Commercial breaks are often placed at the climax of stories in recent TV programs in Japan, which may cause some serious effects on audiences, especially children, since this practice disturbs the concentrations. The experiment measured the psycho-physiological state of four children before and after commercials. The results showed that the next peak of attention is delayed by distracting the attention.

This paper presents a method for measuring the entire three dimensional (3D) shape of an object, which is applicable for 3D digitizing into a solid modeler. The method realizes automatic acquisition of the complete surface model of the object without contact. The method employs two range finders and a turntable cooperatively: a range finder and the turntable measure the surface data of the object rapidly, and then another hand-eye range finder finds deficits in the surface data due to self-occlusion, and corrects them. This method realizes sensory fusion in acquisition of range data. Several 3D-shape data provided by two range finders are integrated into voxel data. The voxe representation allows us to handle the entire shape of an arbitrary object. The experimental system based on this method demonstrates the good flexibility and performance of the method for 3D digitizing.

We propose a knowledge-based instruction system for writing beautiful Japanese characters correctly, by using ICAI techniques. With this kind of CAI, it is important to relate the character pattern with the skill knowledge of handwriting because the rules of writing are indirectly shown as a feature of the character pattern. However, the CAI for penmanship previously reported was only based on the pattern analysis of the character. In this paper, we describe the rules of writing for this system as the skill knowledge of penmanship in the declarative way. This system evaluates and reforms the student's handwriting based on the rules of writing stored in a knowledge base. We would also introduce the error knowledge by the student's frequent handwriting mistakes. Finally, this system can estimate the student's degree of handwriting ability by their input charecters and give suitable guidance for improving their skills of writing. Students can learn the skills and the knowledge of penmanship effectively by this system. This system is also useful for foreign students learning the Japanese language.

Ship handling for leaving and entering port always carries out for a captain, deck officers and quartermasters and sometimes include a pilot. For navigational watch keeping at sea except for a narrow channel and under restricted visibility etc., the deck officer and quartermaster do it. They achieve safe and efficient navigational watch keeping with their teamwork at a ship's bridge. The importance of teamwork has been recognized in the shipping world, and its training and education methods are also thought over. However, their evaluation is not clear, because they are depended on the experience of the trainers. Therefore, we need to make an evaluation method of teamwork for education and training of the ship handling. In this paper, we define that ship's bridge teamwork is shown by 1) a change of mental workload level and 2) a change of mental workload for time. We challenge to evaluate teammates' mental workload in the ship's bridge with R-R interval of subjects' heart rate variability, and we evaluate their mental workloads with the following three steps. 1) To confirm the evaluation of the mental workload of a ship's navigator with R-R interval. 2) To evaluate teamwork with R-R interval in case of an oral presentation at meetings as pre-experiments. 3) To evaluate the teammates' mental workload among ship's bridge team in case of a leaving port. Their results showed that the method using R-R interval was sufficient for the evaluation of teamwork effects.