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The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan's situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There a woman named Taki has worked as a maidservant in the house and lived with its owners, the Hirai family. Now, near the end of her life, Taki is writing down in a notebook her nostalgic memories of the time spent living in the house. Her journal captures the refined middle-class life of the time from her gentle perspective. At the end of the novel, however, a startling final chapter is added. The chapter brings to light, after Taki's death, a fact not described in her notebook. This suddenly transforms the world that had been viewed through the lens of a nostalgic memoir, so that a dramatic, flesh-and-blood story takes shape. Nakajima manages to combine skillful dialogue with a dazzling ending. The result is a polished, masterful work fully deserving of the Naoki Prize.
Biologists and anthropologists in Japan have played a crucial role in the development of primatology as a scientific discipline. Publication of Primate Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior under the editorship of Tetsuro Matsuzawa reaffirms the pervasive and creative role played by the intellectual descendants of Kinji Imanishi and Junichiro Itani in the fields of behavioral ecology, psychology, and cognitive science. Matsuzawa and his colleagues-humans and other primate partners- explore a broad range of issues including the phylogeny of perception and cognition; the origin of human speech; learning and memory; recognition of self, others, and species; society and social interaction; and culture. With data from field and laboratory studies of more than 90 primate species and of more than 50 years of long-term research, the intellectual breadth represented in this volume makes it a major contribution to comparative cognitive science and to current views on the origin of the mind and behavior of humans.
This volume honours the academic achievements and scholarship of Professor Florence Myles as a world-leading scholar in the fields of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and French Linguistics, in particular for her work in corpus-based SLA and language policy in primary school education. In addition to reviews of the field (e.g., primary languages policy in the UK), the volume presents new research studies reflective of key theoretical and methodological issues in current SLA research, including theory-building, corpus-based investigations, studies of language development, as well as informing teacher professional development through research. Taken together, this edited book provides a wide-ranging and balanced account of Myles’s work and speaks to her influence on SLA research and primary languages policy. We invite readers to learn more about the fascinating research presented here as inspired by Florence’s dedication to field.
Most of us believe that we are unique and coherent individuals, but are we? The idea of a "self" has existed ever since humans began to live in groups and become sociable. Those who embrace the self as an individual in the West, or a member of the group in the East, feel fulfilled and purposeful. This experience seems incredibly real but a wealth of recent scientific evidence reveals that this notion of the independent, coherent self is an illusion - it is not what it seems. Reality as we perceive it is not something that objectively exists, but something that our brains construct from moment to moment, interpreting, summarizing, and substituting information along the way. Like a science fic...
What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’s discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores questions regarding personhood, consciousness, and the kinds of relationships humans might have with even the most advanced AI. Through these discussions, the document investigates the theoretical and practical challenges to interpersonal encounter raised by the age of AI.
Smart Technologies and Fundamental Rights covers a broad range of vital topics that highlight the ethical, socio-political, and legal challenges as well as technical issues of Artificial Intelligence with respect to fundamental rights. Either humanity will greatly profit from the use of AI in almost all domains in human life, which may eventually lead to a much better and more humane society, or it could be the case that people may misuse AI for idiosyncratic purposes and intelligent machines may turn against human beings. Therefore, we should be extremely cautious with respect to the technological development of AI because we might not be able to control the machines once they reached a certain level of sophistication.
An in-depth and wide-ranging approach to the study of older adults in society Taking a holistic approach to the study of aging, this volume uses biological, archaeological, medical, and cultural perspectives to explore how older adults have functioned in societies around the globe and throughout human history. As the world’s population over 65 years of age continues to increase, this wide-ranging approach fills a growing need for both academics and service professionals in gerontology, geriatrics, and related fields. Case studies from the United States, Tibet, Turkey, China, Nigeria, and Mexico provide examples of the ways age-related changes are influenced by environmental, genetic, socio...
The result of a conference on language and related cognitive processes in animals, this book brings together scientists working on language and communication, reviews research done on language in apes and dolphins, and places this work in a larger perspective of animal communication and cognition. The conference convened an international group of distinguished scientists interested in exploring the neurological, cognitive, social, and behavioral aspects of communication in animals. A broad spectrum of perspectives was represented, including naturalistic investigations of animals in their natural habitat as well as strictly controlled laboratory investigations. Similarly, a broad range of spe...
A provocative attempt to think about what was previously considered unthinkable: a serious philosophical case for the rights of robots. We are in the midst of a robot invasion, as devices of different configurations and capabilities slowly but surely come to take up increasingly important positions in everyday social reality—self-driving vehicles, recommendation algorithms, machine learning decision making systems, and social robots of various forms and functions. Although considerable attention has already been devoted to the subject of robots and responsibility, the question concerning the social status of these artifacts has been largely overlooked. In this book, David Gunkel offers a p...