Occupational therapy often uses craft activities as therapeutic tools, but their therapeutic effectiveness has not yet been adequately demonstrated. The aim of this study was to examine changes in frontal midline theta rhythm (Fmθ) and autonomic nervous responses during craft activities, and to explore the physiological mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effectiveness of occupational therapy. To achieve this, we employed a simple craft activity as a task to induce Fmθ and performed simultaneous EEG and ECG recordings. For participants in which Fmθ (...) activities were provoked, parasympathetic and sympathetic activities were evaluated during the appearance of Fmθ and rest periods using the Lorenz plot analysis. Both parasympathetic and sympathetic indices increased with the appearance of Fmθ compared to during resting periods. This suggests that a relaxed-concentration state is achieved by concentrating on craft activities. Furthermore, the appearance of Fmθ positively correlated with parasympathetic activity, and theta band activity in the frontal area were associated with sympathetic activity. This suggests that there is a close relationship between cardiac autonomic function and Fmθ activity. (shrink)

Emotion modulates our time perception. So far, the relationship between emotion and time perception has been examined with visible emotional stimuli. The present study investigated whether invisible emotional stimuli affected time perception. Using continuous flash suppression, which is a kind of dynamic interocular masking, supra-threshold emotional pictures were masked or unmasked depending on whether the retinal position of continuous flashes on one eye was consistent with that of the pictures on the other eye. Observers were asked to reproduce the perceived (...) duration of a frame stimulus that was concurrently presented with a masked or unmasked emotional picture. As a result, negative emotional stimuli elongated the perceived duration of the frame stimulus in comparison with positive and neutral emotional stimuli, regardless of the visibility of emotional pictures. These results suggest that negative emotion unconsciously accelerates an internal clock, altering time perception. (shrink)

Madhyamaka and Yogācāra are two Mahāyāna schools which have distinct systems. In the seventh century East Asia, the doctrinal distinction between the two schools was received as doctrinal contrast in the polemic circumstance of Emptiness-Existence controversy. In this context, Ji 基, the putative founder of East Asian Yogācāra school, has been normally considered by scholars to have advocated ‘Existence’ in opposition to ‘Emptiness’. It is problematic, however, to brand Ji’s Yogācāra position simply as anti-Madhyamaka. Although Ji evidently expresses evident criticism (...) on such a Madhyamaka exegete as Bhāvaviveka in some of his works, he also describes Bhāvaviveka in an amicable or even respective way in other works. By analyzing Ji’s extant works, this article argues that Ji’s scholastic attitude toward Madhyamaka changed from criticism to approval. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Legal CommentarySumy Menon, Senior Associate in ResearchThis case involves the balancing of a young person’s right to autonomy and the desire to protect her from harm. No Singapore court decision has determined whether the doctor owes a duty to the parents of the doctor’s 16-year-old patient, to warn them that their child is engaging in sexual activities, and who subsequently has had an abortion. Similarly, the issue of whether (...) the doctor has a duty to protect the minor in such circumstances has also not been tested in the Singapore courts. Nonetheless, it is very unlikely that either duty will be found in this case.The general rule is that doctors owe a duty of confidentiality to their patients. This duty extends to children, and although no Singapore court has ruled on the matter, the law in England is clear.1 It is enshrined in section 4.2.3.1 of the Ethical Code & Ethical Guidelines of the Singapore Medical Council. It is not absolute and a number of exceptions have been carved out. The confidentiality duty can be overridden by legislation, court order, the public interest, or other justifiable circumstances that the doctor believes warrants disclosure.The age of consent for non-commercial consensual sexual activities in Singapore is 16.2 Therefore, there is no statutory responsibility on Dr. C under the criminal law to report the patients’ sexual activities to the authorities or anyone else. There is no other legislation or court order that compels disclosure. It is highly unlikely that the public interest would be served by disclosure. The consequences of such disclosure to the public interest were aptly put in a recent English case, when J. Silber held that if a confidentiality duty was not imposed, it “would probably or might well deter young people [End Page 262] from seeking advice and treatment on contraception, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, and this would have undesirable and troubled consequences”.3 The last exception offers the greatest latitude for doctors to disclose if they believe there are other justifiable circumstances that would shift the balance in favour of disclosure. There are strong reasons to maintain confidentiality in Miss M’s case and although an argument can be made for disclosure, that argument is relatively weak.Miss M’s parents are understandably worried about her but Dr. C should not breach the duty of confidentiality owed to the patient even though she is only 16 years old. It is irrelevant that Miss M’s parents are paying for their daughter’s treatment. The doctor-patient relationship is between Dr. C and Miss M, and her parents have never been involved in the consultations or treatment decision-making process. They have not insisted on attending the consultations with their daughter, nor did they appear to object to Miss M consenting to treatment. Prior to their complaint, they had not sought any update or information about their daughter’s condition from Dr. C. Miss M specifically asked Dr. C not to reveal the contents of their conversations to her parents at the first consultation and the doctor agreed after attempting to convince her that it would be preferable to include her parents in the consultations. Miss M was obviously concerned about confidentiality and sought clarification from Dr. C. It appears as though Dr. C determined that Miss M had the capacity to exclude her parents from the consultations, and later to make her own treatment decisions, as a mature minor, and their doctor-patient relationship proceeded on that basis.It may be in the public interest for Dr. C to disclose confidential information about Miss M, even if she refuses to consent to it, if the doctor believes it is necessary to protect her from serious harm. Any such decision must be made with the patient’s best interests in mind. Examples of such harm include situations where the patient is at risk of serious physical abuse or has voiced a desire to commit suicide. Engaging in sexual activity with an older boy is unlikely to result in such serious harm, although harm may result. In this case, that harm manifested itself in an unwanted pregnancy... (shrink)

