Electronic display devices such as iPad and Kindle have recently attracted considerable attention as, reading media. Although the display performance and, business model concerning the contents have been discussed, there has been little discussion on comfortability, and - kansei like readability. In this paper, we conducted task performance investigation and impression evaluation among electrophoretic displays, liquid crystal displays and paper in order to examine readability for electronic displays, especially electrophoretic displays. In the task performance investigation, the reading speed, error detection rate and comprehension were measured. In the impression evaluation, the impression of the display, reading media and sense of fatigue were examined. As a result of task investigation, it was shown that the electrophoretic display was more comprehensible than that of the liquid crystal display. In the impression evaluation, the following results were obtained; 1) Although the display properties for the electrophoretic display almost passed muster, there was room for improvement in the beauty of the display. 2) The electrophoretic display was easier to read and concentrate on than the liquid crystal display. 3) The electrophoretic display was less likely to cause eyestrain and stiff-neck than other media. Principal component analysis revealed that the synthetic readability for the electrophoretic display was superior to the liquid crystal display, and moreover, the novelty of the electrophoretic display was superior to that of the other media.

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How can customer satisfaction be improved in order to gain a competitive advantage? To begin to answer this question, one must look first at the needs of the customer and what they expect from an enterprise. This research aims to establish emerging trends in customer needs and by extension provide market indicators, which will guide marketing strategies for small-and-medium-sized companies. This analysis will focus on retail trade. Consumers were requested to select an enterprise based on the type of business, and their integrated satisfaction ratings for the enterprise and element requested were investigated. We then analyzed the correlation between those variables by applying the technique of KANSEI engineering. Finally, we examined the selection criteria used by the consumer based on the type of business they were evaluating.

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The purpose of this work is to achieve computer discrimination between living matters that can create the subjective impression that it is alive and nonliving matters by locomotion analysis. First of all, moving object is detected using frame difference method and extracted as a silhouette image. Then the center of mass of the silhouette is computed to represent the object region. From a video sequence, the trajectory of the center of the moving area is obtained. We use the change of speed and the directional change of the center as the moving object's features to discriminate living matters from nonliving matters. AdaBoost was employed to learn the features. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the discrimination method using 77 moving images. The accuracy of discrimination was 85.7%.

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The idea of ecosystem services has been highlighted in order to identify a variety of benefits that human beings obtain from other life forms and to raise people's interest in conserving biodiversity. This idea helps us recognize the connection between our lives and environments and more actively participate in ecological activities. While this sort of instrumental approach to the conservation of biodiversity is particularly important for the growth of public participation, it also limits our understanding of its purposes. This paper, on the basis of field research conducted in Sado, Niigata, illustrates complex value issues involved in conserving biodiversity and discusses the importance of our kansei to uncover various values of the surroundings. As an approach for enhancing such kansei, the authors argue that multi-generational dialogue contributes to sharing different views of the participants and thereby cultivating a comprehensive perspective in environmental decision-processes.

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In this study, we attempted to analyze how the sense of weight changes after handling a material. Ten healthy male subjects were provided with 2 kg of a certain material as a reference so that they could sense and memorize its weight. Next, they were asked to move three buckets with different weights (1, 3, and 5 kg) to predefined right and left hand side positions and to select the bucket that they felt had the same weight as that of the reference material from among nine buckets with different weights ranging from 1.6 to 2.4 kg in intervals of 0.1 kg. Further, we analyzed the influence of the subjective weight of the material being handled, amount of muscle activity, and fatigue experienced by biceps brachii muscles on the sense of weight. The results indicate that subjects feel the weight to be greater than it is when moving the 1 and 3 kg buckets. On the other hand, subjects feel the weight to be lesser than it is when moving the 5 kg bucket. This study suggests that the sensed weight decreases with an increase in the weight of the moved bucket.

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In this study, how social intelligence (SI) and emotional intelligence (EI) are related to the ability to behave has been discussed. It has also been examined how the degree of reliability to others is related to SI. The following proposition was hypothesized: (i)Higher reliability to others leads to higher SI. (ii) SI and EI are important factors and keys to the enhanced ability to behave (decision making of behavior, attention in behavior, motivation to behave, and flexibility in behavior). A questionnaire which includes the following items was prepared: SI (social awareness and social facility), EI, the degree of reliability to others, and ability to behave. An attempt was made to verify the hypothesis above by a questionnaire survey. It was found that SI had a higher correlation with the ability to behave. EI was also found to play an important role for higher ability to behave.

