significant correlation was found between the CT-based assessment of individual muscles and their cross-sectional area. Single muscle assessments showed slightly higher discriminatory power in survival outcomes compared to whole muscle assessments, but the difference was not statistically significant, as indicated by overlapping confidence intervals for the C-index between assessments. To further validate our measurements, we classified patients into two groups based on intramuscular adipose tissue content (P-IMAC) of the spinous process muscle. Analysis showed that the higher the P-IMAC value, the poorer the survival outcome.ConclusionOur findings indicate a slight advantage of single-muscle over whole-muscle assessment in prognostic evaluation, but the difference between the two methods is not conclusive. Both assessment methods provide valuable prognostic information for patients with OSCC, and further studies involving larger, independent cohorts are needed to clarify the potential advantage of one method over the other in the prognostic assessment of sarcopenia in OSCC

カントの共和制の理念 : 18世紀末プロイセンの「理論と実践」論争を文脈として

学位の種別: 課程博士審査委員会委員 : （主査）東京大学教授 森 政稔, 東京大学教授 松原 隆一郎, 東京大学准教授 山本 芳久, 東京大学准教授 齋藤 渉, 早稲田大学教授 斎藤 純一University of Tokyo(東京大学