Enabling children’s deliberation in deliberative systems: schools as a mediating space

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in conceptualising schools beyond their educational functions, as sites and agents of democracy. Yet this interest is often underpinned by a narrow conception of democracy, focusing solely on schools’ public and social aspects. To capture the democratic potential of schools more fully, this article suggests adopting a deliberative systems approach, which conceptualises democracy as differentiated yet linked sites of democratic communications and views schools as one such site. Using this approach as a broader framework and drawing on the fieldwork conducted in two Japanese schools, this article identifies the condition under which schools can become a meaningful part of deliberative systems. It reveals that schools contribute to deliberative systems when they serve as a bridge between children’s everyday practices and deliberative actions in the public space. In light of the findings, this article suggests conceptualising schools as a ‘mediating space’.     

互联网+“国际双师教学”:促进高等教育国际化发展的新途径

随着中国建设世界一流大学和一流学科的“双一流”水平的不断提高,国际化已经成为中国高等教育的发展战略之一。实现高等教育的国际化,必然需要具有先进的国际教育理念、共享优质的国际教育资源、引进先进的国际课程和高水平的外籍师资。在对中国国内互联网+“双师教学”进行追溯和分析的基础上,提出了互联网+“国际双师教学”这一新的教育模式,旨在期待其可以成为有效促进中国高等教育国际化发展的新途径。     

Coaching für japanische Migranten in Deutschland

Compared to other minority groups, Japanese migrants in Germany are regarded as privileged and homogeneous. The author argues against the stereotype of homogeneity and closely analyses this particular migrant group and its situational, heterogeneous necessities and objectives which motivate the use of diverse coaching methods. In addition, the author discusses traditional hierarchical values in the home culture which tends to project a role model in a coach. The mixture of Japanese migrants’ heterogeneous needs in coaching and their hierarchically homogeneous values cannot be adequately addressed by the application of conventional coaching methods in Germany.     

Using the community of inquiry for interviewing children: theory and practice

Involvement of children in research processes requires various ethical considerations. In particular, while interviewing children, a researcher needs to take into consideration the power imbalance between a researcher and children as well as among children. This article suggests a possible way of mitigating potential risks, drawing on the idea and practice of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) as an interview method. CoI is the practice of group dialog for knowledge-making, where participants talk about a common topic by sharing their lived experiences in a cooperative manner. This article shows that CoI allows children to act as both interviewers and interviewees, which helps children in reflective knowledge-making while at the same time mitigating the ethical concerns of interviewing. To illustrate how CoI can help achieve these goals, this article draws on the empirical research conducted with a group of junior high school students in Japan.     

On the level probabilities for useful partially ordered alternatives in the analysis of variance

In the analysis of variance, we often encounter situations in which we want to test the null hypothesis of homogeneity of the normal means against various partially ordered alternative hypotheses. We study likelihood ratio tests for three useful types of alternatives: d-star, bipartite and broom tree. Especially, we give computational formulas for the level probabilities of the alternative types. The results permit us to obtain critical values for practical use.     

Bootstrap estimation and model selection for multivariate normal mixtures using parallel computing with graphics processing units

In applications of multivariate finite mixture models, estimating the number of unknown components is often difficult. We propose a bootstrap information criterion, whereby we calculate the expected log-likelihood at maximum a posteriori estimates for model selection. Accurate estimation using the bootstrap requires a large number of bootstrap replicates. We accelerate this computation by employing parallel processing with graphics processing units (GPUs) on the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) platform. We conducted a runtime comparison of CUDA algorithms between implementation on the GPU and that on a CPU. The results showed significant performance gains in the proposed CUDA algorithms over multithread CPUs.     

On least-squares bias in the AR(p) models: Bias correction using the bootstrap methods

In the case where the lagged dependent variables are included in the regression model, it is known that the ordinary least squares estimates (OLSE) are biased in small sample and that the bias increases as the number of the irrelevant variables increases. In this paper, based on the bootstrap methods, an attempt is made to obtain the unbiased estimates in autoregressive and non-Gaussian cases. We propose the residual-based bootstrap method in this paper. Some simulation studies are performed to examine whether the proposed estimation procedure works well or not. We obtain the results that it is possible to recover the true parameter values and that the proposed procedure gives us the less biased estimators than OLSE. This paper is a substantial revision of Tanizaki (2000). The normality assumption is adopted in Tanizaki (2000), but it is not required in this paper. The authors are grateful to an anonymous referee for valuable suggestions and comments. This research was partially supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)(2) #14530033, 2002–2005, for H. Tanizaki and Grants-in-Aid for the 21st Century COE Program.     

Testing linear hypotheses of mean vectors for high-dimension data with unequal covariance matrices

We propose a new test procedure for testing linear hypothesis on the mean vectors of normal populations with unequal covariance matrices when the dimensionality, p exceeds the sample size N  , i.e. p/N→c<∞$p/N\to c<\infty$. Our procedure is based on the Dempster trace criterion and is shown to be consistent in high dimensions.