scholarly journals Why Are Japanese Judges So Conservative in Politically Charged Cases?

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Mark Ramseyer

Theory suggests that Japanese politicians have weaker incentives than U.S. politicians to keep lower court judges independent. Accordingly, we hypothesize that Japanese lower court judges who defer on sensitive political questions will do better in their careers. To test this, we assemble several new data sets and measure the quality of the assignments received by about 400 judges after deciding various types of cases. We find that judges who deferred to the ruling party in politically salient disputes obtained better posts than those who did not, and that judges who actively enjoined the national government obtained worse posts than those who did not. We also hypothesize that judges with forthrightly leftist preferences do worse in their careers. We measure the speed at which the 500 judges hired during the 1960s moved up the pay scale and find indications that judges who joined a leftist group were promoted more slowly than their peers.

2012 ◽  
pp. 24-47
Author(s):  
V. Gimpelson ◽  
G. Monusova

Using different cross-country data sets and simple econometric techniques we study public attitudes towards the police. More positive attitudes are more likely to emerge in the countries that have better functioning democratic institutions, less prone to corruption but enjoy more transparent and accountable police activity. This has a stronger impact on the public opinion (trust and attitudes) than objective crime rates or density of policemen. Citizens tend to trust more in those (policemen) with whom they share common values and can have some control over. The latter is a function of democracy. In authoritarian countries — “police states” — this tendency may not work directly. When we move from semi-authoritarian countries to openly authoritarian ones the trust in the police measured by surveys can also rise. As a result, the trust appears to be U-shaped along the quality of government axis. This phenomenon can be explained with two simple facts. First, publicly spread information concerning police activity in authoritarian countries is strongly controlled; second, the police itself is better controlled by authoritarian regimes which are afraid of dangerous (for them) erosion of this institution.


1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 171-190
Author(s):  
Pertti Lahermo ◽  
Jouko Parviainen

In this study the changes in the quality of groundwater are described on the basis of material collected at some groundwater extraction plants situated mainly in urban areas. The causes of the marked increase in the content of dissolved solids are evaluated from the 1960s onwards.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (S1) ◽  
pp. 1266-1267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Armbruster ◽  
Christopher Booth ◽  
Stuart Searle ◽  
Michael Cable ◽  
Ronald Vane

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
pp. 4418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Sekrecka ◽  
Michal Kedzierski

Commonly used image fusion techniques generally produce good results for images obtained from the same sensor, with a standard ratio of spatial resolution (1:4). However, an atypical high ratio of resolution reduces the effectiveness of fusion methods resulting in a decrease in the spectral or spatial quality of the sharpened image. An important issue is the development of a method that allows for maintaining simultaneous high spatial and spectral quality. The authors propose to strengthen the pan-sharpening methods through prior modification of the panchromatic image. Local statistics of the differences between the original panchromatic image and the intensity of the multispectral image are used to detect spatial details. The Euler’s number and the distance of each pixel from the nearest pixel classified as a spatial detail determine the weight of the information collected from each integrated image. The research was carried out for several pan-sharpening methods and for data sets with different levels of spectral matching. The proposed solution allows for a greater improvement in the quality of spectral fusion, while being able to identify the same spatial details for most pan-sharpening methods and is mainly dedicated to Intensity-Hue-Saturation based methods for which the following improvements in spectral quality were achieved: about 30% for the urbanized area and about 15% for the non-urbanized area.


Author(s):  
BIN ZHOU ◽  
XIANYI ZENG ◽  
LUDOVIC KOEHL ◽  
YONGSHENG DING

This paper presents an intelligent technology based method for analyzing and interpreting sensory data provided by multiple panels in evaluation of industrial products. In order to process the uncertainty existing in these sensory data, we first transform all sensory data on an unified optimal scale. Based on these normalized data sets, we compute the dissimilarities or distances between different panels and between different evaluation terms used by them, defined according to the degree of consistency of data variation. The obtained distances are then transformed into fuzzy numbers for physical interpretation. These fuzzy distances permit to characterize the evaluation behaviour of each panel and the quality of the evaluation terms used. Also, based on a Genetic Algorithm with punishment policy and the dissimilarity between terms, we develop a procedure for interpreting terms of one panel using those of another panel. This method has been applied to the fabric hand evaluation for a number of samples of knitted cotton in order to identify consumers' preference of different populations.


