Dominant interpretations of Plato's Crito attempt to reconstruct the text deductively, taking the arguments in the famous Laws’ speech as consisting solely in the application of general principles to facts. It is thus conceived that the principles and facts are grasped independently of each other, and then the former are applied to the latter, subsequently reaching the conclusion that Socrates must not escape. Following the lead of Cora Diamond, who argues against this ‘generalist interpretation’, I argue that the Laws’ speech essentially involves an exercise of our moral imagination through which both principles and the facts to which they apply are grasped. This is not to say that a deductive argument is absent from the Laws’ speech. Rather, for the first time, we understand how the deductive arguments in the Laws’ speech can function through imagining a life in which these arguments make sense. The Crito is an attempt to exercise the readers’ imagination, thereby presenting ethics that is both personal and objective. Understanding the Laws’ arguments essentially requires the readers’ imaginative involvement with Socrates’ personal story, but they still have objective import.

A new robot system has been introduced which was designed to seal the seams of car body panels. The system has nine degrees of freedom, and includes the following features: (1) A seam tracking servo using a solid-state TV camera is mounted at the robot hand to compensate for the seam deviations. (2) The robot arm is equipped with a flexible mechanism at the wrist to provide a wide working range for the seal nozzle. (3) A two axis orthogonal robot carrier is provided to make the robot follow the work on an indexed conveyor during the sealing operation. This paper deals with the structure and operation of the system and presents test results obtained on a sealing line.

It is well-known that SiC crystal deficiencies are delaying the realization of outstandingly superior SiC power electronics. Efforts to date have centered on eradicating micropipes, and 4H-SiC substrates with extremely low micropipe densities have been achieved. Nevertheless, SiC substrates and epilayers still contain several types of dislocations in densities on the order of thousands per square centimetres, which are nearly 100-fold micropipe densities. While not nearly as detrimental to SiC device performance as micropipes, it has recently been demonstrated that dislocations existing in SiC crystals degrade several characteristics of SiC devices, e.g., the forward bias characteristics of SiC pin diodes and the gate oxide reliability of SiC MOSFETs.

This paper reports several dislocation processes occurring during the growth of hexagonal SiC bulk crystals. Particularly, we focus on the dislocation formation and propagation processes in SiC crystals. We have investigated dislocation processes in 4H-SiC bulk crystals grown by the physical vapor transport (PVT) growth method, using defect selective etching and transmission electron microscopy (TEM).

It was found that foreign polytype inclusions introduced a high density of dislocations at the polytype boundary. In the polytype-transformed areas of the crystal, very few medium size hexagonal etch pits due to threading screw dislocations were observed, indicating that the polytype transformation ceased the propagation of threading screw dislocations. The oval-shaped etch pit arrays observed on the etched vicinal (0001)Si surface, indicative of the dislocation multiplication in the basal plane, showed characteristic distribution around micropipes and low angle grain boundaries. Based on the results, we will argue the dislocation behavior in PVT grown SiC crystals, suggesting that dislocation interaction and conversion are relevant processes to understanding the behavior.

The difference between vitamin K metabolism in the liver and that in the bone of vitamin K-deficient rats was examined. After 17 d administration of vitamin K-deficient food, vitamin K in the liver was almost depleted, and prothrombin time (PT) was prolonged. Serum total osteocalcin level was slightly decreased by vitamin K deficiency, whereas serum undercarboxylated osteocalcin level did not change. The level of menaquinone (MK)-4 as well as that of phylloquinone was decreased, but approximately 40 % of the initial level still existed in the femur after the 17 d period. A single-dose administration of vitamin K (250 nmol/kg body weight) markedly increased vitamin K level in the liver but not in the femur. These results suggest that the turnover of vitamin K in the bone is slower than that in the liver, and bone metabolism may be little affected by the short period of intake of vitamin K-deficient food. However, intake of a larger amount of vitamin K is required for its accumulation in the bone than in the liver. Furthermore, the counteracting effect of MK-7 on prolonged PT in vitamin K-deficient rats was found to be higher than phylloquinone or MK-4.

Fine features of the dust distribution in the central region of NGC 4151 have been studied from high resolution images obtained by the Subaru Telescope. The two dust lanes lying along a circum-nuclear ellipse of 40“ ×20” have been recognized to consist of a number of fine filaments and knots. In the inner region, there has been found dust distributed in a bipolar cone region extending to 5” from the nucleus. This cone is exactly complementary to the well-known bipolar ionized gaseous region. A dense knot is seen at 2” SE from the nucleus, but no torus-like feature is recognized. The masses of neutral gas in the outer lanes and in the inner region are estimated as 106M⊙ and 105M⊙ respectively. These observational results are compared with results of numerical simulations of gas dynamics.