This paper describes an automatic monitoring system that constantly checks partial update in Web pages and notifies them to a user. While one of the most important advantages of the WWW is update of Web pages, we need to constantly check them out and this task takes much cognitive load. Thus applications to automatically check update of Web pages have been developed, however they can not deal with partial update like update in a particular cell in a table in a (...) Web page. Hence we developed a automatic monitoring system that checks such partial update. A user can give a system regions in which he/she wants to know the update in a Web page as training examples, and it is able to learn rules to identify the partial update by classification learning. By this learning, a user do not need to directly describe the rules. We implemented our system and some executed examples were presented. (shrink)

Drawing on recent feminist discussions, this collection critically reassesses ideas about agency, exploring the relationship between agency and coercion in greater depth and across a range of disciplinary perspectives and ethical contexts.

This book addresses two central questions: What does it mean to shift the epistemic centre of human rights thinking and to decolonise global human rights? And, how to study the 'active' conceptual, empirical, epistemic and political life of rights in 'most of the world'? To address these questions, this book introduces and develops the framework of vernacular rights cultures. The study of vernacular rights cultures is an interdisciplinary, conceptual, epistemic, methodological and empirical project. It intervenes in the current impasse of (...) human rights debates to offer a framework through which the complexity and dynamism of rights-based mobilisations might be analytically captured, not simply as those which are mimetic, and engaged in the translation, enactment and localization of 'global human rights', but rather as those which have their specific languages of rights and entitlements grounded in specific political imaginaries, justificatory premises and subjectivities. Through a conceptual and ethnographic tracking of the Urdu/Arabic word haq across subaltern citizen mobilizations in India and Pakistan, the book analyses the deployment of rights in the vernacular in South Asia including the political, epistemic and ethical agency released by this rights politics. By focusing on the claims for rights/haq by marginalised and very poor women including dalit and indigenous women within grassroots mobilisations demanding rights to food, employment, public information/accountability and land rights in rural movements in India and Pakistan, the book documents the specific gendered political imaginaries that inform rights struggles in the subcontinent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Impersonating the Dead:Mimes at Roman FuneralsGeoffrey S. SumiRoman aristocratic and imperial funerals often had a theatrical quality to them. We are told of the presence of musicians and dancing satyrs as part of the procession (pompa) and the excessive, even feigned grief, on the part of mourners, some of whom were professionals.1 Most striking of all was the performance of an actor (a "funerary mime") who donned a mask (...) that portrayed the likeness of the deceased and wore clothing that represented the highest offices and honors that the deceased had achieved. While dressed in this manner, the actor impersonated the deceased, imitating, and sometimes mocking, his well-known physical characteristics and movements and his words.2 To our modern sensibilities such a custom might seem odd, but a recent commentator on Roman aristocratic funerals has pointed out how the tone of a single funeral celebration ranged from "the patriotic and somber, to sad, to joyous and festive."3 The performance of this funerary mime, in which the dead momentarily came back to life in vivid form, apparently could reflect the full range of emotions on display at