Shobi University

Stress exposure in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is associated with poor outcomes in preterm infants. However, factors predicting subsequent NICU stress exposure have not been identified. To characterize NICU stressors experienced by preterm infants during the first 2 weeks of life and identify demographic, perinatal, and institutional variables associated with stress exposure. A secondary analysis of data from a nonexperimental, prospective study was conducted using data from 60 very preterm infants born 28 to 31 weeks gestational age. Stress exposures during the first 2 weeks of life, operationalized as number of invasive procedures, were characterized by type and quantity for each infant using data extracted from electronic health records. Associations between number of invasive procedures and demographic, perinatal, or institutional variables were analyzed using linear regressions with robust standard errors. Preterm infants experienced, on average, 98 (SD = 41.8) invasive procedures. Of these invasive procedures, nasal and/or oral suctioning episodes (58.1%), followed by skin-breaking procedures (32.6%), were most frequent. Differences in the number of invasive procedures were found for maternal race; infants born to Black mothers experienced fewer total invasive procedures than infants born to White mothers. The number of invasive procedures also varied across NICUs. Preterm infant stress exposure differed by maternal race and NICU, consistent with research findings of differential treatment of diverse infants. Further research is needed to understand the reasons for these differences and to identify best practices to standardize neonatal care.

This study examines the neural substrate of the understanding of human relationships in verbal communication with Japanese honorific sentences as experimental materials. We manipulated two types of Japanese verbs specifically used to represent respect for others, i.e., exalted and humble verbs, which represent respect for the person in the subject and the person in the object, respectively. We visually presented appropriate and anomalous sentences containing the two types of verbs and analyzed the electroencephalogram elicited by the verbs. We observed significant parietal negativity at a latency of approximately 400 ms for anomalous verbs compared with appropriate verbs. This parietal negativity could be a manifestation of the pragmatic process used to integrate the linguistic forms with the human relationships represented in the sentences. The topographies of these event-related potentials (ERPs) corresponded well with those of ERPs for two second-person pronouns in Chinese (plain ni and respectful nin). This correspondence suggests that the pragmatic integration process in honorific expressions is cross-linguistically common in part. Furthermore, we assessed the source localization by means of independent component (IC) analysis and dipole fitting and observed a significant difference in ERP between the honorific and control sentences in the IC cluster centered in the precentral gyrus and in the cluster centered in the medial part of the occipital lobe, which corresponded well with the functional magnetic resonance imaging findings for Japanese honorification. We also found several significant differences in the time-frequency analyses for the medial occipital cluster. These significant differences in the medial occipital cluster suggested that the circuit of the theory of mind was involved in the processing of Japanese honorification. Our results suggest that pragmatic and syntactic processing are performed in parallel because the person to be respected must fulfill the grammatical function appropriate for the honorific verb.

This article aims to shed light on the specificity of Bernard Heidsieck’s poetry, in particular to clarify the relationship between the three modes of his poetry : writing, sound recording and performance. The article first deals with two modes of perception – optical and acoustic – in his three series of poems – Poemes-partitions, Biopsies and Passe-partout. Heidsieck tries to highlight a gap between these two modes of perception, using two versions – visual poems and sound poems. But it should not be ignored that Heidsieck prefers to call his poetry “action poetry” because it requires another poetic mode: performance. Heidsieck’s performance consists in “catapulting” poetry into society: by emancipating it from the yoke of the page, it “catapults” poetry into a relationship between the listeners and the reader. Society is the place where they communicate, and poetry, which is part and parcel of it, comes out of the surface of the page and becomes a “standing poetry”.

The Japanese government has recently addressed the issue of promoting programming education in elementary/secondary education to develop students' ability to utilize information. The curriculum guidelines for junior high school and high school, published by the Japanese government, also include programming education for understanding measurement/control systems and developing problem-solving ability. This study developed a visual programming environment called AT, which was implemented in programming classes for novices in some universities and a technical college. With the objective of introducing the AT environment into elementary/secondary programming education, this study also developed some functionalities of AT that offer users intuitive operation capabilities on tablet devices for AT's editor. We conducted a survey for evaluating the intuitive operation in an actual classroom, and the usability and comprehensibility of the editor were highly evaluated by the students.

Abstract We propose a method of keeping conversations secret using the differences in the amount of degradation (bit‐reversal sensitivity) in decoded speech when reversing the bits in the ITU‐T standard 8‐kbit/s sound encoding method G.729. In communications using the Internet or other open networks, there is a risk of eavesdropping by third parties, so the content of communications should be hidden using appropriate methods. In this paper we analyze the bit‐reversal sensitivity in G.729 and propose an efficient method for creating secrecy based on these results. In the proposed method, the decoded speech is greatly distorted and secrecy is achieved by converting and operating on only 10 of 80 bits in the G.729 synthesis filter and excitation source. Using objective values we evaluated the efficiency of each operation and using subjective evaluations we confirmed that our method is good at maintaining secrecy. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 90(2): 63–71, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20313