A Practical Teacher–Robot Collaboration Lesson Application Based on PRINTEPS

To support elementary school teachers in teaching by encouraging active learning while maintaining the interest of pupils, this study focuses on supporting teaching, learning, and monitoring the progress of students through a Teacher–Robot collaboration lesson application using not only laptops and tablets, but also robots and sensors. Since developing a lesson application is time consuming for teachers, we have developed an integrated intelligent application development platform named PRactical INTElligent aPplicationS (PRINTEPS) to aid Teacher–Robot collaboration. However, several functions and interfaces for education are missing. Therefore, in this study, we extend several functions for education to PRINTEPS. In addition, since it is necessary in learning and monitoring the progress of students to present learning content suitable to each pupil’s level of understanding, we also have provided support through the use of a tablet quiz system based on ontologies and rule bases. In the case study, we developed a Teacher–Robot collaboration lesson application and conducted lessons for sixth-grade pupils at an elementary school. From the case study, we have confirmed the effectiveness of our platform and the application.     

创投抢滩中关村

活跃在中关村的100多家创投机构,管理的资金规模多达200多亿美元。近5年来．中关村地区发生的投资案例和投资金额均占全国的1／3左右。创投的进入为中关村孵化期和发展期的企业提供了发展的机遇。在2010年中关村新上市的39家公司中就有33家获得过创投的支持。     

创业投资引领战略性新兴产业发展潮流

国务院批复中关村建设国家自主创新示范区以来，中关村上市公司总数已达209家。近几年，中关村新增的上市公司中，75％以上均获得过创业投资的支持。2010年中关村新增上市公司40家，其中34家曾获创业投资支持；2011年中关村新增上市公司26家，其中16家获得创业投资支持。创业投资在支持示范区企业走向资本市场和做强做大方面已发挥重要作用。     

美髯公传奇：将汽车节能进行到底

美髯公朱荣辉博士发明的液混动力无级变速器技术,可用相当于自动变速器的成本使汽车综合油耗降低15%。如果这项技术能在全国推广应用,一亿多辆车一年节省的油钱就是2000多亿,相当于一年省出一个三峡工程!     

中国不能成为跨国企业污染的天堂

发生在去年的墨西哥湾漏油事故,9天后．美国当局及司法系统就开始全面介入事态进展,并成立了总统委员会对漏油事故进行调查。反观康菲污染事件．至今为止,也没见到重大实质处罚措施。     

启迪创新研究院为中国城市创新创业环境“体检”——《中国城市创新创业环境排行榜》子榜发布

清华大学启迪创新研究院通过“政、产、学、研、金、介、贸、媒”等软硬环境指标对GDP过千亿、人均GDP排名前100的城市进行创新创业环境对比分析。以期为区域政府完善创新创业环境提供借鉴和参考。     

Facebook Content Strategies and Citizens’ Online Engagement: The Case of Greek Local Governments

This paper analyzes the communication strategies used by Greek local governments through the utilization of Web 2.0 technologies, specifically Facebook, and the effectiveness of these strategies in relation to citizens’ online engagement. More specifically, it examines Facebook communication strategies and levels of citizens’ engagement. For this purpose, we conducted a content analysis on the active and official Facebook pages of local municipalities in Greece from January 2017 until the end of September 2017. Our results suggest a rise in the percentage of active Facebook pages maintained by local governments in comparison to our 2014 study. Our results also show that local governments in Greece are using Facebook in a predominantly top-down manner to promote events organized by the municipality and to push one-way information to citizens about their services and actions. Local authorities have, however, made significant progress in relation to posts that support transparency and accountability and that enhance or mobilize citizens’ participation. Our evaluation of local government Facebook strategies indicates that marketing the municipality to external public, such as tourists, and providing information about services are effective strategies that drive citizens’ online attitude expression (liking), engagement (commenting), and advocacy behavior (sharing). According to our analysis, local governments in Greece prefer the strategies that we found to be the least engaging. In addition, our study provides interesting details of how specific characteristics and modes of Facebook messages (photos, videos, URLs, hashtags, and mentions) impact on citizens’ engagement. Finally, our results provide valuable insights for social media managers in local government who aim to increase the impact of their municipal Facebook pages.     

