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The purpose of this paper is to review the life of the famous mathematician Kiyosi Itô and discuss his influence on the study of agricultural finance and agricultural economics.

This paper is a qualitative historical review.

The paper provides a biographical stretch of Itô's life. It is shown that his influence started to infiltrate the agricultural economics profession at around 1985 and is currently a major influence of a range of economic issues from farm policy to agricultural investments.

The biography is limited to a review of Itô's academic life and influence.

The paper offers a historical perspective on how probability emerged as a critical piece of the economic puzzle. For scholars and practitioners of agricultural finance, the paper provides an in depth review of how Itô processes have, and can, be used.

This paper provides a historical perspective on Itô that is of use to students and scholars of rural credit. This is the first “biography” of Itô to discuss his influence on agricultural finance and agricultural economics.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a general discussion of how techniques from financial engineering can be used to investigate the economic costs of farm programs and to aid in the design of new financial products to implement margin protection for dairy farmers. Specifically the paper investigates the Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) and the Dairy Margin Protection (DMP) program. In addition the paper introduces the concept of the Milk to Corn Price ratio to protect margins.

The paper introduces and reviews the tools of financial engineering. These include the stochastic calculus and Itô's Lemma. The empirical tool is Monte Carlo simulations. The approach is part pedagogy and part practice.

In this paper the authors illustrate how financial engineering can be used to price complex price stabilization formula in the USA and to illustrate its use in the design of new products.

In this paper the authors illustrate how financial engineering can be used to price complex price stabilization formula in the USA and to illustrate its use in the design of new products.

Farm programs designed to protect dairy farmers margins are designed in a seemingly ad hoc fashion. Assessments of programs such as MILC or DMP are conducted on an ex-post basis using historical data. The financial engineering approach presented in this paper provides the means to add significant depth to the assessment of such programs which can be used in conjunction with Monte Carlo simulation to identify alternative model structures before they are written into law.

This paper builds upon an existing literature. Its originality is in the application of financial engineering techniques to farm dairy policy.

I discuss Eleanor Westney’s significant contributions to the field of Japanese business studies in four regards. First, her genuine interest in Japan and her deep knowledge of Japan and its language drove her thorough investigation of Japanese business and management. Second, her disciplinary approach to Japanese business and society has added value to the studies of Japanese businesses by linking idiosyncratic phenomena to general sociological perspectives. Third, she played a bridging role, facilitating interactions between the Western and Japanese academic communities. Finally, she has been extremely positive, encouraging, and inspiring to people worldwide working in the field. Westney’s contribution to academia clearly reaches beyond the field of Japanese business studies and extends to the entire field of international business and R&D/innovation management.

The application of objective measurement of the mechanical properties of fabrics in the apparel industry began around 1975 in the Hirakata area, which is one of the centres of men's suit production in Japan. At that time the KESF system had been developed and thereafter spread rapidly. The measurement of mechanical data under low‐load level by the KESF provided useful information for the apparel engineers who needed some means of fabric measurement by which the tailoring process might be controlled. The fabric dimensional stability testing using steam press was also standardised at that time (HESC 103A method). At present, the KESF data and the stability data are essential for apparel engineers and are used widely in the Japanese apparel industry. In addition to the use of objective measurements in each factory, a centre for objective fabric inspection has been recently initiated in the Hirakata area, for the inspection and control of fabric by the objective system for tailoring process control. In addition, a co‐operative work between the apparel engineers and the university has been carried out to develop a new equation for predicting the good appearance of a suit on the basis of fabric mechanical data. Automatic tailoring such as automatic overfeed action on the basis of fabric mechanical property is also carried out under the co‐operation of the university, the apparel industry, and a sewing machine manufacturer (Juki) in Hirakata. The progress of these projects is presented.

As companies grow and increase the number of products they have on offer, they generally change and adapt their organizational structures, in order to arrange their resources and product mix in ways that will create value. We analyze various corporate structures that have been adopted by U.S., European, and Japanese companies, in the context of the resource‐based view of the firm. These corporate structures include functional, divisional, conglomerate diversification, core competence‐based diversification, and keiretsu. We also identify an emerging structure. This recent development is a network of alliances, aimed at pursuing economies of scale, scope, and speed.

The relationship between parent firms and their subsidiaries is a crucial aspect of corporate governance, and is increasingly complex in the global environment. We analyze an organizational arrangement quite common in Japan, the corporate spinoff, focusing on the relationship between parent firms in the Japanese service sector and their spinoff subsidiaries. The level of parental ownership is negatively related to the parent firm's net income and number of subsidiaries, but positively related to its advertising expenditures. In addition, parent firms tend to have lower ownership of more profitable subsidiaries. The ownership arrangement between the parent and the subsidiary appears to be based on issues broader than direct profit maximization.

This paper aims to present a preliminary experimental result on a large-scale experiment on a cyber-physical hybrid discussion support environment in a panel discussion session in an international conference.

In this paper, the authors propose a hybrid (cyber-physical) environment in which people can discuss online and also offline simultaneously. The authors conducted a large-scale experiment in a panel discussion session in an international conference where participants can discuss by using their online discussion support system and by physical communications as usual.

The authors analyzed the obtained date from the following three viewpoints: participants’ cyber-physical attention, keywords cyber-physical linkage and cyber-physical discussion flow. These three viewpoints indicate that the methodology of the authors can be effective to support hybrid large-scale discussions.

Online large-scale discussion has been focused as a new methodology that enable people to discuss, argue and make consensus in terms of political issues, social complex problems (like climate change), city planning and so on. In several cases, the authors found that online discussions are very effective to gather people opinions and discussions so far. Moreover, this paper proposes a hybrid (cyber-physical) environment in which people can discuss online and also offline simultaneously.

Although much research work has been performed on the liquid sloshing inside simple cylindrical vessels, this paper deals with the analysis of the liquid sloshing in the annular region of more intricate coaxial circular cylinders. In this analysis, by utilizing the velocity potential theory, the transient response was formulated as a boundary value problem in the axisymmetrical vessels when the sine wave in resonance with the sloshing of the primary mode was applied.

The experience of the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science with the use of Kawabata Evaluation System for Fabrics (KES‐F) since 1984 and more recently, 1988, with the Fabric Assurance by Simple Testing (FAST) is described. Although previous projects have involved the effect of chemical and mechanical finishing and sponging on the hand and mechanical properties of fabrics, the major emphasis here correlates the processability of fabrics in tailored clothing manufacturing, especially in manually operated overfeed sewing, with the tensile‐elongation and shear properties of these fabrics. It is anticipated that programmable sewing machines will require instructions based on the mechanical properties of the fabrics being processed.