Fermi-liquid, non-Fermi-liquid, and Mott phases in iron pnictides and cuprates

The role of Coulomb correlations in the iron pnictide LaFeAsO is studied by generalizing exact diagonalization dynamical mean field theory to five orbitals. For rotationally invariant Hund's rule coupling a continuous transition from a paramagnetic Fermi-liquid phase to a non-Fermi-liquid metallic phase exhibiting frozen moments is found at moderate Coulomb energies. For Ising-like exchange, this transition is first order and occurs at a lower critical Coulomb energy. The correlation-induced scattering rate as a function of doping relative to half-filling, i.e., delta = n/5-1, where n=6 for the undoped material, is shown to be qualitatively similar to the one in the two-dimensional single-band Hubbard model. In this scenario, the parent Mott insulator of LaFeAsO is the half-filled n=5 limit, while the undoped n=6 material corresponds to the critical doping region delta_c ~ 0.2 in the cuprates, on the verge between the Fermi-liquid phase of the overdoped region and the non-Fermi-liquid pseudogap phase in the underdoped region.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures; published versio

UN FORUM SERIES – business and human rights progress in the Japanese context

This post was contributed by Hiroshi Ishida, Executive Director of the Caux Round Table Japan. Human Rights are universal, but acceptance should be based on each social context Human rights are universal and belong to every human being in every human society. However, the “Western” philosophic foundations of human rights are not universally accepted in the Asian region, especially in Japan

Stratification and attainment in a large Japanese firm

This paper investigate the attainment process in a large Japanese financial service company. Unlike firms in the U.S., hires into the "permanent" category of workers in a Japanese company tend to be homogeneous with regard to age of entry, (lack of) prior experience, education, and gender. This raises an issue of how, in such circumstances, a firm selects employees for advancement and what is the structure of the promotion process. It has been suggested that a formal description of the attainment process is conveyed by Rosenbaum's "tournament model of careers." We investigate whether this imagery is consistent with the data on careers in the firm, we conclude that such a model is not descriptive of the attainment process; rather advancement is more properly characterized as a "gatekeeping" operation (at an early career stage), followed by delayed selection of the eventual corporate elite

Decoding predicted musical notes from omitted stimulus potentials

Ishida K., Ishida T., Nittono H.. Decoding predicted musical notes from omitted stimulus potentials. Scientific Reports 14, 11164 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-61989-1.Electrophysiological studies have investigated predictive processing in music by examining event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by the violation of musical expectations. While several studies have reported that the predictability of stimuli can modulate the amplitude of ERPs, it is unclear how specific the representation of the expected note is. The present study addressed this issue by recording the omitted stimulus potentials (OSPs) to avoid contamination of bottom-up sensory processing with top-down predictive processing. Decoding of the omitted content was attempted using a support vector machine, which is a type of machine learning. ERP responses to the omission of four target notes (E, F, A, and C) at the same position in familiar and unfamiliar melodies were recorded from 25 participants. The results showed that the omission N1 were larger in the familiar melody condition than in the unfamiliar melody condition. The decoding accuracy of the four omitted notes was significantly higher in the familiar melody condition than in the unfamiliar melody condition. These results suggest that the OSPs contain discriminable predictive information, and the higher the predictability, the more the specific representation of the expected note is generated

Contemporary Significances of Export Processing Zone in Taiwan

本稿は、台湾における輸出加工区(加工出口区)の現代的な意義について考察したものである。1960年代の台湾は経済がまだ未発展で、工業化資金が不足しており、唯一の比較優位は安価で豊富な労働力の存在であった。そこで、政府は1966年に初めて高雄に輸出加工区を建設し、さらに南梓と台中にも建設して外資を導入し、労働集約的輸出加工業を発展させた。その結果、1970年代～1980年代前半には輸出が拡大し、急速な経済成長を遂げた。しかし、1985年のプラザ合意以後は労働集約的輸出加工業は国際競争力を失い、東南アジアに生産拠点をシフトさせ、1987年の戒厳令解除後には積極的に中国にシフトさせることになった。つまり、1980年代後半に入ると、安価で豊富な労働力という比較優位を基礎にした輸出加工区はその役割を終えたように思われるが、現在に至るも輸出加工区は行政院経済部の管轄として存在し、各種の政策が打ち出されている。果して、輸出加工区の現在的意義はどこにあるのか、本稿はこの点について考察した