The Effects of Proposals for Basic Pension Reform on the Income Distribution of the Elderly in Japan

The aging of the population in Japan is a serious problem, and the reform of the public pension scheme is a major political issue. Although the 2004 pension reform was enforced to ensure a sustainable pension system in such an aging society, people remain quite apprehensive about the pension system. Consequently, various sectors have created new proposals for pension reform to overcome these problems, and it has become a recent policy debate. The objective of this article is to prepare projections for the income distribution of households containing elderly people using the Japanese microsimulation model, INAHSIM (Integrated Analytical Model for Household Simulation), and to evaluate the effect of the proposals on the living standards of the elderly. According to the simulation results, the problem of very low pension amounts for the elderly does not appear to be growing. However, changes in co-resident families of the elderly, such as the increase in the number of people living alone, may cause a decline in their standard of living. The author points out the problems of the previously proposed reform plans and proposes an alternative reform plan based on the perspective used in this paper.     

Correlation and Regression Analysis for Characterizations of a University Hospital

One of the most important issues in hospital management is how to determine the indicators for revenue of a large-scale hospital. Although it has been pointed out that the averaged value of length of stay in a hospital is an indicator of its revenue, quantitative evaluation has not been conducted. In this paper, we propose an analytic process based on methods for correlation and regression analysis to evaluate this indicator by using stored data in hospital information systems. We applied this method to data combined with discharge summaries and medical treatment fees, collected from 1997 to 2000 in Chiba University Hospital. The result shows that the length of stay can explain around 60-90% of the revenue during this period.     

Sales Strategy Mining Support with Visualization of Moving History

Strategic usage in data mining of sales data has come under increased focus as a result of the growth of data mining studies using electrical data, such as Point of Sale (POS) data. However, many of these mining systems only output results such as frequently appearing patterns, while, instead, they should be aimed at people who mine data. In this paper, a framework for leading and supporting new ideas from data is introduced. Based on this framework, a system that supports strategic usage in the data mining of sales data is proposed. The system deals not only with POS data, but also with the moving history of each customer. The system visualizes POS and moving history data, so that an analyzer inputs conditions to narrow down customers and acquires customer features. In addition to the ordinal outputs of a mining system, the analyzer interprets the meaning of his/her input and output to create a new strategy based on the framework. According to the experimental results, new strategies derived from the moving history were created.     

万宇怦“小天王”

北京市昌平区中关村生命科学园,一栋6层高的企业独栋办公楼里,万字平每天穿梭在办公室与实验室之间,未见他有停下来的时候。     

Social Network Rebuilder: A Tool to Estimate a Social Network of Financial Crisis Propagation

The objective of this paper is to find a new method to estimate real social networks based on observed data collected by questionnaire surveys. Studies on social networks have been increasing in order to analyze social phenomena from a micro viewpoint. Most social phenomena can be explained by micro-level interactions among people. Spread of rumor and pandemics are typical example of micro interaction? However, there has not been much work on an analysis of real social networks based on observed data. This study tries to establish a methodology that exploits a genetic algorithm to rebuild a social network based on the data observed indirectly from real social networks. This paper introduces our proposed method, which allows us to rebuild a social network to some extent from degree distributions of a target real social network.     

An Emergency Evacuation Planning Model Using the Universally Quickest Flow

In recent years, catastrophic disasters by massive earthquakes have been increasing in the world, and disaster management is required more than ever. In the case of disasters such as tsunamis, a slight delay in evacuation may deprive evacuees of life. In this article, we formalize the emergency evacuation planning model for evacuation from tsunamis and other disasters based on the idea of the universally quickest flow. We show that there does not always exist a universally quickest flow when the capacity constraint of refuges is taken into account. Therefore, we propose an alternative criterion that approximates a universally quickest flow, and presents an algorithm for finding an optimal flow for this criterion. Numerical experiments are carried out for the evacuation of a local city in Japan where tsunami damages are assumed to occur when a large earthquake occurs in the ocean nearby.     

Married Women’s Lifestyles in Japan: Disparities Based on the Number of Children

In order to explore the complex mechanisms of married women’s decisions in matters of childbirth, we studied empirically the relations between family size and aspects of lifestyle through a questionnaire survey administered in 2006 to married women living in the city of Suita, Japan, a suburb of Osaka. Lifestyle was taken as a complex of mutual relationships among individual (biographical, psychological) and social (socioeconomic, social support) factors, and our aim was to clarify differences in Japan in lifestyle among married women based on the number of their children. Analysis of 495 respondents showed mothers with only a single child were more self-reliant: they tend to give birth at a late age, enjoy cooperation with their husbands in family finances, be psychologically at ease, and not seek help from others in child rearing. Mothers with three or more children embody more of the traditional role for Japanese women: they tend to give birth at an early age, be reliant on their husbands financially, be less at ease psychologically, and seek others’ help in child rearing. These differences suggest that more focus on psychological, not just economic support in government policy to counteract declining fertility is an important issue for future consideration.     

