Has Japan's Long-term employment Practice Survived? New Evidence Emerging Since the 1990s

What happened to the traditional, long-term employment practices in Japan after the 1990s has remained unexplored. We take advantage of a micro data set from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure to provide new evidence regarding the years of tenure for Japanese male workers after a decade-long recession. While the practice of long-term employment is still alive among the workers who are already in the system, the proportion of workers who are not covered by the system has increased. These ongoing phenomena contribute to the bipolarization in the Japanese labor market.long-term employment practice, Japan, Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux decomposition

α-Smooth muscle actin expression in cancerassociated fibroblasts in canine epithelial tumors

Tumor tissues contain not only cancer cells but also other cell types including, fibroblasts, immune cells, and endothelial cells, which interact with cancer cells. In human medicine, cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) have been reported to promote tumor growth. CAFs are known to express α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA), and this expression is correlated with poor prognosis in humans with cancer. However, the role of CAFs in canines and α-SMA expression in canine CAFs remains unknown. This study evaluated whether CAFs are present within the stroma of various types of canine epithelial tumors, for example, mammary gland tumors, squamous cell carcinoma, and anal sac adenocarcinoma, and assessed α-SMA expression in CAFs isolated from canine epithelial tumors. α-SMA analysis of tumor tissues revealed a cytoplasmic localization with variable levels of expression. α-SMA was detected in 60.9% (14/23) of epithelial tumor tissues and in 80% (8/10) of anal sac adenocarcinoma tissues. CAFs and normal fibroblasts (NFs) were isolated from tumor and skin tissues. The size of CAFs was variable, and most CAFs had large cell volume, in contrast to NFs. Most CAFs expressed α-SMA stress fibers and had higher α-SMA protein levels than NFs. Taken together, our findings provide evidence that canine CAFs express α-SMA in various canine epithelial tumors. Further studies are required to investigate the correlation between canine CAFs and clinical parameters and to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the effects of CAFs on cancer progression

Reaction pathway analysis for dislocation nucleation from a Ni surface step

Abstract Threshold strain required for a thermally activated dislocation nucleation from a Ni surface step has been measured using an atomistic-based reaction pathway analysis. We show that the saddle-point configuration and the stress-dependent activation energy are strongly influenced by the presence of a surface step. Our results provide insight into the previous experimental findings concerning the mechanism on a coherency loss at the Ni/Cu(001) interface. We conclude that the coherency strain caused by a lattice mismatch between Ni and Cu does not yield a sufficient driving force for the dislocation nucleation

Spatial profiles of collimated laser Compton-scattering γ\gamma-ray beams

The intensity and energy spatial distributions of collimated laser Compton scattering (LCS) $\gamma$-ray beams and of the associated bremsstrahlung beams have been investigated as functions of the electron beam energy, electron beam phase space distribution, laser optics conditions and laser polarization. We show that the beam halo is affected to different extents by variations in the above listed parameters. In the present work, we have used laser Compton scattering simulations performed with the \texttt{eliLaBr} code (https://github.com/dan-mihai-filipescu/eliLaBr) and real LCS and bremsstrahlung $\gamma$-ray beams produced at the NewSUBARU synchrotron radiation facility. A 500~$\mu$m MiniPIX X-ray camera was used as beamspot monitor in a wide $\gamma$-ray beam energy range between 1.73~MeV and 38.1~MeV

Star Formation Activity Beyond the Outer Arm II: Distribution and Properties of Star Formation

The outer Galaxy beyond the Outer Arm represents a promising opportunity to study star formation in an environment vastly different from the solar neighborhood. In our previous study, we identified 788 candidate star-forming regions in the outer Galaxy (at galactocentric radii $R_{\rm G}$ $\ge$ 13.5 kpc) based on Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mid-infrared (MIR) all-sky survey. In this paper, we investigate the statistical properties of the candidates and their parental molecular clouds derived from the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory (FCRAO) CO survey. We show that the molecular clouds with candidates have a shallower slope of cloud mass function, a larger fraction of clouds bound by self-gravity, and a larger density than the molecular clouds without candidates. To investigate the star formation efficiency (SFE) at different $R_{\rm G}$, we used two parameters: 1) the fraction of molecular clouds with candidates and 2) the monochromatic MIR luminosities of candidates per parental molecular cloud mass. We did not find any clear correlation between SFE parameters and $R_{\rm G}$ at $R_{\rm G}$ of 13.5 kpc to 20.0 kpc, suggesting that the SFE is independent of environmental parameters such as metallicity and gas surface density, which vary considerably with $R_{\rm G}$. Previous studies reported that the SFE per year (SFE/yr) derived from the star-formation rate surface density per total gas surface density, HI plus H$_2$, decreases with increased $R_{\rm G}$. Our results might suggest that the decreasing trend is due to a decrease in HI gas conversion to H$_2$ gas.Comment: 40 pages, 26 figures, 5 tables, accepted for publication in Ap