Voluntary participation is connected to cultural, political, religious and social contexts. Social and societal factors can provide opportunities, expectations and requirements for voluntary activity, as well as influence the values and norms promoting this. These contexts are especially central in the case of voluntary participation among students as they are often responding to the societal demands for building a career and qualifying for future assignments and/or government requirements for completing community service. This article questions how cultural values affect attitudes towards (...) volunteerism, using data from an empirical research project on student volunteering activity in 13 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region. The findings indicate that there are differences in motivation between countries which represent different cultural values. This article sets these findings in context by comparing structural and cultural factors which may influence volunteerism within each country. (shrink)

Yamauchi Tokuryū, 2020. Logos et Lemme: Pensée occidentale, pensée orientale 『ロゴスとレンマ』（1974）. Translated by Augustin Berque with the assistance of Romaric Jannel. Paris: CNRS Éditions.

Affective computing research has advanced emotion recognition systems using facial expressions, voices, gaits, and physiological signals, yet these methods are often impractical. This study integrates mouse cursor motion analysis into affective computing and investigates the idea that movements of the computer cursor can provide information about emotion of the computer user. We extracted 16–26 trajectory features during a choice-reaching task and examined the link between emotion and cursor motions. Participants were induced for positive or negative emotions by music, film clips, (...) or emotional pictures, and they indicated their emotions with questionnaires. Our 10-fold cross-validation analysis shows that statistical models formed from “known” participants could predict nearly 10%–20% of the variance of positive affect and attentiveness ratings of “unknown” participants, suggesting that cursor movement patterns such as the area under curve and direction change help infer emotions of computer users. (shrink)

The self-organizing consciousness (SOC) is not sufficient to account for young children's ability to acquire complex rules and word-object mappings. First, the attention-association cycles suggested by the SOC are unlikely to happen because recurrence of particular stimulus properties usually disengages the attention of an observer. Second, “primitive processors” preinstalled in the system make the SOC unnecessarily complex.

Based on an empirical illustration of Onta pottery and more broadly a discussion of the Japanese Mingei movement, we study the intimacy between craft work, ethics and time. We conceptualize craft work through the temporal structure of tradition, to which we find three aspects: generational rhythms of making; cycles of use and re-use amongst consumers and a commitment to historically and naturally attuned communities. We argue these temporal structures of tradition in craftwork are animated by two contrasting but co-existing ideas (...) of the good: the moral and the ethical. By developing the work of Elizabeth Grosz, we conceptualize this distinction between moral and ethical as a temporal phenomenon, specifically in differing relations to ideas of the future. Moral aspects of craft work understand the future as a progression from past, whether in preserving practices and norms, or improving upon them in relation to ideals. Ethical aspects understand the future as inherently open to chance and divergence, valuing difference, accident and the possibilities for creativity these entail. Empirically, we show evidence of both aspects in the case of Mingei—a organized movement dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional Japanese craft work. We contribute to studies of craft work by revealing and classifying its temporal aspects. We contribute to studies in business ethics by conceptualising a generative distinction between morals and ethics configured through differing understandings of time. (shrink)

尊皇の哲学者は、なぜ昭和天皇に敗戦を見据えた御進講を行ったのか? 新発見史料を基に、講義の内容と終戦の決断への影響を解明。.

マッカーサーの「非武装」の夢、西晋一郎の「理想国家」の夢、森瀧市郎の「核絶対否定」の夢―日本思想史に「過剰な理想」という新視点を提起。原水禁運動の指導者、森瀧市郎の戦前の思想を読み解き、過剰な理想では なく、理想を掲げながらも実現可能な核廃絶の道をゆくことを提唱する。.

It has been suggested that luminance edges in retinal images are potential cues for glossiness perception, particularly when the perception relies on low-luminance specular regions. However, a previous study has shown only statistical correlations between luminance edges and perceived glossiness, not their causal relations. Additionally, although specular components should be embedded at various spatial frequencies depending on the micro-roughness on the object surface, it is not well understood what spatial frequencies are essential for glossiness perception on objects with different micro-roughness. (...) To address these issues, we examined the impact of a sub-band contrast enhancement on the perceived glossiness in the two conditions of stimuli: the Full condition where the stimulus had natural specular components and the Dark condition where it had specular components only in dark regions. Object images with various degrees of surface roughness were generated as stimuli, and their contrast was increased in various spatial-frequency sub-bands. The results indicate that the enhancement of the sub-band contrast can significantly increase perceived glossiness as expected. Furthermore, the effectiveness of each spatial frequency band depends on the surface roughness in the Full condition. However, effective spatial frequencies are constant at a middle spatial frequency regardless of the stimulus surface roughness in the Dark condition. These results suggest that, for glossiness perception, our visual system depends on specular-related information embedded in high spatial frequency components but may change the dependency on spatial frequency based on the surface luminance to be judged. (shrink)