The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has been advancing the dissemination of pedestrian mobility support services that utilize ICT toward the establishment of an inclusive society where anyone including foreign visitors, elderly and physically-challenged people can participate in social activities freely without stress. Bearing the year 2020 in mind, the Ministry promotes approaches for improving frameworks of open data, so that pedestrians can obtain various kinds of services which meet their needs from many providers.
Real time captions which are simultaneously appeared on the screen as a speaker speaks during lectures etc. are called "shorthand caption writing by using personal computers", and were developed to aid hearing-impaired people as well as sign language. IPtalk is a free software being used countrywide as a "De facto standard" for applications for shorthand caption writing, which has been updated for several times since 1999. We explain what functions IPtalk has and how we can make shorthand caption by using it, as well as the history of the development and its future tasks.
Publication of academic journals is not trivial. Many academic societies and institutions outsource the task to large international publishing houses, which seem more dexterous in providing review systems, advertising journals internationally, and most of all, improving the impact factor. The negotiation of the outsourcing is, however, not simple. Detailed inspection may reveal unbalanced legal liability on the society side. Indeed, the Metabolomics Society, to which the author belongs, could not reach the agreement with a publisher to improve its legal status in managing its official journal. As a result, the society chose to start a new society journal. Based on this example, I introduce tips for societies to outsource journals, and confirm the benefit of using J-STAGE.
This article introduces a collaborative research between the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy and Japan Science and Technology Agency, Department of Information Planning, Office of Information Analysis. The aim of the research is twofold. One is to reveal the statistical nature of job posting cards on the JREC-IN Portal, on which there has been little holistic analysis so far. The other is to examine the consequence of enforcing the recent human resource policy on science and technology, which strongly stimulates mobility and instability in the job market. A precautionary warning to note is that the results and discussions in this article are provisional and could be replaced along with the progress in our analysis.