We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday aesthetic tastes and judgments (...) can exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues. (shrink)

Yuriko Saito, the leading figure in the field, explores the nature and significance of the aesthetic dimensions of people's everyday lives. She argues that everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing humanity's collective and cumulative world-making project.

Neglect of everyday aesthetics -- Significance of everyday aesthetics -- Aesthetics of distinctive characteristics and ambience -- Everyday aesthetic qualities and transience -- Moral-aesthetic judgments of artifacts.

I propose that the appropriate appreciation of nature must include the moral capacity for acknowledging the reality of nature apart from humans and the sensitivity for listening to its own story. I argue that appreciating nature exclusively as design is inappropriate to the extent that we impose upon nature a preconceived artistic standard as well as appreciation based upon historical/cultural/literary associationsinsofar as we treat nature as a background of our own story. In contrast, aesthetic appreciation informed by our attempt to (...) make sense of nature, such as science, mythology, and folklore, is appropriate because it guides our experience toward understanding nature’s own story embodied in its sensuous surface. (shrink)

Throughout much of Chinese history, Mencius (372-289 BC) was considered the greatest Confucian thinker after Confucius himself. Following the enshrinement of the Mencius (an edited compilation of his thought by disciples) as one of the Four Books by Sung neo-Confucianists, he was studied by all educated Chinese. This book begins a reassessment of Mencius by studying his ethical thinking in relation to that of other early Chinese thinkers, including Confucius, Mo Tzu, the Yangists, and Hsün Tzu. The author closely examines (...) his ethical concepts and terms, showing how they were used in the Mencius and other texts. (shrink)

We critically examine pragmatism's approach to skepticism and try to elucidate its certain limits. The central questions to be addressed are: whether “skepticism” interpreted through the lens of problem-solving does justice to the human condition; and whether the problem-solving approach to skepticism can do justice to pragmatism's self-proclaimed anti-foundationalism. We then examine Stanley Cavell's criticism of Dewey's “problem-solving” approach. We propose a shift from the problem-solving approach's eagerness for solutions to a more Wittgensteinian and Emersonian project of dissolution.

The project of world-making is carried out not only by professional world-makers, such as designers, architects, and manufacturers. We are all participants in this project through various decisions and judgments we make in our everyday life. Aesthetics has a surprisingly significant role to play in this regard, though not sufficiently recognized by ourselves or aestheticians. This paper first illustrates how our seemingly innocuous and trivial everyday aesthetic considerations ha ve serious consequences which determine the quality of life and the state (...) ofthe world, for better or worse. This power ofthe aesthetic should be harnessed to direct our cumulative and collective enterprise toward better world-making. Against objections to introducing a norma ti ve dimension to everyday aesthetics, 1 argue for the necessity of doing so and draw an analogy between everyday aesthetics and art-centered aesthetics which has dominated modern Western aesthetics discourse. (shrink)

To apply reinforcement learning to difficult classes such as real-environment learning, we need to use a method robust to perceptual aliasing problem. The exploitation-oriented methods such as Profit Sharing can deal with the perceptual aliasing problem to a certain extent. However, when the agent needs to select different actions at the same sensory input, the learning efficiency worsens. To overcome the problem, several state partition methods using history information of state-action pairs are proposed. These methods try to convert a POMDP (...) environment into an MDP environment, and thus they are sometimes very useful. However, their computation cost is very high especially in large state spaces. In contrast, memory-less approaches try to escape from the aliased states by outputting actions stochastically. However, these methods output actions stochastically even in unaliased states, and thus the learning efficiency is bad. If we desire to guarantee the rationality in POMDPs, it is efficient to output actions stochastically only in the aliased states and to output one action deterministically in the other unaliased states. Hence, to discriminate between aliased states and unaliased states, the utilization of χ² -goodness-of-fit test is proposed by Miyazaki et al. They point out that, in aliased states, the distributions of the state transitions by random search and a particular policy are different. This difference doesn't occur owing to non-deterministic actions. Hence, if the agent can collect enough samples to implement the test, the agent can distinguish between aliased states and unaliased states well. However, such a test needs a large amount of data, and it's a problem how the agent collects samples without worsening learning efficiency. If the agent uses random search in the course of learning, the learning efficiency worsens especially in unaliased states. Therefore, in this research, we propose a new method called Extended On-line Profit Sharing with Judgement (EOPSwJ) to detect important incomplete perception, which doesn't need large computation cost and numerous samples. We use two criterions for detecting important incomplete perceptions to attain a task. One is the rate of transitions to each state, and the other is the deterministic rate of actions. We confirm the availability of EOPSwJ using two simulations. (shrink)

We propose a novel algorithm to transliterate English to Japanese and its application to a voice controlled browser, which enable ordinary Japanese people to browse English Web site by voice. Speech recognition software designed for native English speakers do not work for most Japanese because Japanese can't pronounce English as native English speakers do. Therefore, we combined Japanese speech recognition software with English-to-Japanese transliteration software. The accuracy of our transliteration algorithm is 80% recall for the top candidate, and 92% recall (...) for the top three candidates. The browser using this transliteration algorithm makes it possible for Japanese to navigate English Web pages almost as accurate as Japanese pages by voice commands. (shrink)

The Chinese ethical tradition has often been thought to oppose Western views of the self as autonomous and possessed of individual rights with views that emphasize the centrality of relationship and community to the self. The essays in this collection discuss the validity of that contrast as it concerns Confucianism, the single most influential Chinese school of thought. Alasdair MacIntyre, the single most influential philosopher to articulate the need for dialogue across traditions, contributes a concluding essay of commentary. This is (...) the only consistently philosophical collection on Asia and human rights and could be used in courses on comparative ethics, political philosophy and Asian area studies. (shrink)