a Roman funeral. Despite recent studies on the Roman funeral, we still lack an analysis of the funerary mime that draws together all of the ancient evidence. Such an [End Page 559] analysis can shed light, as I hope to show, not only on the nature of the actor's performance, but also on what this performance might mean for our understanding of Roman funerals, both under the Republic and the Empire. Further light can be shed on the custom of the funerary mime by using Bakhtin's model of carnival as a way of demonstrating how in Rome certain carnivalesque elements could be interwoven into otherwise serious and even somber public events.4The first source that describes the practice of the funerary mime most explicitly is a passage of Diodorus, quoted by Photius, which is taken from his discussion of the funeral of L. Aemilius Paullus, the famous conqueror of Perseus who died in 160 B.C.:(Diod. 31.25.2)5Those Romans who by reason of noble birth and the fame of their ancestors are pre-eminent are, when they die, portrayed in figures that are not only lifelike as to features but show their whole bodily appearance. For they employ actors who through a man's whole life have carefully observed his carriage and the several peculiarities of his appearance. In like fashion each of the dead man's ancestors takes his place in the funeral procession, with such robes and insignia as enable the spectators to distinguish from the portrayal how far each had advanced in the cursus honorum and had had a part in the dignities of the state.(Loeb trans.)In this passage, Diodorus describes not only the use of masks to portray the facial features of the deceased, but also the employment of [End Page 560] actors () to play the role of the deceased at the funeral. The word can simply mean "imitator" in general terms, one who pretends to be someone or something else, but it can be used specifically of actors.6 Diodorus goes on to explain that this, during the lifetime of the deceased, observed the gait or carriage () of the deceased and "the several peculiarities of his appearance" (). The result of this "lifetime" of observation was that the actor could perform these traits faithfully at his subject's funeral. The translation of as "the several peculiarities of his appearance" renders into English the ambiguities of the Greek without making clear precisely what is meant. By this phrase, Diodorus must mean gestures or other physical movements, since it should refer to something, such as gait or carriage with which it is paired, that actors could observe, imitate, and then perform for a large audience. By the same token, it is unlikely that this phrase refers either to distinguishing physical characteristics, such as facial features or expressions, since these would have been depicted by the mask itself, or, for that matter, to physical blemishes of the body, such as scars, which would have been concealed by the dress... (shrink)

Summary As part of the events marking Nero’s assumption of the toga virilis in 51 CE, he along with Britannicus led the circus procession (pompa circensis) in advance of games in the Circus Maximus. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct this pompa circensis, both in its processional elements and route through the city. The presence of potential successors along with images of the deified and honored dead of the imperial family shows how this ceremony evolved and expanded in (...) the Principate to become a dynastic ceremony. The route of the newly modified pompa circensis, marked by monuments built by or dedicated to members of the imperial family, also had become increasingly dynastic. An essential element of the pompa circensis was the participation of the senate and equestrian order as well as the urban plebs, an act of performed consensus fully realized when the procession ended in the Circus Maximus. This circus procession, as reconstructed here, has further implications for the larger question of the imperial succession under Claudius. (shrink)

