Earticle

Robust design is an approach to reduce the performance variation of mutiple responses in products and processes. In fact, in many experimental designs require the simultaneous optimization of multiple responses. In this paper, we propose how to simultaneously optimize multiple responses for robust design when data are collected from a combined array. The proposed method is based on the quadratic loss function. An example is illustrated to show the proposed method.

Personal space is an invisible space around people and plays an important role in human communication. Individual spaces are known to change according to gender and relationships in communication between people. This study examines whether such personal space exists between characters on a metabus. Gender participants took up short personal space, and female participants found that on the Metabus, they changed their personal space according to their intimacy or gender with other people’s characters rather than their own. Male participants are thought to change their personal space according to their personality in case of reason in Metabus. From this, it is thought that the participant continues to have physicality, just as the meta-bus actually has a body. Female participants found that in Metabuses, as in the real world, gender between characters has a similar short personal space, rather than gender, and intimacy between characters. In the case of male participants, it was shown that the closeness between the characters was similar to that of the personal space, but the gender of other characters did not change the personal space. Future validation of personal space for metabus characters requires comparison of shapes of individual spaces and cultures, such as individual characteristics, such as introduction and extroversion of individual space, and experiments of gender. In this experiment, the number of female experiment participants is strongly required in future experiments, as compared with male experiment participants, and the need for various cultural experiments is also required.

Previous research on online games has suggested that virtual world activities improve problem solving and interpersonal skills, but FPS and MMORPG are not well distinguished in various monomeric and difficult activities. The reason for this is that qualitative considerations of activities in the virtual world have not yet been made. Therefore, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six-Siege, one of the most popular FPS in Japan, focused on the difficulty of supporting groups, and participated in observation and interviews to investigate the quality observation and interviews. The results showed that the first high-difficulty quest requires problem-solving skills and interpersonal skills in an environment where most of the nonverbal information is blocked. Second, it is important to extract players’ thoughts and actions from high-difficulty quests, and to identify problems, confirm evidence and facts, propose causes and solutions, and to work together with coordinated actions and harmonious actions. Furthermore, it has been found that these capabilities are provided as two important leadership functions in actual collective work.

By far, studies on the effect of oral administration of peppermint essential oil on blood pressure are not consistent, increasing or decreasing. And the effect of inhalation of peppermint essential oil on blood pressure was not reported. This study was designed to clarify the effect of peppermint essential oil inhalation on the blood pressure and autonomic nervous system. Blood pressure and heart rate variability (HRV) as an indicator of autonomic nervous system activity were measured. The systolic and diastolic blood pressure was not changed significantly by inhalation of peppermint essential oil. Standard deviation of normal to normal (SDNN), a parameter of total activity of autonomic nervous system also was not changed significantly. High frequency (HF) power level, an indicator of parasympathetic nervous system activity was not changed by peppermint. These results indicate that action mechanism of peppermint essential oil on blood pressure is different by the method of administration, oral or inhalation.

A mixture of alcohol and water is commonly used as antifreeze, liquor, and the fundamental solvents for the manufacture of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and inks in our daily life. Since various properties of alcohol water mixtures such as density, boiling or melting point, viscosity, and dielectric constant are determined by their mixing ratio, it is very important to know the mixing ratio to predict their properties. One of simple method to find the mixing ratio is measuring the density of the mixtures. However, it is not easy to predict the mixing ratio from the density of the mixtures because the relationship between mixing ratio and density has not been established well. The relationship is dependent on the relative sizes of solute and solvent molecules, and their interactions. Recently, an empirical model to predict the density of glycerol water mixture from their mixing ratio has been introduced. The suggested model is simple but quite accurate for glycerol water mixture. In this article, we investigated the applicability of this model to different alcohol water mixtures. Densities for six different alcohol water mixtures containing various alcohols (e.g., ethylene glycol, 1,3-propane diol, propylene glycol, methanol, ethanol, and 1-propanol) were simulated and compared to experimentally measured ones to investigate the applicability of the model proposed for glycerol water mixtures to other alcohol water mixtures. The model predicted the actual density of all alcohol water mixtures tested in this article with high accuracy at various ratios. This model can probably be used to predict the mixing ratio of other alcohol water mixtures from their densities beyond 6 alcohols tested in this article from their densities.

The demand for traceability of meat and livestock supply chains is growing due to the high-profile incidents of hormonal contamination. E. coli, dioxin, BSE, and antibiotics have been recorded. In this paper, we present blockchain-based poultry information management system design and implementation using Hyperledger Fabric. The proposed system offers accurate, decentralized, immutable and consensus process that promote trust and transparency between stakeholders. The main tasks of the system include the recording of the information associated with poultry rearing (from a hatchery to a farm), status report of the farm activities on a monthly basis. The system can track movement of docks through the supply chain until delivery to the final consumer through the retail outlet. The ability to trace the source of livestock product through all the stages of rearing/production, processing and distribution is essential for ensuring food safety as recall of contaminated product can easily be done thereby increasing consumer confidence.

Properties and comparison of multivariate CUSUM and EWMA charts for monitoring Σ of multivariate normal N(μ, Σ) process has considered. Comparison of the performances of the considered charts, the numerical values are obtained by simulation with 10,000 iteration in terms of ATS, ANSS and ANSW. We found that EWMA chart with small values of smoothing constant more effectively detects the process changes than with large smoothing constant. And we also found that CUSUM chart with small value of reference value is more effectively detecting the process change than with large reference value. If a process engineer has interest in detecting small amount of shift rather than large shift, he/she can be recommended to use small smoothing constant in EWMA chart and small reference value in CUSUM chart.

This research examines the effect of positively skewed population distribution on the two sample t-test through simulation. For simulation work, two independent samples were selected from the same chi-square distributions with 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 degrees of freedom and sample sizes 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, respectively. Chi-square distribution is largely skewed to the right at small degrees of freedom and getting symmetric as the degrees of freedom increase. Simulation results show that the sampled populations are distributed positively skewed like chisquare distribution with small degrees of freedom, the F-test for the equality of variances shows poor performances even at the relatively large degrees of freedom and sample sizes like 30 for both, and so it is recommended to avoid using F-test. When two population variances are equal, the skewness of population distribution does not affect on the t-test in terms of the confidence level. However even though for the highly positively skewed distribution and small sample sizes like three or five the t-test achieved the nominal confidence level, the error limits are very large at small sample size. Therefore, if the sampled population is expected to be highly skewed to the right, it will be recommended to use relatively large sample size, at least 20.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has had a huge impact on human life. The World Bank group (WBG) has stated that 2020 is the worst year since World War II for economic growth. An epidemic of an infectious disease such as COVID-19 is classified as a “social disaster” by law. The social disaster caused by COVID-19 puts certain industries, occupations and vulnerable groups at risk of exclusion and isolation. This paper intends to examine the fluctuations in the consumer price index in the cultural, sports and tourism sector before and after the onset of COVID-19. In addition, it predicts the consumer price index by sector until December 2021 and reveals its implications.

The purpose of this paper is to classify the torsion-free extensions 1→Z3 →Π→ZΦ→1 with injective abstract kernel φ : ZΦ→Aut(Z3). From this classification, we handle the sufficient conditions so as to classify the crystallographic groups of SoI4m,n.