We investigated robot-assisted recreation (RAR) for improving the quality of life (QoL) of older adults with dementia in an aged care facility. However, as a simple method to evaluate RAR has not been established at the field level, limited scientific data exists to show its effectiveness. To solve this problem, we studied a method to evaluate RAR based on speech analysis, which can reduce the burden on subjects (older adults) and data analysts. This study conducted both subjective and objective analyses of speech data. Subjective analysis based on the transcripts of speech data resulted in findings that supported and added to the knowledge of previous research, such as an increased willingness to participate in RAR, positive feelings toward the future, and interest in interacting with others. The results of the objective analysis based on the fundamental frequency (F0) demonstrated that there was a difference in the distribution of F0 during RAR and the interviews conducted before and after RAR. This study thus provides the prospect for easy evaluation of recreational activities, including RAR, in aged care facilities at the field level using speech analysis.

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The Satsukikai is a society of persons who passed the teachers' license examination. The examination used to be in force by the Ministry of Education (the so-called Bunken) and has been abolished since the World war II.
The Satsuki-kai came into being in 1948, and the number of its members is some 120 throughout Japan. However, this society is destined to come into nothing, because the examination (Bunken) has been abolished since the end of the World war II.
In this thesis I want to tell about this examination and its successful candidates (myself among the rest) and its reason for being.

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A configuration of 5 Munsell neutral gray squares on a gray and white background and a modulus were haploscopically presented to 12 Ss. Each S made brightness estimates for the squares, their background, and the illumination of total field when illuminance was varied in 3 steps over 1.2 log units. Linear brightness functions were obtained on a log-log plot, where brightness estimates were plotted against illuminance. Mean slopes systematically decreased as the reflectance of test region became lower, but none were negative. The failure to find negative slopes would be a difficulty for Jameson and Hurvich's opponentprocess model. Some problematic issues concerning brightness constancy and contrast were discussed.

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This note gives a primitive idea on coalition formation in a weighted voting experiment. The experimental protocol requires that the roles of subjects be partially fixed throughout each session and that each subject be in favor of only one proposal including his or her own at a time. In two four-player weighted voting games with no veto player, the orders of observed frequencies of minimal winning coalitions (MWCs) were the same as those of predicted ones derived from the following presumptions. (1) Each voter prefers a MWC to another MWC when his or her relative voting weight in the MWC is larger than that in another MWC. (2) The probability of each MWC occurring depends on a score the MWC makes in the Borda count, given such individual preferences of voters over MWCs. Tensions among MWCs in the bargaining process affected the resource allocation among the members within each MWC, which violated Gamson's law in some MWCs. Nevertheless, the above prediction was robust to small violations of Gamson's law.

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In listening, learners must turn to both bottom-up and top-down strategies in order to successfully parse the acoustic signals and segment the speech into individual words. However, topdown strategies are sometimes less fully utilized, especially by the listeners with lower levels of proficiency. In the present study, it is examined if providing the learners with semantic and contextual hints before listening would help activate their top-down strategies, thereby enhancing their word recognition. In the experiment, only the participants in the experimental group were given Japanese translations before dictation practices and instructed to guess on the text they would soon hear. The results showed that the participants in the experimental group fared better in the posttest even without the scaffolding of semantic and contextual cues than those in the control groups. In particular, their recognition of function words was significantly improved, which was presumably caused by their reference to contextual, semantic, and linguistic knowledge.

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The connection between the two Caribbean texts, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin and C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins, has been rarely identified especially with regards to their shared concern for mediating the masses. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri rejects mediation in their foregrounding of the multitude, but in this rejection the dignity the masses have of their lands, as Franz Fanon encompasses, cannot be represented. In the process of decolonization, mediating this dignity is a form of responsibility in which Lamming and James differently partake, and is realized in critical engagement with their region. In The Black Jacobins, the masses are not represented monolithic but articulated as two types, "descriptive" and "transformative", a distinction Spivak makes in her reading of Marx's analysis of the class relation in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. James's dialogue with Marxism prepares a concept of the transformative masses while the masses in Haitian Revolution are historically examined. Yet the contrast he draws with the leader of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, enacts the necessity for them to mediate themselves. In Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, such transformative masses are located near the end of the narrative in Trumper's knowledge of the black people in the US. Before reaching this, the novel employs shame for the characters to locate denials that colonial education has instituted-the memory of slavery, the politics of language, and a feeling that would be alternative to shame. Shame thus witnesses the complicity between the colonized and the colonizer, which subsequently stimulates in the former a responsible sense for their own people. Lamming's use of shame consequently succeeds in representing the masses and despite their differences this representation is consonant with what James tried to do in his writings.

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