Author(s):  
Hassan Gharayagh Zandi ◽  
Sahar Zarei ◽  
Mohammad Ali Besharat ◽  
Davoud Houminiyan sharif abadi ◽  
Ahmad Bagher Zadeh

Coaching has often been viewed as a context within which coaches operate to largely bring about changes in athlete’s performance and flourishing. One key factor to successful outcomes in coaching is the quality of the relationship between coaches and athletes. The coach–athlete relationship is at the heart of coaching; however, limited studies have been conducted on its antecedents. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between coaches’ forgiveness and perceived relationship quality toward their athletes through verifying the mediating role of interpersonal behaviors of coaches. A total of 270 Iranian coaches participated in the survey, and the data sets were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results revealed that forgiveness positively predicted the coaches’ perceived relationship quality with their athletes, and this pathway was mediated by the coaches’ interpersonal behaviors.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Engström ◽  
Cesar Azorin-Molina ◽  
Lennart Wern ◽  
Sverker Hellström ◽  
Christophe Sturm ◽  
...  

<p>Here we present the progress of the first work package (WP1) of the project “Assessing centennial wind speed variability from a historical weather data rescue project in Sweden” (WINDGUST), funded by FORMAS – A Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (ref. 2019-00509); previously introduced in EGU2019-17792-1 and EGU2020-3491. In a global climate change, one of the major uncertainties on the causes driving the climate variability of winds (i.e., the “stilling” phenomenon and the recent “recovery” since the 2010s) is mainly due to short availability (i.e., since the 1960s) and low quality of observed wind records as stated by the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).</p><p>The WINDGUST is a joint initiative between the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) and the University of Gothenburg aimed at filling the key gap of short availability and low quality of wind datasets, and improve the limited knowledge on the causes driving wind speed variability in a changing climate across Sweden.</p><p>During 2020, we worked in WP1 to rescue historical wind speed series available in the old weather archives at SMHI for the 1920s-1930s. In the process we followed the “Guidelines on Best Practices for Climate Data Rescue” of the World Meteorological Organization. Our protocol consisted on: (i) designing a template for digitization; (ii) digitizing papers by an imaging process based on scanning and photographs; and (iii) typing numbers of wind speed data into the template. We will report the advances and current status, challenges and experiences learned during the development of WP1. Until new year 2020/2021 eight out of thirteen selected stations spanning over the years 1925 to 1948 have been scanned and digitized by three staff members of SMHI during 1,660 manhours.</p>


MycoKeys ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 29-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sten Anslan ◽  
R. Henrik Nilsson ◽  
Christian Wurzbacher ◽  
Petr Baldrian ◽  
Leho Tedersoo ◽  
...  

Along with recent developments in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies and thus fast accumulation of HTS data, there has been a growing need and interest for developing tools for HTS data processing and communication. In particular, a number of bioinformatics tools have been designed for analysing metabarcoding data, each with specific features, assumptions and outputs. To evaluate the potential effect of the application of different bioinformatics workflow on the results, we compared the performance of different analysis platforms on two contrasting high-throughput sequencing data sets. Our analysis revealed that the computation time, quality of error filtering and hence output of specific bioinformatics process largely depends on the platform used. Our results show that none of the bioinformatics workflows appears to perfectly filter out the accumulated errors and generate Operational Taxonomic Units, although PipeCraft, LotuS and PIPITS perform better than QIIME2 and Galaxy for the tested fungal amplicon dataset. We conclude that the output of each platform requires manual validation of the OTUs by examining the taxonomy assignment values.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 423-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Prantl ◽  
Martin Prantl

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine and verify the competitive intelligence tools Alexa and SimilarWeb, which are broadly used for website traffic data estimation. Tested tools belong to the state of the art in this area.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use quantitative approach. Research was conducted on a sample of Czech websites for which there are accurate traffic data values, against which the other data sets (less accurate) provided by Alexa and SimilarWeb will be compared.FindingsThe results show that neither tool can accurately determine the ranking of websites on the internet. However, it is possible to approximately determine the significance of a particular website. These results are useful for another research studies which use data from Alexa or SimilarWeb. Moreover, the results show that it is still not possible to accurately estimate website traffic of any website in the world.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitation of the research lies in the fact that it was conducted solely in the Czech market.Originality/valueSignificant amount of research studies use data sets provided by Alexa and SimilarWeb. However, none of these research studies focus on the quality of the website traffic data acquired by Alexa or SimilarWeb, nor do any of them refer to other studies that would deal with this issue. Furthermore, authors describe approaches to measuring website traffic and based on the analysis, the possible usability of these methods is discussed.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-790 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Palmer ◽  
Gilberto Hochman ◽  
Danieli Arbex

The paper presents and discusses the travel notes diary of Canadian scientist Robert J. Wilson when he visited Brazil in April 1967 during the Smallpox Eradication Programme run by the World Health Organisation. Wilson's report makes it possible to reflect on the smallpox eradication campaign in Brazil; on the Canada-Brazil cooperation to improve the quality of the smallpox vaccine; on his assessment by of scientists and Brazilian laboratories; on the effects of intersections between scientific activity and social and cultural activities; on the role played by specialist communities of experts role in international scientific cooperation projects; and on a Canadian traveller's concepts and prejudices about Brazil at the end of the 1960s.


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