With more than five years since Japan's completion of digital switch over, the environment surrounding television and broadcasting have changed dramatically. Terminals are now multi devices, transmission paths broadband, and broadcast services available on digital platforms, and we see plenty of video streaming service on the internet that are not for existing TV terminals, not using broadcast waves, and not operated by broadcasters. Under these circumstances, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) established a "study group on problems surrounding broadcasting" in November 2015 and started separate discussions on each issue from October 2016. This article first examines the relations between the recent changes occurring in the television and broadcasting industry and the government's broadcast policy, based on which the author discusses the two key topics in the recent debates--4K·8K broadcasts and the internet distribution of broadcast content.

TRC MARC is a bibliographic database used in more than 80% of the public libraries in Japan. Since we began providing TRC MARC in 1982, we have been trying to enrich the contents and expedite the provision speed, aiming to be useful for improving the efficiency of library work and to be a tool to respond to various search needs of library users. In this article, the author focuses on the data items unique to TRC MARC, and explains its contents and features. The author also illustrates the process of making MARC records for newly published books.

This article describes a methodology to grasp dynamism of tourist behavior and thoughts through big data analysis. At first, it shows viewpoints for promotion of tourism, such as inter-region transition and popular places. Then, available datasets including population statistics from cellphone network operation data, behavior logs of location-based services, and SNS like Twitter, are introduced. The article shows an example of the actual survey of FY2015 by Japan Tourism Agency, which reveal behavior of oversea visitors in Japan. In addition, it discusses that the result of analysis of trajectories seems to fit Levy Flight model known as a behavior model of human mobility.

We explain how drone market's been growing as well as its current technical problems. Then we introduce the newest model of Mini-surveyor along with SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), the autonomous control technology for non-GPS environment, loaded in this Mini-surveyor. We also describe the strengths of three technologies which enable flight management method of ultimate autonomous control as well as their weaknesses, the latter is that they can only help to fly with navigation and control system, with no guidance. We mention that drone technologies are antecedently applied in such five fields as the agriculture area, inspection of infrastructure, survey, security and the disaster area. We also analyse the business fields' landscape, siting the example that logistics field could initiate industrial revolution in the sky. We conclude this article by depicting the current status and the problem of Chiba Drone City project, the ongoing program of drone home delivery.