南存辉：致富思源富而思进热心公益

我在《民营经济内参》上读过南存辉先生《商人在温州很幸福》的文章,为他那淡定又充满激情的心态所感动。想起他讲过的一句话:"致富思源,富而思进,热心公益。"     

翰墨痕裡書卷香——讀戴静波作品随想

（一）经好友胡振兴先生介绍,结识了戴静波先生,他是中国书法家协会会员、书法篆刻家、毕业于南京艺术学院,因久慕宜兴紫砂,而于去年客居宜兴与紫砂结缘,专事创作。他给我的第一印象是朴实,不故作斯文。到他的创作室一看,增加了一个印象,他勤奋。如果只吹牛,不勤于笔耕,不会让你看到这么多的作品。细品他的书法和篆刻以及在紫砂陶上的创作,又再帮他加了一个印象分——有灵气。最近他把一些作品结集,付梓前送我一阅,叫我提点意见,我很感动。     

张虎：大字小字 自成一家

接到采访张虎先生的任务，我一边欣喜，一边心有惴惴。欣喜，因为他是一位颇负盛名的书法家；惴惴则为他不仅是位艺术家，还是著名的作家和新闻界的前辈。在网络上输入张虎的名字，你会看到诸如沈鹏、欧豪年、冯骥才等名家对他的评述，这让我担心自己的拙笔相形逊色。     

梁漱溟：读死书，死读书，读书死

金秋时节好读书。在国庆长假期间,我拜读了两部关于梁漱溟先生的著作:一部是《梁漱溟读书生涯》,一部是《国学大师丛书·梁漱溟评传》。有人称梁漱溟先生是中国历史上的“最后一个儒家”,窃以为言之过早了。时下的国学热中,不乏儒学的追捧者,也不乏可以称为“大儒”的学者。梁漱溟先生高寿九十有六,他的漫长人生旅途,饱经沧桑,几经多事之秋,不论是“城头变幻大王旗”,还是“喜看稻黍千重浪”,梁先生始终有一颗忧国忧民之心。先生“特立独行”的一生,有一个最大的特点,那就是始终与书为伴,在卷帙浩繁的“故纸堆”中追求他的理想世界。梁先生…     

献身漫苑尽芳华——读缪印堂《我的漫画生活》札记

上世纪末的秋天,我有幸和著名漫画家缪印堂先生同游西欧六国,在法国塞纳河的游船上,在沿着亚平宁山脉驰往意大利佛罗伦萨的大巴上,我不断聆听着大师在人生旅程中的奋斗和追求,让我怀着对他的深深敬意感晤着漫画艺术的真谛。最近读到了五洲传播出版社由缪印堂先生著作的《我的漫画生活》一书,又让我兴奋不已,使我重温了他从艺的心迹。缪老是一位热爱生命、热爱生活,人生很有价值且有诸多贡献的著名漫画家,他充实的一生令人仰望,令人尊敬。透过一幅幅精湛的漫作和字里行间娓娓道来的真情,我们仿佛看到一棵枝头挂满了硕果的大树,成熟的果实沉甸…     

林毅夫的“归去来辞”充满爱国激情

著名经济学家林毅夫教授,结束了在“世行”任职高级副行长兼首席经济学家的工作回到祖国。我先是拜读了他在北大国家发展研究院“欢迎林毅夫座谈会”上的讲话,他“温和地坚持”己见。令人十分感动。这让我想起陶渊明先生那篇传世的《归去来辞》——这是一部“不肯为五斗米折腰”的抒愤懑之作,其不肯“同流合污”的积极暨“乐天知命”的消极,影响了诸多的知识分子。日前,又读到林先生与新华社记者的对话。激情满怀,是一篇充满爱国热情的新“归去来辞”。     

铁板高吭唱大歌——读王宏甲报告文学作品感言

大约是在2002年的仲夏,经老朋友作家哲愚先生的介绍,我结识了海淀文联主席卫汉青同志,他正忙着创办《中关村》杂志。汉青是个热情洋溢、精力充沛的诗人作家,又是一位思想开阔、极具事业心的领导干部。汉青当即送我几本新书,多是他近年创作的诗歌和散文作品的结集;其中还有一部军旅作家王宏甲的《智慧风暴》。王宏甲这个名字我十分熟悉,早在10年前,我读过他的长篇报告文学《无极之路》,被深深的感动,还生发了一段难以忘怀的故事。“榜样的力量是无穷的”——这是河南兰考县委书记焦裕禄说过的话。我在一次讲党课时,用《无极之路》中的河北无…     

偿愿驻跸山

我在研究海淀区的山川旅游和园林发展的过程中,非常重视金章宗完颜璩开拓者的重要地位。他作为一个少数民族的皇帝,不但在政治上取得了重大成就,在文化建设上也卓有建树。他酷爱山水,连“字”也以山称呼。他小字“麻达葛”,因为他出生于金莲川麻达葛山。他从小爱山,即皇帝位后本性得以弘扬。他住在金中都城,足迹踏遍了西山处处美景。他在香山建会景楼和祭星台,在玉泉山建芙蓉殿行宫,     

叶培贵：奔跑在书法的路上

他温和谦逊。他说自己是个笨人,就是老实写字,因为笨人不敢出格。他把自己多部著作当作日记,“本质上都是学习笔记。”。他谦虚地说。我和我的字一样,仍在路上,所以不敢说有什么代表作。他谨记恩师欧阳中石先生的话：“社会每时每刻都在给每个人打分,它是公平的。历史也是公平的。”     

中国新乡村画家郭文松

绘画生涯中的创新之举郭文松先生向我谈起他的绘画历程,是从1988年开始。那一年他从西安美院大学毕业后回到河南,决定在“牡丹之乡”洛阳开辟出中国乡村人物写实画之路。很多朋友都对他的发展前景不看好,     

