In order to explore differences in news frames regarding controversial historical and territorial issues between Japan and Korea, the contents of four Japanese and Korean newspapers were analyzed by using topic models. Specifically, all the articles on the first page of Yomiuri, Asahi, Donga, and Hankyoreh newspapers during the two years from 2012 to 2013 were analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Results indicated that in Japanese newspapers, the territorial issue related to Takeshima (Dokto) was framed as a part of a broader international security topic, whereas in Korean newspapers it was more closely associated with historical issues that are unique to the relationship between Japan and Korea. The issue of comfort women was framed in Japanese newspapers as an aspect of domestic politics surrounding the statements made by Toru Hashimoto, the former mayor of Osaka city, whereas in Korean newspapers, it was more distinctively framed as a historical issue. The potential consequences of different news framing between Japan and Korea, as well as the usefulness of using LDA for content analysis are discussed.

This study sheds light on the effect of non-verbal information on impression for politician, and tested whether voice pitch influenced perceptions of politicians. In the experiment, we manipulated voice pitch of recordings of the debate by nine political party leaders and asked participants their impressions (favorableness and trustworthiness). We found that while lower-pitched voices increase favorableness and trustworthiness in politicians' image, higher-pitched voices negatively effect on these images, particularly on trustworthiness.

The comments made by Professor Shigemasu contains a fundamental inquiry regarding the risk concept which extends beyond the relationship between probability theory and risk theory. In responding to this inquiry, this reply proposes further discussion by way of extracting four important problems out of risk theory:

1. How to evaluate the uncertainty which is contained in the risk concept.

2. How to evaluate the magnitude of damage which is contained in the risk concept.

3. How to combine both of these so as to connect to action.

4. How to effectively convey the risk to the citizenry.

The author generally agrees with the comments by Professor Shigemasu from statistical viewpoints, however, he also wants concrete bridging approaches between statistics and soft computing by using ordered categorical statistical models, subjective transformation of multi-variate probability measures for decision with multi-stakeholders, statistical decision methods with robustness against the deviation from the current probability distribution in future and so on.

In this reply to the comments by Professor Kazuo Shigemasu on my article published in the last issue of the journal, I pointed that no significant difference exists between Fisherian and objective Bayesian except for the one point of prior distribution. Although I am still on the side of Fisherian, I first introduced a recently published interesting paper demonstrating the usefulness of Bayesian semiparametric approach for estimating dose-response relationship in the low ranges of radiation dose. I then briefly touch the issue of radiation risk communication with an example of the newspaper article reporting the risk of esophagus cancer in atomic bomb survivors.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that process simulation can improve the prediction accuracy of marketing research. First, we argue that photo-simulation-manipulation, proposed by Takeuchi (2015), is based on process simulation. Considering this argument, we conduct a randomized experiment in which participants are assigned to three groups (photo-simulation-manipulation vs. how-manipulation vs. non-manipulation). The participants answer the mind-set manipulation task based on the condition assigned to them and conjoint measurement in the main experiment. In addition, we investigate the products that the participants actually purchased in a follow-up survey. We find that in contrast to non-manipulation, photo-simulation-manipulation improves the prediction accuracy of participants' purchase deduced from conjoint measurement. We discuss the reason for this result and conclude that the participant responses better reflect actual purchase behavior due to activation of memory of past purchases and association with the target products caused by process simulation.

Equating or linking, which calibrate the parameters of two or more tests, are critical to the application of IRT, because they allow for comparisons between test scores. Common item design or common person design is often used for equating. In Multidimensional item response theory model (MIRT), there is a case that both common item design and common person design are available. However, few studies about the equating process corresponding to such a case has not been conducted. The present study proposes the integration of common item and common person criteria and analyzes the characteristics of the method through computer simulations. The results of the simulations reveal the proposed method is effective when one must take both criterion into consideration.

This study focuses on workers' differentiation in occupational cognition based on the subjective evaluation of distance between self and various occupations. Data from a Web survey conducted in 2013 are used. The sample consists of males or females in labor force between 20 and 59 years old. In the analyses I applied the Reduced K-means cluster analysis and 2 to 10 clusters of respondents were extracted. I adopt the 6 cluster solution with 4 dimensions. These clusters are interpreted in terms of affinity to occupations; (1) high status, (2) low status, (3) routine manual (male dominated), (4) high autonomy (male dominated), (5) personal service with professional, technical skills (female dominated), and (6) nonmanual in bureaucratic organization (female dominated). Then, I analyze the relationships between the cluster membership and several occupational traits of respondents to examine the differentiation of occupational groups. Implications of findings are discussed in terms of social class and gender segregation.

The Yomiuri Shimbun introduced dual-frame RDD surveys of landline and cell-phone users for monthly public-opinion surveys. To improve the survey methods, this study investigated experimental dual-frame RDD surveys. The results show that cell-phone surveys are a feasible method for use in Japan, improve the coverage of telephone surveys, effectively reach young respondents, and produce data of adequate quality. The unequal weighting effects (UWEs) of the dual-frame surveys were also examined to measure increases in variance. Increases in variance due to weighting were small, and the UWE was better than in single-frame landline surveys.

A decline of the voting rate becomes conspicuous in Japan in recent years. There is a movement which tries to improve the governance and increase of political participation through participation to community activity according to Putnam (1993). This paper clarifies empirically the impact of the attitudes and behavior of community residents on the voting behavior. We conducted questionnaire survey toTama-Area Residents in order to examine the effect of the impact of the local political environment on the attitudes and behavior of community residents. Furthermore, we compared the voting behavior with four group's significant difference based on Age groups, on attitudes about local governance. The causal structure is identified by using the multiple group Structural Equation Modeling between four groups.