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To clarify the mechanism concerning the human's texture recognition of cloth, it is important to investigate the influence of knowledge and experience. In this paper, combine memory formed based on knowledge and experience from vision and touch is defined as the visual-tactual memory. For two groups of observer which is having different amount of the memory, the cloth images and materials are presented by displaying and blinding, respectively. The observers select the material corresponding to the images taking drape and flat cloth. Result indicated that the visual-tactual memory is greatly effective for human's texture recognition and cloth image that made the drape shape was more effective. Then, multiple linear regression analysis is performed by the condition that corresponding rate between cloth image and material is objective variable, and skewness and kurtosis of image are explanatory variable. As a result, skewness strongly influenced the corresponding rate between cloth image and material in any case.

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This paper proposes an automatic method to estimate the impression of noun-verb phrases. The impression is important in making smoother communication and so on since it gives away the speaker's intention and emotion. In fact, many related researches have been conducted. However, the conventional techniques were mainly focused on nouns and verbs were comparatively neglected. Verbs can make a big change to the whole impression when they appear with nouns. This paper proposes a new method to estimate the impression of noun-verb phrases. The proposed method introduces two types of estimation values, polarity accordance and adequacy accordance. These values are calculated by extracting 11 kinds of phrase patterns from Web Japanese n-gram. Through the experimental results, we show the novelty of our method as an impression estimating system.

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In this paper, we propose a non-task-oriented dialog system which uses multiple language resources. This system can generate dynamic dialogues by two methods: one is using the Web; another is using the language resources such as Japanese Google N-grams and Nihongo-goitaikei. First, the system collects Web pages' data by Web retrieval after doing morphological analysis for the user input. Then the system extracts candidate topic terms from the data and determines a way of dialog generation according to the extracted terms. In the case of using Google N-grams, the system generates dialogs by searching N-grams after the terms and connects words recursively. In the case of the Web, the system collects Web pages with extracted words and their referential words. After that, the system generates the sentence by clipping sentence which includes extracted word. We carried out experiments to evaluate the proposed system.

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This paper describes a system which composes operetta songs fitting to story scenes represented by texts and/or pictures. Inputs to the system are original theme music, numerical information on given story scenes and story texts. The system composes variations on theme music and lyrics according to image of music and lyrics obtained from numerical information on given story scenes. Evolutionary computation is applied to generations of variations and lyrics. Using a vocal synthesizer and a general midi synthesizer, the system plays operetta songs as the variations on theme music with the lyrics. The system reflects user's Kansei to variations on theme music and lyrics using interactive evolutionary computation. This paper also describes the evaluation experiments to confirm whether the composed songs reflect impressions of story scenes appropriately or not.

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We propose a new approach for supporting user centered and “comfortable” spacial design such as buildings, plants or room and their indoor environment. Our research take users' subjectively-based approaches and describe users' cognitive evaluations for indoor environments which are depended on layouts of objects included in them, as both graphical and logical ways. In order to realize this framework, we adopt relationships between Mathematical Morphology: MM and Modal logic: ML which is work in theory and well-established by I. Bloch et al. Through the application of the theory we can propose a framework created from a collaboration of visual approach and hermeneutic approach. As a first step to make a sound model in this paper we compare evaluations of a room obtained from agent simulation construable with ML to image processing algorithm given Morphological operation. As a result supportive evidences and an actual use of correspondence relationship between MM and ML are found in so far as our simulation experiment. The result gives a way to construct a framework for describe what defies description such as user-centered evaluations, or subjective or cognitive judgments in bringing them to spatial designs.

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The relationship between impressions by looking the color designing of touch panel interfaces of electronic devices and the operations is discussed. Experiments that investigate the effect of color in designs of touch panel interfaces on the operation and on impressions of users have been conducted. Subjects tried mental arithmetic tests on twelve kinds of screens which have different color images. The following points: “time which passed during a task,” “number of correct answers,” “number of incorrect answers” and “number of timeouts” were measured and counted. After the tasks were conducted, the subjects answered questionnaires about their impressions of the interfaces in order to measure the evaluation. As a result, following things became clear : (1) Accuracy of the operations increases when using coloration such that evaluation is high, e.g., “cool-casual.” (2) Operation could be done speedy when using coloration such that potency and activity are low, and evaluation are high, e.g., “clear.” (3) There are correlations between the number of correct answers, time which passed during a task and the evaluation.

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Since 2003 the Japanese government has been enhancing tourism-related measures in order to increase Japan's national tourism industry. In this situation industrial tourism is greatly expected to develop as a new type of tourism in which people can learn and enjoy local culture and history from different angles. Industrial museums play an important role as core facilities for this industrial tourism. But unfortunately there is not enough data about industrial museums in Japan, because major surveys don't treat them as an independent category. For this reason we started original research on them in 2005. In this paper, based on the results of our research, we clarify current conditions and problems of industrial museums in Fukuoka Prefecture.

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