Chemical mechanical polishing is an essential process for achieving a high degree of planarization. The planarity after CMP sensitively depends on pattern scales, pattern densities and mechanical properties of polishing pads. In order to simulate the topography after CMP, a numerical model for the polishing pad is proposed. In this model, the surface roughness layer of the polishing pad is assumed as a flat soft layer. The distribution of the contact pressure between the patterned wafer and the polishing pad is calculated with finite element method, and the pattern topography is modified based on the pressure dependency of the polishing rate. The iterations of the contact pressure analyses and the topography modifications give the progress of the polishing process numerically. The model is applied to oxide CMP process with silica slurry and stacked pad of polyurethane and non-woven fabric. The compressive elastic moduli of polyurethane layer and non-woven fabric layer are measured dynamically. The elastic modulus of the soft layer is treated as a fitting parameter between the experimental results and the numerical model. The models with the elastic modulus of 10 MPa for the soft layer show good agreements with the experimental results in both of a short range, where the compressive deformation of the pad is dominant, and a long range, where the bending deformation is dominant. Static measurements for the surface elasticity of the polyurethane layer also give a good agreement with the model. The proposed pad model should be useful for the topography simulation, and it also guides the development of new polishing pads.

A rare case of extramedullary plasmacytoma arising from the nasal septum with localized amyloid deposition is reported. A 75-year-old woman presented with a history of post-nasal discharge and nasal obstruction for several months. Endonasal endoscopic observation revealed the presence of a mass arising from her nasal septum with an extension to the nasopharynx. No cervical lymph nodes were palpable. The biopsy specimen was diagnosed as a plasmacytoma (IgG, lambda-light chain type). Both serum myeloma-protein and urine Bence-Jones protein were negative. Bone marrow biopsy, a chest radiograph, total body skeletal survey and 67Ga- and 99mTc-scintigrams showed no other systemic lesions. These findings confirmed the diagnosis of extramedullary plasmacytoma in the nasal septum. The patient received irradiation of 40 Gy without clinically detectable reduction of tumour size. The patient eventually underwent complete resection of the tumour by KTP/532 laser under endonasal endoscopic control. Pathologically, the tumour mass was composed mainly of amyloid deposition with a marked reduction of tumour cells. This indicated the radiosensitiveness of tumour cells, which was clinically masked by the increased amyloid deposition. The clinical presentation, pathological features and surgical procedures are described with a review of the literature.

Spectronebulagraph, an automated observation system of tridimensional spectroscopy with a long slit spectrograph, is now in operation at the 188 cm telescope of the Okayama Astrophysical Observatory. This system is based on the local area net work of personal computers which control the telescope, the autoguider, the Cassegrain spectrograph and its CCD camera. Effects of variable atmospheric transmission during scans of target objects are removed by performing a set of two orthogonal scans and the data processing.

A new spectrograph is now under development for the telescope. This instrument has multiple modes for tridimensional spectroscopy, i.e., the filter imagery mode, the imaging Fabry-Perot interferometer mode, a slit spectrograph mode for Spectronebulagraph, and the microlens array spectrograph (TIGER) mode. For the last mode, a dual preoptics to get simultaneously the sky background is introduced and achromatization of the microlenses is tried. This project is a part of development of a prototype instrument for the SUBARU telescope.

A cometary globule in IC1396 named ”comet tail 6” by Osterbrock (1957), has been observed at CO and 13CO (J = 1-0) lines with a high spatial resolution, 14″, with the 45-m radio telescope at the Nobeyama Radio Observatory. The resolution corresponds to a linear size of 0.05 pc at the distance of 750 pc (Matthews 1979). Two possible pre-main sequence stars, LkHα 349 and LkHα 349/c (Cohen and Kuhi 1979), associated with small nebulosities nestle in the central part of the globule. We have obtained CO and 13CO spectra long NS and EW strips which cross each other at the position of LkHα 349 and have mapped a 1.5′x1.5′ area around the globule center at 13CO. Results from the observations are summarized as follows:

To find evidence for collective star formation without massive stars in the dark cloud complex Kh141 (Saito 1980), a search for T-Tauri stars has been made.