In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the human condition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, Saito reads Dewey’s idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to (...) borrow a term coined by Stanley Cavell). She elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey’s notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology. (shrink)

After discussing the use of le 樂 in early texts, the paper goes on to consider the nature of the idealized state of le in the Analects. It is a state akin to a state of tranquility, and is anchored in one's following the ethical path and one's affirming such a way of life. Because the different elements of the mind are blended together in an ethical direction, there is a sense of harmony and of ease. There is also a (...) sense of restfulness in that one is not inclined to move away from this state and, as a result, this state will endure. Furthermore, because the external conditions of life are viewed as of minor significance compared to the ethical, one is not subject to worries about such conditions. (shrink)

Based on selected writings on women's experiences of and reflections on dress and travel published in the Hong Kong feminist journal Nuliu, this paper discusses the politics of female subjectivity in relation to the everyday. The context of the discussion is the changing actualization of the well-known feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ within the local feminist movement in Hong Kong between the 1980s and the 1990s. The paper aims to create a new paradigm for analysing agency – the key (...) concept in subject formation – by critiquing the ideology of choice, which is a liberal value system that connects people's imagination with the notion of personal ‘liberation’. As demonstrated by the examples of dress and travel, the everyday is a site of both possibilities and conflict for women, who generate new strategies or tactics to negotiate not only with institutions, structures and policies, but also with ‘interpellations’, ‘temporality’, ‘spatiality’, ‘performativity’, ‘symbolism’ and ‘psyche’. (shrink)

This article examines the underexplored relationship between Amartya Sen's ‘capability approach’ to human well-being and education. Two roles which education might play in relation to the development of capacities are given particular attention: (i) the enhancement of capacities and opportunities and (ii) the development of judgement in relation to the appropriate exercise of capacities.

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of transnational commemoration of "Hiroshima." I also show that nationalization of trauma of "Hiroshima" involved (...) a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other. (shrink)

The paper presents a perspective on our relation to our environment that is inspired by Confucian thought and that stands in contrast to certain common strands in contemporary philosophical discussions. It conceptualizes our relation to what we encounter on a day-to-day basis primarily in terms of the way we experience and respond to situations, rather than to the objects affected in the situations. From this perspective, the contemporary philosophical distinction between a first- and a third-person point of view is often (...) not suited for describing our responses to situations. Instead, our responses to situations can vary along different dimensions, including the way we direct our attention, our thoughts and sentiments, our motivations, etc., and these variations admit of degrees. Such variations depend on various factors, such as the different ways in which one relates to the object affected in a situation and the kind of person one is. and cannot be adequately described in terms of a shift from one point of view to another. The paper discusses two examples, anger and compassion, to illustrate this alternative perspective, but the discussion can be extended to other areas such as gratitude. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 276-295.

Recently, many opportunities have emerged to use the Internet in daily life and classrooms. However, with the growth of the World Wide Web (Web), it is becoming increasingly difficult to find target information on the Internet. In this study, we explore a method for developing the ability of users in information seeking on the Web and construct a search process feedback system supporting reflective activities of information seeking on the Web. Reflection is defined as a cognitive activity for monitoring, evaluating, (...) and modifying one's thinking and process. In the field of learning science, many researchers have investigated reflective activities that facilitate learners' problem solving and deep understanding. The characteristics of this system are: (1) to show learners' search processes on the Web as described, based on a cognitive schema, and (2) to prompt learners to reflect on their search processes. We expect that users of this system can reflect on their search processes by receiving information on their own search processes provided by the system, and that these types of reflective activity helps them to deepen their understanding of information seeking activities. We have conducted an experiment to investigate the effects of our system. The experimental results confirmed that (1) the system actually facilitated the learners' reflective activities by providing process visualization and prompts, and (2) the learners who reflected on their search processes more actively understood their own search processes more deeply. (shrink)

After half a century, environmental aesthetics successfully expanded the scope of modern art-centred Western aesthetic discourse. I argue that further expansion is in order. First, we should explore the aesthetics of the constituents of the environment, namely artefacts, human activities and social relationships, which determine the quality of life and the state of the world. Second, we need to cultivate aesthetic literacy as well as a normative discourse to steer our aesthetic practice toward a better world-making. Finally, environmental aesthetics needs (...) to be globalised to include rich aesthetic traditions of nature and environment from diverse cultures. (shrink)

Background The concept of career identity is integral to nursing practices and forms the basis of the nursing professions. Positive career identity is essential for providing high-quality care, optimizing patient outcomes, and enhancing the retention of health professionals. Therefore, there is a need to explore potential influencing variables, thereby developing effective interventions to improve career identity. Objectives To investigate the relationship between moral distress, moral courage, and career identity, and explore the mediating role of moral courage between moral distress and (...) career identity among nurses. Design A quantitative, cross-sectional study. Methods A convenient sample of 800 nurses was recruited from two tertiary care hospitals between February and March 2022. Participants were assessed using the Moral Distress Scale-revised, Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale, and Nursing Career Identity Scale. This study was described in accordance with the STROBE statement. Ethical consideration Research ethics approval was obtained from the researcher’s university and hospital where this study was conducted prior to data collection. Findings Moral distress is negatively associated while moral courage is positively associated with career identity among nurses. Moral courage partially mediates the relationship between moral distress and career identity ( β = −0.230 to −0.163, p < 0.01). Discussion The findings reveal a relationship between moral distress, moral courage, and career identity among nurses. Conclusion By paying attention to nurses’ moral distress and courage, healthcare providers can contribute to the development of effective interventions to improve career identity, and subsequently performance, among nurses. (shrink)