Motoyosi Sugita—A “Widely Unknown” Japanese Thermodynamicist Who Explored the 4th Law of Thermodynamics for Creation of the Theory of Life

The purpose of this paper is to introduce to you, the Western people, nowadays a “widely unknown” Japanese thermodynamicist by the name of Motoyosi Sugita and his study on the thermodynamics of transient phenomena and his theory of life. This is because although he was one of the top theoretical physicists in Japan before, during and after WWII and after WWII he promoted the establishment of the biophysical society of Japan as one of the founding members, he himself and his studies themselves have seemed to be totally forgotten nowadays in spite that his study was absolutely important for the study of life. Therefore, in this paper I would like to present what kind of person he was and what he studied in physics as a review on the physics work of Motoyosi Sugita for the first time. I will follow his past studies to introduce his ideas in theoretical physics as well as in biophysics as follows: He proposed the bright ideas such as the quasi-static change in the broad sense, the virtual heat, and the field of chemical potential etc. in order to establish his own theory of thermodynamics of transient phenomena, as the generalization of the Onsager-Prigogine’s theory of the irreversible processes. By the concept of the field of chemical potential that acquired the nonlinear transport, he was seemingly successful to exceed and go beyond the scope of Onsager and Prigogine. Once he established his thermodynamics, he explored the existence of the 4th law of thermodynamics for the foundation of theory of life. He applied it to broad categories of transient phenomena including life and life being such as the theory of metabolism. He regarded the 4th law of thermodynamics as the maximum principle in transient phenomena. He tried to prove it all life long. Since I have recently found that his maximum principle can be included in more general maximum principle, which was known as the Pontryagin’s maximum principle in the theory of optimal control, I would like to explain such theories produced by Motoyosi Sugita as detailed as possible. And also I have put short history of Motoyosi Sugita’s personal life in order for you to know him well. I hope that this article helps you to know this wonderful man and understand what he did in the past, which was totally forgotten in the world and even in Japan.

What Makes Homeowners Consider Protective Actions to Reduce Disaster Risk?An Application of the Precaution Adoption Process Model and Life Course Theory

We hypothesize that for disaster risk mitigation,many households,despite being aware of their risk and possible mitigation actions,never seriously consider doing anything about them.In mitigation-focused decisions,since there is no equivalent to warning messages,the decision process is likely to evolve over an extended time.We explore what activates hurricane mitigation protective action decisions through three research questions:(1)to what extent are homeowners unengaged in protective action decision making?(2)What homeowner characteristics are associated with lack of engagement?And(3)to what extent do different life events trigger engagement in the decision-making process?We use the Precaution Adoption Process Model to conceptualize engagement as distinct from decision making;the broader protective action decision-making literature to explore drivers of engagement;and Life Course Theory to examine potential transitions from unengaged to engaged.We use survey data of homeowners in North Carolina to examine these questions empirically.Findings suggest that one-third of respondents had never engaged in protective action decisions,that life experiences differ in their occurrence frequency and effect on households’mitigation decisions,and that some events,such as renovating,reroofing,or purchasing a home may offer critical moments that could be leveraged to encourage greater engagement in mitigation decision making.

Progress in Theoretical Research on Reliability for China's Space Engineering

With the support of the Fundamental Reliability Theoretical Research (FRTR) Foundation of the Quality Control Bureau of Ministry of Astronautics (MOA), PRC, 9 Chinese institutes and universities have worked for years on reliability statistics problems pending to be solved in space research and development. This paper gives a brief review of our main research results, including (1) Results on Normal Distributions; (2) Results on Weibull Distributions; (3) Results on the Synthesisof System Reliability-Theoretical Method; (4) Results on the Synthesis of System Reliability-Approximation Method: Binomial Distribution, Exponential Distribution, Weibull Distribution, Parallel System, General Cases; (5) Structual Reliability; (6) Zero-Failure Reliability Estimation; (7) Storage Life and Others. All these results can be acquired from the Quality Control Bureau of the Ministry of Aero-Space Industry (MAS).