ABSTRACT
Hypercubes and regular cross polytopes, which are generalizations in higher dimensions, of the cube and the regular octahedron of the third dimension, are not only useful, for example, in the analysis of the partition of Euclidean regions in applications, but also interesting on their own mathematical right. The present note discusses some properties of their degenerate cases in the first and the zeroth dimensions defined through analytical continuations, using Gamma functions and differentiations as tools for their analysis.

ABSTRACT
The number of co-authors for Japanese scholarly papers tends to be larger than that for foreign papers, as is occasionally indicated. This should be attributed to the way of conducting research, and to the cultural and social climate in Japan. The present paper consists of two parts: a report of the results obtained in a preliminary survey on the number of co-authors in abstracting databases; and an essay on Japanese environment for research activities that brings about heavily co-authored papers. The preliminary survey has indeed indicated that Japanese papers have more co-authors than USA papers. However, the variations among fields of research are expected to be substantial, and consideration on designing the complete statistical future survey is discussed. In the second part, characteristics and creativity of co-authored papers, and editorial policy of academic journals, of Japan are compared to those of Western countries through the actual examples. Although advanced electronic media is expected to make joint research be conducted more easily, it may also make the publication more individualized to reflect personal contribution of every researcher.

ABSTRACT
The diagnositc process of physitians has been studied from very early stage of artificiall intelligence research. It seems that physicians perform information acquisition from patients and diagnostic hypothesis generation simultaneously at the first clinical encounter. The authors classify the diagnostic prosess for a first-encounter-patient into seven basic tasks performed simultaneously. According to this model, the author also proposed a framework for parallel prosessing of these tasks on a computer.

ABSTRACT
A new method is proposed for identification of document records in bibliographic databases. In databases, documents are often specified in a format that can be found, for example, in reference list. On the other hand, in information retrieval system it is required to retrieve the most likely record based on insufficient information concerning a specific document given by a user. In this paper, an algorithm to cope with input error, abbriviation and special notation and a method to estimate likelihood of documents are proposed. A core system was implemented to demonstrate these algorithms with syntax analysis software which operates in accordance with this core system. A evaluation was also done, using actual bibliographic records from NACSIS databases and a high rate of identification was achieved with the proposed method.

ABSTRACT
Oohashi et al. have experimentally shown that inaudible high-frequency components in music nevertheless constitute a contributory factor to the pleasure in listening. Based on their findings and some certain facts from auditory physiology and brain science, we critically examine some aspects of musical qualities of analog LP and digital CD records. We then suggest some future research topics and mention some relevant issues of ethnic and cultural heritage.

ABSTRACT
Recent development of chemical information databases, in particular, those of chemical structure and fact databases are discussed. There has been major development in the area of chemical structure search systems, chemical reaction databases, generic structure databases, physical properties data and spectral databases, and biological databases. Database activities in Japan are briefly summarized.

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ABSTRACT
Field surveys on Japanese collections in Korea, Europe and US were conducted to identify the problems as the information sources on contemporary Japanese studies.
The current survey of 9 Chinese institutions was carried out with three points in mind: 1) comparisons with the results of previous surveys, 2) feasibility of union catalogs for Japanese materials, and 3) review of supporting elements such as materials and librarians inseparable from Chinese Japanology. Consequently, characteristics of Chinese Japanology including 1) concerted interest in Japan's modernization, 2) direct access to corresponding Japanese scholarly community, and 3) prominence of Japanese language as the source materials were identified. China has both favorable and unfavorable conditions for construction and maintenance of union catalogs of Chinese materials, whereas, for Japanese materials, some plans are going to be formulated.
International cooperations on union catalog compilation may be feasible. The validity of viewpoint to regard Chinese Japanology as inseparable from its supporting elements may be confirmed by the nature of Japanese studies in China.

ABSTRACT
"Feasibility Study on International Exchange of East Asian Databases'' was a FYs 1989-1991 three-year international research project of the National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS) of Japan, which is one of the Inter-University Research Institutes under the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture (MESC), supported by the grant-in-aid of MESC, as the first phase of the study to stimulate international exchange of scholarly information available in non-alphabetic scripts, in particular, Kanzi (Kanji) in China, Japan and Korea (CJK). The present note describes the objectives, background, methodology, and achievements of the study, and suggests future tasks to be pursued in the second phase of the study.