If we develop a Website which automatically collects questions and asks for answers, people can respond efficiently. Against this background, we developed a method to semi-automatically collect questions, constructed a Website in which they were shown, and evaluated its effectiveness. Our method consists of two steps, i.e., (1) by submitting words which are characteristic to questions into search engine, we obtain Blog articles and tweets which are likely to contain questions, and (2) based on automatic text classification, we extract Blog articles and tweets with questions. It was found that (1) the characteristic words "taitoru-ga-omoidase-nai" produced the best precision and (2) Boosting and decision tree produced the best classification for Blogs and Twitter. When we showed 30 articles and 31 tweets in our Website, six and five were answered, respectively, which satisfied the authors ofquestions.

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　A nurse concurrently performs nursing actions or cares corresponding to each patient assigned to her/him. Recently medical practice in hospital ward is often performed under a treatment plan between hospitalization and discharge, which is called clinical pathway (CP). However, a method to estimate necessary working hours (NWH) for nurses based on CP is not found. Therefore, we have devised a simulation method based on CPs which are concurrently processed, and forward studies using the method. Features of the method are the followings; 1) breaking each element of treatment and care into detailed units, 2) measuring the minutes needed to perform the unit, and 3) totaling up the minutes. Using the method, a primary nurse, ordinary nurse or care worker's NWH values can be estimated. In this paper, the method is applied to CP of coronary artery bypass grafting, obtained results are consistent with actual conditions. In the case of an NWH value per hour in coronary artery angiography indicates crushing labor, two countermeasures are simulated. The results show that the one of them is effective in reducing the values.

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　A large amount and variety of geographic information has been produced to support the four years' rehabilitation and reconstruction (RR) process following the earthquake and tsunami disasters in December 2004 in Aceh province, Indonesia. After the RR process, the geographic information has been handed over to the Aceh Geospatial Data Center (AGDC), managing information services and supporting decision making for sustainable development in the Aceh province. However, AGDC has no integrated geographic information system (GIS). Therefore, the authors developed a prototype for an integrated GIS. The system is implemented with ESRI products such as ArcIMS Server, ArcGIS Server, ArcSDE Geodatabase connection for PostgreSQL/PostGIS and ArcGIS Desktop. The system consists of various geographic information produced during the RR process and geographic information related to Aceh province, which has been collected by the first author. Metadata and Metadata catalog service are also provided by the system. The target users of the system are AGDC staff, local government decision-makers or end users, and application developers. Examples of analysis using the system indicate the potential to support the planning of sustainable development. AGDC has evaluated that the system is suitable for implementation. Consequently, the authors concluded that the system will be useful for Aceh province, Indonesia.

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　A large-scale experiment using a support vector regression (SVR) to analyze the relationship between sovereign bond ratings of 158 countries and 44 kinds of economic and political indices was carried out to construct a model for reproducing ratings of various countries just from publicly open numerical information. Effective indices were selected by using the sensitivity analysis method, and the SVR model was optimized. The ratings of various countries could satisfactorily be reproduced from published indices with the root-mean-square error of 0.070 and the coefficient of determination of 0.925. The contribution of political indices is more significant than economical ones, suggesting that rating companies consider political factors important in rating sovereign bonds. Foreign rating companies severely judge the Japan's sovereign bonds by critically estimating the accumulated debt while domestic rating companies judge high compared with index data. The relationship between ratings and indices is highly nonlinear, therefore the combination of SVR and sensitivity analysis is indispensable for constructing a model to reproduce sovereign bond ratings.

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　I hypothesized that feelings state after reading was formed through the causal relationship between the personality characteristics of the reader and the cognitive appraisal in narratives comprehension in the novelswhose understanding of a protagonist. I measured the personality and empathy of 111 subjects, and next I measured the cognitive appraisal on the same subjects, and feelings state after the same subjects read 4 short novels, after which I analyzed the hypothetical model by a covariance structure model analysis. Results were that, in 2 short novels in which understanding of a protagonist was materialized, the hypothetical model was adopted, empathy and sympathy were strengthened as the reader who was high in extroversion and agreeableness, and a tendency which causes causal relationship between a negative feelings state after reading was shown. On the other hand, the hypothetical model was not adopted in 2 short novels in which understanding of a protagonist was not materialized.
　These results indicate the possibility that the causal relationship was established between the personality characteristics of the reader and the cognitive appraisal in narratives comprehension in the novelswhose understanding of a protagonist and the feelings state after the reading was formed through the causal relationship.

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[in Japanese]

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