פרסומים

One of the primary concerns of epistemic thinking research is understanding how people think about matters such as knowledge, truth, and justification. Understanding how people think about epistemic matters is highly important in current knowledge societies in which information has become more abundant and accessible, yet also increasingly diverse. This chapter focuses on the processes and resources that people employ in order to deal with epistemic challenges and explores how epistemic thinking is situated with regards to the distinction between cognition and metacognition.

This book analyzes and contextualizes Auerbach's life and mind in the wide ideological, philological, and historical context of his time, especially the rise of Aryan philology and its eventual triumph with the Nazi Revolution or the Hitler Revolution in Germany of 1933. It deals specifically with his struggle against the premises of Aryan philology, based on völkisch mysticism and Nazi historiography, which eliminated the Old Testament from German Kultur and Volksgeist in particular, and Western culture and civilization in general. It examines in detail his apologia for, or defense and justification of, Western Judaeo-Christian humanist tradition at its gravest existential moment. It discusses Auerbach's ultimate goal, which was to counter the overt racist tendencies and völkish ideology in Germany, or the belief in the Community of Blood and Fate of the German people, which sharply distinguished between Kultur and civilization and glorified völkisch nationalism over European civilization. The volume includes an analysis of the entire twenty chapters of Auerbach's most celebrated book: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1946. -- Publisher's description

Nature Communications 6: Article number: 7414 (2015); Published: 16 June 2015; Updated: 18 February 2016. The authors inadvertently omitted Kimiora L. Ward, who managed and contributed data, from the author list. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

A project titled “Establishing the advanced disaster reduction management system by fusion of real-time disaster simulation and big data assimilation,” was launched as Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). Intended to save as many lives as possible in future national crises involving earthquake and tsunami disasters, the project works on a disaster mitigation system of the big data era, based on cooperation of large-scale, high-resolution, real-time numerical simulations and assimilation of real-time observation data. The world’s most advanced specialists in disaster simulation, disaster management, mathematical science, and information science work together to create the world’s first analysis platform for real-time simulation and big data that effectively processes, analyzes, and assimilates data obtained through various observations. Based on quantitative data, the platform designs proactive measures and supports disaster operations immediately after disaster occurrence. The project was launched in 2014 and is working on the following issues at present.Sophistication and fusion of simulations and damage prediction models using observational big data: Development of a real-time simulation core system that predicts the time evolution of disaster effect by assimilating of location information, fire information, and building collapse information which are obtained from mobile terminals, satellite images, aerial images, and other new observation data in addition to sensing data obtained by the undersea high-density seismic observation network.Latent structure analysis and major disaster scenario creation based on a huge amount of simulation results: Development of an analysis and extraction method for the latent structure of a huge amount of disaster scenarios generated by simulation, and creation of severe scenarios with minimum “unexpectedness” by controlling disaster scenario explosion (an explosive increase in the number of predicted scenarios).Establishment of an earthquake and tsunami disaster mitigation big data analysis platform: Development of an earthquake and tsunami disaster mitigation big data analysis platform that realizes analyses of a huge number of disaster scenarios and increases in speed of data assimilation, and clarifies the requirements for operation of the platform as a disaster mitigation system.The project was launched in 2014 as a 5-year project. It consists of element technology development and system fusion, feasibility study as a next-generation disaster mitigation system (validation with/without introduction of the developed real-time simulation and big data analysis platform) in the affected areas of the Great East Japan Earthquake, and test operations in affected areas of the Tokyo metropolitan earthquake and the Nankai Trough earthquake.

This paper uses transaction-level data from a firm in the High Technology sector to compare the revenue garnered from customers who purchase via sales representatives to that garnered from customers who purchase online. The interaction mode may be correlated with the customer’s unobserved valuation for the service, and this potential endogeneity is addressed using an instrumental variable. Specifically, the data indicate whether the customer’s details were recorded in the company’s information systems following an initial contact, such as the download of a free version from the company’s website. The availability of such leads facilitated representatives’ ability to contact customers, generating exogenous variation in the probability of interacting with a representative. Instrumental variable estimates indicate that such interaction lowers the total revenue garnered from a paying customer during the sample period. The primary driver of this result is a churn effect: customers who purchased online displayed a longer overall relationship with the firm, and were more likely to renew an expiring subscription. An alternative explanation, according to which representatives lowered revenues by reassuring customers regarding the adequacy of cheaper versions of the product, is not supported by the data.

