Women writers and feminist consciousness in early twentieth-century Japan

This article is a slightly revised version of an article that appeared in the journalWaseda Shōgaku (Waseda Commercial Review) no. 335, July 1990.     

Family Background and the Process of Ability Formation*

This paper takes a sociometric approach to the process of skills formation in children as they mature into adults. Honda suggests that meaningful communication with family as a child is the determining factor that raises those abilities (ability β ¹ ) that fall outside of scholastic aptitude – motivation, personal relations skills, personality, and emotions. Along with considering the results of Honda's thesis, I have constructed an operating hypothetic model that includes two additional factors: the financial state of the family during childhood, and the transition of the communication target from within the family to a target outside the family. The data for this investigation were then verified. From the results, the direct effect of the observed family communication, when isolated from other influencing variables in the formation of abilities β, is not as decisive a factor as Honda emphasized. It was clear that the financial status of the family played a role, as did the indirect results of the intermediary shift from communication within the family to outside the family (the process of children becoming socially independent). The results of this analysis show that we should not necessarily be looking for the decisive factors of abilities β within the family; if anything, it reflects the existence of a formative route for abilities β that capitalizes on the resources outside the family. Based on the above, the results also show the potential for the introduction of social intervention to address the disparity and inequality in skills formation, and the possible anticipation of more rationality in the overblown discourse surrounding the role of the family in facilitating educational ability.     

Development of the workflow kine systems for support on KAIZEN

In this paper, we introduce the new workflow line system consisted of the location and image recording, which led to the acquisition of workflow information and the analysis display. From the results of workflow line investigation, we considered the anticipated effects and the problems on KAIZEN. Workflow line information included the location information and action contents information. These technologies suggest the viewpoints to help improvement, for example, exclusion of useless movement, the redesign of layout and the review of work procedure. Manufacturing factory, it was clear that there was much movement from the standard operation place and accumulation residence time. The following was shown as a result of this investigation, to be concrete, the efficient layout was suggested by this system. In the case of the hospital, similarly, it is pointed out that the workflow has the problem of layout and setup operations based on the effective movement pattern of the experts. This system could adapt to routine work, including as well as non-routine work. By the development of this system which can fit and adapt to industrial diversification, more effective "visual management" (visualization of work) is expected in the future.     

A simulation study of methods for selecting subgroup‐specific doses in phase 1 trials

Patient heterogeneity may complicate dose‐finding in phase 1 clinical trials if the dose‐toxicity curves differ between subgroups. Conducting separate trials within subgroups may lead to infeasibly small sample sizes in subgroups having low prevalence. Alternatively,it is not obvious how to conduct a single trial while accounting for heterogeneity. To address this problem,we consider a generalization of the continual reassessment method on the basis of a hierarchical Bayesian dose‐toxicity model that borrows strength between subgroups under the assumption that the subgroups are exchangeable. We evaluate a design using this model that includes subgroup‐specific dose selection and safety rules. A simulation study is presented that includes comparison of this method to 3 alternative approaches,on the basis of nonhierarchical models,that make different types of assumptions about within‐subgroup dose‐toxicity curves. The simulations show that the hierarchical model‐based method is recommended in settings where the dose‐toxicity curves are exchangeable between subgroups. We present practical guidelines for application and provide computer programs for trial simulation and conduct.     

Breastfeeding practices and parental employment in Japan

Much research shows that breastfeeding provides short- and long-term health benefits for both mothers and their children. However, few studies have yet investigated the factors which may promote or inhibit breastfeeding practices in Japan. To fill this research gap, this paper uses data newly gathered in 2012 on breastfeeding initiation and duration for each child of each mother, which enable us to estimate mother fixed-effects models that control for unobserved differences among mothers. Compared to mothers who leave their jobs after childbirth, mothers who return to work within a year after childbirth do not significantly differ in breastfeeding initiation but have a breastfeeding duration which is shorter by 1.654 months. On the other hand, when fathers work under a flextime system after childbirth, breastfeeding initiation is higher, and the duration is longer by 4.418 months. Therefore, letting fathers work under a flextime system would help promote breastfeeding practices in Japan.     

Application of an adaptive design to a randomized phase II selection trial in gastric cancer: a report of the study design

Randomized phase II selection trials seek to provide unbiased comparisons for the selection of the most promising treatment arm for evaluation in a future phase III trial. In this paper, we present an application of an adaptive design to a randomized phase II selection trial comparing three experimental treatments with a control arm in patients with advanced gastric cancer. The trial design continuously monitors multiple patient outcomes to protect future patients from treatments with unacceptably high toxicity and/or unacceptably low efficacy. We use a Bayesian approach to monitor the trial and carry out simulations to investigate operating characteristics of the trial design. The simulation study also evaluates the sensitivity of the design to the prior distribution by considering two alternative priors.     

Influence of parental density on the distribution pattern of eggs in the common cabbage butterfly,Pieris rapae crucivora

Summary To investigate the relation between the distribution pattern of eggs and the parental density in the common cabbage butterfly,Pieris rapae crucivora, the countings of egg number per plant were made on both cabbage plants cultivated in the farm and planted in the net house in which the female butterflies were released at various densities. The frequency distribution of eggs fits well to the negative binomial excepting the cases where they agree withPoisson series, and the degree of aggregation expressed as the reciprocal of the parameter, 1/k, tends to decrease as the egg or parental density increases. At the same parental density, however, the distribution of eggs can be described by the negative binomial with a common parameter,k _c, regardless of the difference in the density of laid eggs. In the case where a single female butterfly lays eggs, the spatial pattern of egg distribution is always lean, while its frequencies conform toPoisson or the negative binomial series. This lean changes toward patchy with increasing the parental density. From these results, it is concluded that the degree of aggregation in the distribution of eggs decreases with the increase of the parental density.     

The species-area relation II. A second model for continuous sampling

Summary A second mathematical model describing the species-area relation was proposed for continuous expanding of sample area. This model is expressed asS=λ ln(1+x/E) whereS is the number of species occurring in an areax, and λ andE are the constants termedspecific diversity andelemental area respectively. As a result of testing the validity of the model for several sets of data, it was shown that the above equation would provide an adequate fit to a group of species belonging to a single synusia which exists in an open habitat. The ecological implications of parameters involved were discussed and the characteristic area presented previously (Kobayashi, 1974) was defined in terms ofE. The relation between results obtained by discrete sampling and continuous sampling was examined and the possibility of converting one to another was suggested. Contribution from the Laboratory of Applied Zoology, Yamagata University, No. 79.