Impact of Online Customer Reviews on Sales Outcomes: An Empirical Study Based on Prospect Theory

This study examines the influence of the valence of online customer reviews on sales outcomes based on prospect theory. Numerous studies have revealed the importance of customer reviews in online marketing. However, only few studies have explored the impact of online customer reviews on sales outcomes in the dynamic process. Prior studies in behavioral economics literature have indicated that people differently value gains and losses and that losses have more emotional impact than an equivalent amount of gains. This study verifies whether prospect theory applies to the relation between online customer reviews and sales outcomes. Relevant data were collected from Amazon.co.jp, and three statistical models were employed to investigate the relation between the two factors. Major findings confirm that negative customer reviews considerably impact online sales than positive reviews. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the marginal effects of positive and negative reviews decrease with the increase in their volume. The results of this study will enable marketers to compare the relative sales effects of different types of customer reviews and improve the effectiveness of customer service management.     

Parallel Consultant-Guided Search with Crossover

Consultant-guided search (CGS) is a recent metaheuristic method. This approach is an algorithm in which a virtual person called a client creates a solution based on consultation with a virtual person called a consultant. In this study, we propose a parallel CGS algorithm with a genetic algorithm’s crossover and selection, and calculate an approximation solution for the traveling salesman problem. We execute a computer experiment using the benchmark problems (TSPLIB). Our algorithm provides a solution with less than 3.3% error rate for problem instances using less than 6000 cities.     

Are Depositors Aware of the Governance of their Banks?1

In the discussion of corporate governance from the standpoint of economists, it is common for economists to pay more attention to the stockholders of a corporation (as stakeholders) than to the creditors. However, the behaviors of depositors as creditors should not be neglected in the management of banking institutions. The purpose of this paper is to analyze statistically the decision factors of depositors in opening an account at a particular bank with respect to corporate governance variables. My result shows that depositors with risk aversion consider banks well managed based on the following: a lower rate of external auditors, a longer time of service by the bank’s president, and the existence of a simultaneous promotion system of the bank’s president and chairperson.     

Prediction Model for Bollywood Movie Success: A Comparative Analysis of Performance of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms

The main purpose of this paper is to do a comparative analysis of prediction models using various machine learning techniques. The models will be used to predict whether a movie will be a hit or flop before it is actually released. The techniques used for comparisons are decision tree, random forest (RF), support vector machine, logistics regression, adaptive tree boosting, and artificial neural network algorithms. The major predictors used in the models are the ratings of the lead actor, IMDb ranking of a movie, music rank of the movie, and total number of screens planned for the release of a movie. The results of most models indicated a reasonable accuracy, ranging from 80 to 90%. However, models based on two techniques, RF and logistic regression, achieved an accuracy of 92%. From the results, the most important predictors of a movie’s success are music rating, followed by its IMDb rating and total screens used for release.

     

Agent-based simulation approach for disaster rescue using active RFID

After the 2004 earthquake in Japan’sNiigata Prefecture, there were many difficulties finding the victims. The earthquake caused a wired network disconnection. In addition, fixed-phone and cell-phone service systems crashed due to the rapid increase in the volume of communications. The systems’ collapse was due to the large number of users who were worried about the safety of their relatives. The same situation happened during Hurricane Katrina in the USA. Reflecting on these situations, the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is trying to adopt several methods to correct these communications problems. Although these methods have not been disclosed precisely yet, we think that a predominant goal of one of the methods is most likely to find victims using RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification) with computer sensors. To do this, the RFID method would have to be incorporated in the following ways: 1) by scattering sensor devices from helicopters when a large-scale disaster such as an earthquake occurs, 2) by making RFIDs self-organized into a network, and 3) by making the self-organized network pinpoint the position of victims. A certain amount of field-testing may be necessary to confirm the effects of this plan. However, such testing requires a great amount of time and high costs. Therefore, we adopt an agent-based simulation for such a test. In this paper, we pay specific attention to a simple and assured algorithm for discovering victims using RFIDs. First, we explain our method to confirm the location of victims. Second, we explain our method for pinpointing the position of victims using trilateration. Finally, we present our simulation results.