Aim: The multidrug resistance protein 1 (MDR1; P-glycoprotein) has been associated with efflux of chemotherapeutic agents from tumor cells and with poor patient prognosis. This study evaluated the feasibility of non-invasive, non-radioactive near infrared (NIR) imaging methodology for detection of MDR1 functional activity in tumors. Methods: Initial accumulation assays were conducted in MDR1-overexpressing MDCK cells (MDCK-MDR1) and control MDCK cells (MDCK-CT) using the NIR dyes indocyanine green (ICG), IR-783, IR-775, rhodamine 800, XenoLight DiR, and Genhance 750, at 0.4 $μ$M-100 $μ$M. ICG and IR-783 were also evaluated in HT-29 cells in which MDR1 overexpression was induced by colchicine (HT-29-MDR1) and their controls (HT-29-CT). In vivo optical imaging studies were conducted using immunodeficient mice bearing HT-29-CT and HT-29-MDR1 xenografts. Results: ICG's emission intensity was 2.0- and 2.2-fold higher in control versus MDR1-overexpressing cells, in MDCK and HT-29 cell lines, respectively. The respective IR-783 control:MDR1 ratio was 1.4 in both MDCK and HT-29 cells. Optical imaging of mice bearing HT-29-CT and HT-29-MDR1 xenografts revealed a statistically non-significant, 1.7-fold difference (p > 0.05) in ICG emission intensity between control and MDR1 tumors. No such differences were observed with IR-783. Conclusion: ICG and IR-783 appear to be weak MDR1 substrates. In vivo, low sensitivity and high between-subject variability impair the ability to use the currently studied probes as markers of tumor MDR1 activity. The results suggest that, for future use of this technology, additional NIR probes should be screened as MDR1 substrates.

Water consumption of wine grapevines (Vitis vinifera 'Cabernet Sauvignon') was measured during three consecutive growing seasons (2012-2014) using 6 drainage lysimeters. The lysimeters (1.5 m3 each) were installed within a two-hectare commercial vineyard in a Mediterranean region in the central mountain region of Israel. Water consumption of the lysimeter-grown vines (ETc) was measured daily and reference evapotranspiration (ETo) was calculated from regional meteorological data according to the Penman Monteith equation. Seasonal curves of crop coefficient (Kc) were calculated as Kc = ETc/ETo. Maximum ETc values (weekly average) in different seasons ranged from 7.5 to 6.64 mm day-1 and seasonal ETc (from DOY 99 through DOY 288) ranged from 746 to 780 mm over the growing seasons. Leaf area index (LAI) was measured weekly using the SunScan Canopy Analysis System. Maximum LAI ranged from 1.36 to 1.16 m2 m-2 for the 2012-2013 seasons, the seasonal LAI pattern was quite similar to control vines grown in the surrounding vineyard. A linear curve relating Kc to LAI (R2 values ranged from 0.76 to 0.85) is proposed as the basis for efficient irrigation management. Some of the differences in ETc and Kc values that were observed are different from those obtained in table grapes (Williams et al., 2003; Netzer et al., 2009) and wine grapes (Picón-Toro et al., 2012) is explained by the different canopy size and architecture.

We designed a high-resolution compact spectrometer based on an evanescently coupled multimode spiral waveguide. Interference between the modes in the waveguide forms a wavelength-dependent speckle pattern, which is used as a fingerprint to identify the input wavelength after calibration. Evanescent coupling between neighboring arms of the spiral results in a non-resonant broadband enhancement of the spectral resolution. Experimentally, we demonstrated a resolution of 0.01 nm at a wavelength of 1520 nm using a 250 &\#x03BC;m radius spiral structure. Spectra containing 40 independent spectral channels are recovered simultaneously, and the operation bandwidth is significantly increased by applying compressive sensing to sparse spectra reconstruction. The ability to achieve such high resolution with low loss in a compact footprint is expected to have a significant impact on low-cost portable sensing and to add functionality to lab-on-a-chip systems.