In this paper, illocutionary acts of commanding will be differentiated from perlocutionary acts that affect preferences of addressees in a new dynamic logic which combines the preference upgrade introduced in DEUL (dynamic epistemic upgrade logic) by van Benthem and Liu with the deontic update introduced in ECL II (eliminative command logic II) by Yamada. The resulting logic will incorporate J. L. Austin’s distinction between illocutionary acts as acts having mere conventional effects and perlocutionary acts as acts having real effects (...) upon attitudes and actions of agents, and help us understand why saying so can make it so in explicit performative utterances. We will also discuss how acts of commanding give rise to so-called “deontic dilemmas” and how we can accommodate most deontic dilemmas without triggering so-called “deontic explosion”. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series (...) of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception. (shrink)

In this article, I raise a question and acknowledge a ‘feminist debt’. The ‘feminist debt’ is to the politics of location, and the question asks: what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical reflexive feminist politics of location put in place for knowledge production and for doing feminist theory? I suggest that there are at least three stipulations/enablements that a critical reflexive politics of location puts in place for knowledge production. Firstly, it demands/enables scholarly accounts to reveal their location within (...) the prevailing entanglements of power relations and to highlight the politics of struggle that underpin these. Secondly, it demands/enables conceptual work from different geographical spaces – and in particular, it facilitates the production of conceptual work in non-standard background contexts and conditions. And finally, a critical reflexive politics of location demands/enables a methodological response to capture the different conceptual and analytical and empirical knowledges produced in different locations. (shrink)

This paper is a theoretical and empirical investigation into whether persons in subordinate social contexts possess agency and if they do, how do we recognise and recover their agency given the oppressive conditions of their lives. It aims to achieve this through forging closer links between the philosophical arguments and the ethnographic evidence of women's agency. Through such an exercise, this paper hopes to bridge the existing gap between feminist theoretical interventions and feminist politics as well as to increase 'sociological (...) awareness' within feminist philosophical arguments. In order to think about women's agency in oppressive social contexts, the paper evaluates the suitability of existing theoretical frameworks for examining, describing and capturing the autonomy of persons and concludes that a new and a more complex thinking is required to facilitate thinking about human agency within oppressive transcultural contexts. The social context of subordination, the exhibition of agency within and oppressive context and the application of the new theoretical framework is illustrated in an extensive empirical study of the contact with modernity and its accompanying ideas of autonomy and individual rights of rural women belonging to two districts in Rajasthan, North western India. (shrink)

日本思想史の真髄に迫る論考と座談。天皇制・丸山眞男・日本仏教・慈円の考察から日本文化に潜む外来と固有の対立・融合を読み解く。.

A classical reconstruction of Wright’s first-order logic of strict finitism is presented. Strict finitism is a constructive standpoint of mathematics that is more restrictive than intuitionism. Wright sketched the semantics of said logic in Wright (Realism, Meaning and Truth, chap 4, 2nd edition in 1993. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, Cambridge, pp.107-75, 1982), in his strict finitistic metatheory. Yamada (J Philos Log. [doi-url omitted], 2023) proposed, as its classical reconstruction, a propositional logic of strict finitism under an auxiliary condition that makes (...) the logic correspond with intuitionistic propositional logic. In this paper, we extend the propositional logic to a first-order logic that does not assume the condition. We will provide a sound and complete pair of a Kripke-style semantics and a natural deduction system, and show that if the condition is imposed, then the logic exhibits natural extensions of Yamada (2023)’s results. (shrink)

