From plastic to peace: Overcoming public antipathy through environmental cooperation

Citizen distrust towards the rival country is a defining feature of protracted international rivalries, undermining meaningful cooperation that can lead to mutual benefits. How might governments establish a public opinion base that is more supportive of cooperation with the rival country? We argue that information about ongoing environmental cooperation with the rival country makes citizens more supportive of non-environmental cooperation by changing their beliefs about the rival’s trustworthiness and facilitating extrinsic reciprocity. We investigate this potential micro-level cooperation spillover in the context of the longstanding rivalry between Japan and South Korea. Our survey-based experiment finds that information about cooperation on marine plastic pollution shapes the public’s willingness to cooperate in terms of the economy and security. Importantly, however, we find asymmetric results in Japan and Korea. While Koreans are more receptive to our positive cooperation treatment, which increases their willingness to cooperate in other domains, Japanese respondents react more strongly to the negative non-cooperation treatment, which reduces their willingness to cooperate in other domains. We offer explanations for these divergent reactions based on prior interactions between the two countries. Our findings have important policy implications for conflict-ridden areas of the world beyond East Asia that increasingly face common environmental challenges

Does partisanship shape public support for suspending U.S. federal gas tax? A survey experiment

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the national average gasoline price in the U.S. rose sharply. In response, President Biden wanted Congress to temporarily suspend the 18.4 cents per gallon federal gasoline tax. However, critics pointed out that gas tax suspension could: (1) undermine U.S. climate policy goals by encouraging the use of gasoline cars, (2) threaten U.S. national security by providing additional oil revenue to the Russian government for expanding its military capabilities, and (3) undermine the economy by defunding federal highway infrastructure. To systematically test how these critiques influenced public support for gas tax suspension, we administered an online survey experiment in May 2022 to a representative sample of U.S. respondents (N = 1, 705). We found that in spite of high inflation during the months when the survey was conducted, in the aggregate, national security and the economy frames reduced public support for the gas tax suspension while the climate frame had no such effect. Yet, at the disaggregated level we find important partisan differences. When we interact treatment frames with respondents’ party identification, the national security and the economy frames reduced public support for the gas tax suspension among Republicans only, while the climate frame reduced public support among Democrats only

PyNET-CA: Enhanced PyNET with Channel Attention for End-to-End Mobile Image Signal Processing

Reconstructing RGB image from RAW data obtained with a mobile device is related to a number of image signal processing (ISP) tasks, such as demosaicing, denoising, etc. Deep neural networks have shown promising results over hand-crafted ISP algorithms on solving these tasks separately, or even replacing the whole reconstruction process with one model. Here, we propose PyNET-CA, an end-to-end mobile ISP deep learning algorithm for RAW to RGB reconstruction. The model enhances PyNET, a recently proposed state-of-the-art model for mobile ISP, and improve its performance with channel attention and subpixel reconstruction module. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method with comparative experiments and results from the AIM 2020 learned smartphone ISP challenge. The source code of our implementation is available at https://github.com/egyptdj/skyb-aim2020-publicComment: ECCV 2020 AIM workshop accepted versio

What condition realizes cooperation between countries?

本研究は独立行政法人日本学術振興会科研費（18KK0037、19H00582）の助成を受けたものである

国家間の「助け合い」はいかに実現できるか

第248回産業セミナ

Understanding the Formation and Evolution of Dark Galaxies in a Simulated Universe

We study the formation and evolution of dark galaxies using the IllustrisTNG cosmological hydrodynamical simulation. We first identify dark galaxies with stellar-to-total mass ratios, $M_* / M_{\text{tot}}$, smaller than $10^{-4}$, which differ from luminous galaxies with $M_* / M_{\text{tot}} \geq 10^{-4}$. We then select the galaxies with dark matter halo mass of $\sim 10^9 \, h^{-1}$$\rm M_{\odot}$ for mass completeness, and compare their physical properties with those of luminous galaxies. We find that at the present epoch ($z=0$), dark galaxies are predominantly located in void regions without star-forming gas. We also find that dark galaxies tend to have larger sizes and higher spin parameters than luminous galaxies. In the early universe, dark and luminous galaxies show small differences in the distributions of spin and local environment estimates, and the difference between the two samples becomes more significant as they evolve. Our results suggest that dark galaxies tend to be initially formed in less dense regions, and could not form stars because of heating from cosmic reionization and of few interactions and mergers with other systems containing stars unlike luminous galaxies. This study based on numerical simulations can provide important hints for validating dark galaxy candidates in observations and for constraining galaxy formation models.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Turning behaviors of T cells climbing up ramp-like structures are regulated by myosin light chain kinase activity and lamellipodia formation

T cells navigate diverse microenvironments to perform immune responses. Micro-scale topographical structures within the tissues, which may inherently exist in normal tissues or may be formed by inflammation or injury, can influence T cell migration, but how T cell migration is affected by such topographical structures have not been investigated. In this study, we fabricated ramp-like structures with a 5 mu m height and various slopes, and observed T cells climbing up the ramp-like structures. T cells encountering the ramp-like structures exhibited MLC accumulation near head-tail junctions contacting the ramp-like structures, and made turns to the direction perpendicular to the ramp-like structures. Pharmacological study revealed that lamellipodia formation mediated by arp2/3 and contractility regulated by myosin light chain kinase (MLCK) were responsible for the intriguing turning behavior of T cells climbing the ramp-like structures. Arp2/3 or MLCK inhibition substantially reduced probability of T cells climbing sharp-edged ramp-like structures, indicating intriguing turning behavior of T cells mediated by lamellipodia formation and MLCK activity may be important for T cells to access inflamed or injured tissues with abrupt topographical changes.11Ysciescopu