Tsunami, floods, and other disasters occur frequently in Japan, but people do not have a high awareness of disasters as their own personal concerns. Therefore, in order to increase people’s awareness of their own personal involvement in disasters, we developed a "Smart Hazard Map" (SHM) for smartphones that uses location information to provide information on tsunami and river flooding depth, house damage, time until flooding, and evacuation routes and times from the current location, by individual evacuation method. SHM was tested on 339 students in 2023-2024, 159 of whom responded to four questions; 1) where the app was tested?, 2) Is this app easy to use to make disasters personal?, 3) Which functions are particularly effective? and 4) fHow should the feature be improved? These four questions assess the degree of stakeholder engagement with disasters. The four indicators were: 1) the app was tested at students’ homes more than 60% of the time; 2) the ease of use was rated positively by about 90% of the respondents; 3) the ability to check the new tsunami depth at the current location was rated highly for each function; 4) functional improvements were organized into 11 items. Then the respondents were especially interested in the display of tsunami information. We would like to verify whether more detailed tsunami risk information and multiple evacuation route information would increase the sense of ownership of disasters. We also plan to conduct a questionnaire survey of the elderly and physically-challenged to improve the functionality of the Smart Hazard Map as an application that can be used by everyone.

MOTIVATION: High-density DNA microarrays provide us with useful tools for analyzing DNA and RNA comprehensively. However, the background signal caused by the non-specific binding (NSB) between probe and target makes it difficult to obtain accurate measurements. To remove the background signal, there is a set of background probes on Affymetrix Exon arrays to represent the amount of non-specific signals, and an accurate estimation of non-specific signals using these background probes is desirable for improvement of microarray analyses. RESULTS: We developed a thermodynamic model of NSB on short nucleotide microarrays in which the NSBs are modeled by duplex formation of probes and multiple hypothetical targets. We fitted the observed signal intensities of the background probes with those expected by the model to obtain the model parameters. As a result, we found that the presented model can improve the accuracy of prediction of non-specific signals in comparison with previously proposed methods. This result will provide a useful method to correct for the background signal in oligonucleotide microarray analysis. AVAILABILITY: The software is implemented in the R language and can be downloaded from our website (http://www-shimizu.ist.osaka-u.ac.jp/shimizu_lab/MSNS/).

MOTIVATION: High-density DNA microarrays provide useful tools to analyze gene expression comprehensively. However, it is still difficult to obtain accurate expression levels from the observed microarray data because the signal intensity is affected by complicated factors involving probe-target hybridization, such as non-linear behavior of hybridization, non-specific hybridization, and folding of probe and target oligonucleotides. Various methods for microarray data analysis have been proposed to address this problem. In our previous report, we presented a benchmark analysis of probe-target hybridization using artificially synthesized oligonucleotides as targets, in which the effect of non-specific hybridization was negligible. The results showed that the preceding models explained the behavior of probe-target hybridization only within a narrow range of target concentrations. More accurate models are required for quantitative expression analysis. RESULTS: The experiments showed that finiteness of both probe and target molecules should be considered to explain the hybridization behavior. In this article, we present an extension of the Langmuir model that reproduces the experimental results consistently. In this model, we introduced the effects of secondary structure formation, and dissociation of the probe-target duplex during washing after hybridization. The results will provide useful methods for the understanding and analysis of microarray experiments. AVAILABILITY: The method was implemented for the R software and can be downloaded from our website (http://www-shimizu.ist.osaka-u.ac.jp/shimizu_lab/FHarray/).