A classical reconstruction of Wright’s first-order logic of strict finitism is presented. Strict finitism is a constructive standpoint of mathematics that is more restrictive than intuitionism. Wright sketched the semantics of said logic in Wright (Realism, Meaning and Truth, chap 4, 2nd edition in 1993. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, Cambridge, pp.107–75, 1982), in his strict finitistic metatheory. Yamada (J Philos Log. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-022-09698-w, 2023) proposed, as its classical reconstruction, a propositional logic of strict finitism under an auxiliary condition that makes the (...) logic correspond with intuitionistic propositional logic. In this paper, we extend the propositional logic to a first-order logic that does not assume the condition. We will provide a sound and complete pair of a Kripke-style semantics and a natural deduction system, and show that if the condition is imposed, then the logic exhibits natural extensions of Yamada (2023)’s results. (shrink)

The ‘mind-made body’ is seen as a subtle body attained by a Buddhist adept during meditative practice. Previous research has elucidated this concept as having important doctrinal significance in the Buddhist cosmological system. The P?li canonical evidence shows that the manomaya-k?ya is not merely a spiritual byproduct of meditative training, but also a specific existential mode of being in the system of the three realms. Studies of the manomaya-k?ya to date, however, have focused mostly on early P?li materials, and thus (...) do not encompass theoretical development and soteriological significance of this notion in later tradition. As a beginning step to fill this gap, this article explores the meanings of the manomaya-k?ya represented in the?r?m?l?dev? S?tra and the two treatises of the Ratnagotravibh?ga??stra and the Foxing lun, which are doctrinally based on the?r?m?l?dev? S?tra in their discussion of the manomaya-k?ya. Through the observation of the manomaya-k?ya in these Mah?y?na texts, this article seeks to demonstrate how the concept is used in the broader cosmological and soteriological system of Mah?y?na tradition. For this purpose, I first review the meanings of the manomaya-k?ya in early Buddhist texts and then observe the cosmological and soteriological meaning of the notion by analyzing the theoretical connection between the three Mah?y?na texts. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an organization method of page information agents for adaptive interface between a user and a Web search engine. Though a Web search engine indicates a hit list of Web pages to user’s query using a large database, they includes many useless ones. Thus a user has to select useful Web pages from them with page information indicated on the hit list, and actually fetch the Web page for investigating the relevance. Unfortunately, since the page information (...) on a hit list is neither sufficient nor necessary for a user, the adequate information is necessary for valid selection. However which information is adequate depends on a user and a task. Hence we propose adaptive interface AOAI in which different page information agents are organized through man-machine interaction. In AOAI, the page information agents indicating different page information on a hit list like the file-size, network traffic and a page title are prepared at first. A user evaluates them through searching with a search engine, and the agents are organized based on the evaluation. As results, different organizations are achieved depending on a user and a task. Finally we make experiments with subjects and find out AOAI is promising for adaptive interface between a user and a search engine. (shrink)

Backgrounds: Transcranial direct current stimulation is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique for the treatment of several psychiatric disorders, e.g., mood disorders and schizophrenia. Therapeutic effects of tDCS are suggested to be produced by bi-directional changes in cortical activities, i.e., increased/decreased cortical excitability via anodal/cathodal stimulation. Although tDCS provides a promising approach for the treatment of psychiatric disorders, its neurobiological mechanisms remain to be explored.Objectives: To review recent findings from neurophysiological, chemical, and brain-network studies, and consider how tDCS ameliorates psychiatric conditions.Findings: (...) Enhancement of excitatory synaptic transmissions through anodal tDCS stimulation is likely to facilitate glutamate transmission and suppress gamma-aminobutyric acid transmission in the cortex. On the other hand, it positively or negatively modulates the activities of dopamine, serotonin, and acetylcholine transmissions in the central nervous system. These neural events by tDCS may change the balance between excitatory and inhibitory inputs. Specifically, multi-session tDCS is thought to promote/regulate information processing efficiency in the cerebral cortical circuit, which induces long-term potentiation by synthesizing various proteins.Conclusions: This review will help understand putative mechanisms underlying the clinical benefits of tDCS from the perspective of neurotransmitters, network dynamics, intracellular events, and related modalities of the brain function. (shrink)