In recent years, the disparity in treatment for equal work has become a major social problem, and the analysis of labor precedents has become important in analyzing labor issues. In general, it takes a lot of time to decipher precedents. This is because the logical structure of claims and conflicts in precedents is complex. To assist the analysis of precedents, there were studies to judge the similarity between the description of the case by important characteristic facts (factors) and the case, and the proposal of the description method by the diagram of the logical structure of the case. However, there are problems that the logical structure of precedents could not be expressed only by factors and that it is difficult to extract complex diagrammatic expressions from precedents. On the other hand, the Bipolar Argumentation Framework (BAF) and Extended Argumentation Framework (EAF), which have been studied in the field of computational argumentation theory, are suitable for describing the structure of cases simply, and their logical support is clear. Therefore, we combined factors and BAF/EAF to describe the logical structure of precedents and analyzed labor cases from three viewpoints: (1) analysis of factors that influence the judgment, (2) analysis of the tendency of the selection of issues by the court, and (3) conflict of allegations between plaintiff and defendant and logical verification of court judgment. From the results of the analysis, we showed that this method can describe and verify the logical structure of individual labor precedents in detail and that it can effectively analyze the trend of judgments from multiple precedents by focusing on factors and issues.

In this research, we focused on the surveillance in the information society with the progress of information technology and conducted an experiment on the degree of tolerance of the surveillance. As a result of study 1, we clarified that people permit monitoring by a credit information system and purchase histories and that people do not permit private person monitoring and monitoring communication by telephone and mail, as a result of an experiment with crowdsourcing users. It was also confirmed that there was an interaction between the monitoring subject and the monitoring method.

Based on study 1, considering the evaluation of the social credit system, which has been attracting attention these days, and the possibility that crowdsourcing users are conscious of online behavior, we added some survey items. We experimented with university students as participants in study 2. As a result, we clarified that the social credit system has a high degree of tolerance. Furthermore, from study 3 comapring the results of study 1 and study 2, we obtained similar results by the university student survey and the crowdsourcing survey.

These results show that the tolerance degree of monitoring varies depending on the combination of the monitoring subject and the monitoring media, and it was clarified that it is neither uniformly allowed nor uniformly excluded. Further studies include the expansion of the types of monitoring subjects, monitoring targets and monitoring media, and examination by behavioral experiments.

We report a survey on the documents of public relations (PR) principles published by Japanese universities and research institutes on their website to sketch out the current landscape of the academic PR. We analyze the survey by applying the Shannon-Weaver model of communication and formulate a general framework that can be used for evaluation of academic PR. In this survey, the contents of the collected 41 documents can be categorized into 6 broad categories and then further to 50 subcategories. To formulate the general framework, we apply the non-linear model of three levels (the technical problem (A), the semantic problem (B), and the effectiveness problem (C)) by Shannon and Weaver (1949) to the survey and sort each PR activity to a level in this communication model. This helps us to identify a flow of communication and potential target indicators at each level (A, B, or C).

In Japan, disaster prevention measures are important for areas where the Nankai megathrust great earthquake is predicted to occur. Although many studies have been carried out to develop such measures, most of such studies are based on questionnaires and experiments to identify factors that influence evacuation behavior. However, by only identifying such factors, the actual evacuation behavior of people remains unclear. Planning effective strategies based on the results of studies on evacuation behavior should include a description of similar previous events and the methods used to address the issues encountered. Thus, in the present study, we used the trajectory equifinality approach to examine how the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake obtained information and evacuated from disaster areas using specific routes and to visualize their evacuation behavior. These investigations aimed to collect data that would prove useful for planning effective evacuation measures. The results showed that the victims exhibited “respect for the primary group” during evacuation, particularly at bifurcation points of action, which suggests that evacuation measures should be based on mutual aid as well as self-help and public assistance. Moreover, planning countermeasures for disasters should involve not only studies based on questionnaires and experiments that identify relevant factors but also research at the micro level, such as the visualization of actual evacuation paths.