Facebook e-Portfolios for Career Education Focused on Japanese Employment Practice: A Case Study

The authors propose the effectiveness of Facebook functions in the promotion of career education. In recent years, career education in Japanese universities has differed slightly from that in other countries. Japanese students are trained to be competitive in the job-hunting process; they need to obtain the technical skills and knowledge necessary to pass a company entrance examination or a university oral interview. This practice is in stark contrast with the intrinsic meaning of vocational/career education, which is the process by which students acquire the abilities and independence required by a certain industry. This meaning is manifested in the purpose of the career education program of Hokkai-Gakuen University’s Faculty of Business Administration. The program’s purpose is to foster independence in its students rather than the acquisition of skills for the job-hunting process. The professional independence of every student is important to their career development after graduating from the university. On the other hand, it is known that e-portfolios generally encourage students to record and assess their activities. To promote the activities that students tackle in the program, we introduced an e-portfolio using Facebook. This study shows the characteristics and achievements of our e-portfolio.     

Contributions of Econometrics to Public Policy Analysis in the Information Age

In this paper we model U.S. economic growth over the next 25 years. Despite the anticipated aging of the population, moderate population growth will provide growing supplies of labor well into the 21st century. Improvements in labor quality due to education and experience will also continue for some time, but will eventually disappear. Productivity growth for the U.S. economy will be below long-term historical averages, but labor-using technical change will be a stimulus for growth of labor demand. Year-to-year changes in economic activity will be primarily the consequence of capital accumulation. However, the driving forces of economic growth over the long term will be demography and technology. This is a revised version of the keynote speech that I delivered on 16 January 2009 at the 6th International Conference of Socionetwork Strategies, at Kansai University, Japan.     

Subcontracting Structure and Productivity in the Japanese Software Industry

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors determining the productivity of the software industry in Japan, using individual data from the Survey of the State of the Information Service Industry conducted in August 2006 by IPA (Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan). This paper focuses on the relationship between the subcontracting structure and productivity in the Japanese software industry. Software enterprises are classified as prime contractors, intermediate subcontractors, end-contractors, and independent enterprise. A comparison of their productivity levels reveals that intermediate subcontractors are the least productive. However, it is observed that the intermediate subcontractors possessing a high quality of human resources measured the proportion of employees passing the Information Technology Engineers Examination (ITEE), or the intermediate subcontractors adopting the IT skill standard which defines the skills for IT human resources clearly and systematically, has a high productivity level. It can raise the productivity in software industry as a whole.     

Graph-Based Entropy for Detecting Explanatory Signs of Changes in Market

Graph-based entropy, an index of the diversity of events in their distribution to parts of a co-occurrence graph, is proposed for detecting signs of structural changes in the data that are informative in explaining latent dynamics of consumers’ behavior. For obtaining graph-based entropy, connected sub-graphs are first obtained from the graph of co-occurrences of items in the data. Then, the distribution of items occurring in events in the data to these sub-graphs is reflected on the value of graph-based entropy. For the data on the position of sale, a change in this value is regarded as a sign of the appearance, the separation, the disappearance, or the uniting of consumers’ interests. These phenomena are regarded as the signs of dynamic changes in consumers’ behavior that may be the effects of external events and information. Experiments show that graph-based entropy outperforms baseline methods that can be used for change detection, in explaining substantial changes and their signs in consumers’ preference of items in supermarket stores.     

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.     

The Future of Socionetwork Strategies

In the first stage of creating technological improvements for a democratic society, the leaders of the Society of Socionetwork Strategies have conducted statistical research on the effect of information and communication technology on the global economy. In the second stage, younger professors, based on their Positive Studies, have leapt into a multi-agent simulation of Grid Computing. In the third stage, a terra-bite scale of social data-collecting and the mining of large-scale data in our real world will be next. The next generation of scientists will share knowledge and intellectual inquiry in the fields of statistics, mathematics, and the social sciences with the help of computers connecting such scholars from all over the world.     

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.     

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.     

Globalization of Information Services and the Industrial Structure of the Japanese Economy

Since the late 1990s, ICT has rebuilt organizational networks by connecting value chains and providing communication networks. This made certain types of services tradable, including information services. This change raised the public concern in terms of the effect on employment and innovation capacity in developed economies. The fragmentation of the production network of information services has been led by US firms, but is spreading to East Asia, typically in outsourcing from Japan to China, India and the ASEAN countries. This study empirically assesses the effect of offshore outsourcing on employment in Japan, specifying trading partners. The results show that information services outsourcing affects employment in the manufacturing sector in Japan, but the effect is different depending on trading partners. This study discusses the implications from the viewpoint of industry policy, relating the results to outsourced business processes.     

The Role of Cross-Border Networks of Skilled Labor in Offshore Outsourcing: Empirical Evidence Based on the Network Theory

This study investigates the determinant role of the cross-border movement of skilled labor in the expansion of service trade between the US, and both developed and developing countries. For this purpose, we employ the key concepts of network theory as an analytical framework and conduct panel data analysis and graphical modeling analysis for 31 countries from 1999 to 2008. In this decade, offshore outsourcing in the service trade took off worldwide. We use data for each country’s service exports to the US, number of H-1B visas issued, GNI per-capita, network readiness index, and an English dummy for the official language. We illustrate the trajectory and interactions between these factors. These analyses yield three observations. First, service trade with the US is more intensive among higher income countries. Second, the number of H-1B visas issued has a positive effect on service exports to the US. Third, individuals in lower income countries tend to desire H-1B visas and create intensive skilled labor networks with the US, the path through which developing countries such as India expanded their service exports to the US.