Inequality for equireplicated n-ary block designs with unequal block sizes

It is shown that certain inequalities known for binary, equireplicated, equiblock-sized block designs remain valid for equireplicated n-ary block designs with unequal block sizes. The approach used here is based on the spectral expansion of the C-matrix of the block design. The main theorems include some useful and combinatorially interesting results.     

日本农协物流设施的发展及对中国农民专业合作社的启示

二战后,日本农协的物流设施在机械化、规模化和技术高度化方面取得了巨大的成就,适应了消费者的周年消费需求,使农产品的规格化成为可能。日本农协物流设施建设的经验对中国发展合作社物流设施的启示是：政府要加大对合作社的物流软件、硬件设施的投入;加强合作社物流技术的研究;确立现代物流理念,培养合作社物流人才。     

日本农协的发展经验对中国农民专业合作社的启示

合作社与股份公司有很大的不同,合作社是社员出资,由社员来管理,社员享受合作社提供的服务的非营利组织.日本农协和中国农民专业合作社虽然有不同之处,但都是在遵守合作社原则的基础上依法成立、发展起来的农民组织,其发展、壮大的经验对中国农民专业合作社的发展有很好的借鉴意义.随着中国地区间农民收入差距的扩大.如何增加农民收入成为解决"三农"问题的关键.日本以青森县农协(农业协同组合的略称)为代表的农协发挥其优势增加农民收入,缓和地区间农民经济差距的经验,给予中国诸多启示.     

Optimal dispatching control of an AGV in a JIT production system

This paper deals with an FMS (Flexible Manufacturing System) in a JIT (Just-In-Time) production system. The FMS consists of m workstations, one dispatching station and a single AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle). Each workstation has an input buffer of limited capacity and its processing times are distributed stochastically. When the processing of a new component starts at the workstation, a withdrawal Kanban attached to it is sent to the dispatching station. The AGV chooses one from workstations whose withdrawal Kanbans are accumulated at the dispatching station, and conveys a component with a withdrawal Kanban from the dispatching station to the workstation. The main purpose of this paper is to find an optimal dispatching policy of the AGV that maximizes the long-run expected average reward per unit time. The problem is formulated as a semi-Markov decision process and an optimal dispatching policy is computed. Numerical experiments are performed to make several comparisons.     

Characterization of certain incomplete block designs

It is shown that certain inequalities known for partially balanced incomplete block (PBIB) designs remain valid for general incomplete block designs. Some conditions for attaining their bounds are also given. Furthermore, the various types of PBIB designs are characterized by relating blocks of designs with association schemes. The approach here is based on the spectral expansion of NN' for the incidence matrix N of an incomplete block design.     

Some bounds on balanced block designs

Bounds on the latest root of the C-matrix and the number of blocks for a variance-balanced block design are given. These results contain the well-known results as special cases.     

Association of bioavailable estradiol levels and testosterone levels with serum albumin levels in elderly men

Estrogens are reported to be the essential sex steroid acting on some male physiological functions, and bioavailable estrogens comprise the free and albumin-bound fractions. Moreover, most of the bioavailable sex steroid is made up of albumin-bound fraction. We examined the age-related change in serum free, albumin-bound and bioavailable estradiol levels in comparison with each fraction of testosterone and its relationship with serum albumin level in elderly men. Albumin-bound as well as bioavailable estradiol levels declined with age, and their decreases were associated much more with the decrease of albumin level than the increase of sex-hormone binding globulin (SHBG) level in sixties and seventies, and similar results were recognized in the level of each fraction of testosterone, suggesting albumin levels have an important role for maintaining bioavailable sex steroid levels in males aged over sixty. Moreover, our study showed that SHBG levels associated inversely with bioavailable sex steroid levels particularly when serum albumin level was low. It seems likely that the decrease of bioavailable estradiol as well as testosterone is induced by the decrease of albumin-bound fractions in combination with the increase of SHBG-bound fractions in males aged over sixty, and that their physical characteristics of aging could be induced by the decrease of albumin-bound fractions caused by the decrease of serum albumin regardless of total sex steroid levels.     

Socio-material arrangements of impoverished youth in Japan: historical and critical perspectives on neoliberalization

In the past decade, in Japan, a new light has been cast on youth poverty in the context of the middle-class impoverishment caused by the advance of neoliberalization. Thus, the socio-material arrangements, that is, the configuration of people and artifacts pertaining to poor Japanese children, was explored. The authors conducted a field survey in Tokyo’s Adachi Ward, where poverty and the problems it brings have become more serious, and then analyzed that data. In the analysis, we introduced a historical viewpoint to understand the changes in the socio-material arrangements of poor youth that have been brought about by neoliberalization.     

Dose Response for Infection by Escherichia coli O157:H7 from Outbreak Data

In 1996, an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7-associated illness occurred in an elementary school in Japan. This outbreak has been studied in unusual detail, making this an important case for quantitative risk assessment. The availability of stored samples of the contaminated food allowed reliable estimation of exposure to the pathogens. Collection of fecal samples allowed assessment of the numbers infected, including asymptomatic cases. Comparison to other published dose-response studies for E. coli O157:H7 show that the strain that caused the outbreak studied here must have been considerably more infectious. We use this well-documented incident as an example to demonstrate how such information on the response to a single dose can be used for dose-response assessment. In particular, we demonstrate how the high infectivity limits the uncertainty in the low-dose region.     

Redistribution to the less productive: parallel characterizations of the egalitarian Shapley and consensus values

Theory and Decision - In cooperative game theory with transferable utilities (TU games), there are two well-established ways of redistributing Shapley value payoffs: using egalitarian Shapley...