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

Factors Promoting Speech: Analysis of Output During Discussion Activities

Sixty-one junior high school students in Japan participated twice in an online English group conversation lesson. At the first half of a session, each student gave an individual presentation to a Filipino instructor and the other group members. At the second half of the session, they conducted discussions, where the instructor, as the facilitator, asked each student relevant questions. The present study first determined if there would be a change in the maximum number of words spoken in discussions between the first and second online English conversation lessons. As the result of a statistical analysis for the discussions, there was a significant difference between the maximum number of words spoken during the two discussions. Since a significant change was admitted, a further discussion was conducted to clarify the reasons for the change. The factors of the increase in words spoken were discussed in terms of willingness to communicate, having things to communicate, anxiety, confidence, and instructors’ intervention. All of them were thought to affect the increase. The findings suggest that (1) it is important to set some activities for students to strengthen their own opinions about topics in advance and (2) it is effective not to end with a single practice but to provide at least two opportunities for the output and interaction with others

Generation of Alfven Waves by Magnetic Reconnection

In this paper, results of 2.5-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical simulations are reported for the magnetic reconnection of non-perfectly antiparallel magnetic fields. The magnetic field has a component perpendicular to the computational plane, that is, guide field. The angle theta between magnetic field lines in two half regions is a key parameter in our simulations whereas the initial distribution of the plasma is assumed to be simple; density and pressure are uniform except for the current sheet region. Alfven waves are generated at the reconnection point and propagate along the reconnected field line. The energy fluxes of the Alfven waves and magneto-acoustic waves (slow mode and fast mode) generated by the magnetic reconnection are measured. Each flux shows the similar time evolution independent of theta. The percentage of the energies (time integral of energy fluxes) carried by the Alfven waves and magneto-acoustic waves to the released magnetic energy are calculated. The Alfven waves carry 38.9%, 36.0%, and 29.5% of the released magnetic energy at the maximum (theta=80^\circ) in the case of beta=0.1, 1, and 20 respectively, where beta is the plasma beta (the ratio of gas pressure to magnetic pressure). The magneto-acoustic waves carry 16.2% (theta=70^\circ), 25.9% (theta=60^\circ), and 75.0% (theta=180^\circ) of the energy at the maximum. Implications of these results for solar coronal heating and acceleration of high-speed solar wind are discussed.Comment: Accepted for publication in PASJ. 24 pages, 11 figure

Spontaneous regression of a cystic peripancreatic tumor in a 12-year-old boy: A case report

AbstractWe present a case of spontaneous regression of a cystic peripancreatic tumor in a 12-year-old boy. The cystic tumor was initially suspected to be a pancreatic pseudocyst associated with traumatic pancreatic damage. However, the differential diagnosis included the possibility of lymphatic malformation in view of the clinical and image findings. In anticipation of spontaneous regression, the patient has been followed without treatment. Elective drainage is available but fortunately the cyst has shown no sign of expansion. Close surveillance may be a treatment option for a cystic peripancreatic tumor

Identification of putative domain linkers by a neural network – application to a large sequence database

BACKGROUND: The reliable dissection of large proteins into structural domains represents an important issue for structural genomics/proteomics projects. To provide a practical approach to this issue, we tested the ability of neural network to identify domain linkers from the SWISSPROT database (101602 sequences). RESULTS: Our search detected 3009 putative domain linkers adjacent to or overlapping with domains, as defined by sequence similarity to either Protein Data Bank (PDB) or Conserved Domain Database (CDD) sequences. Among these putative linkers, 75% were "correctly" located within 20 residues of a domain terminus, and the remaining 25% were found in the middle of a domain, and probably represented failed predictions. Moreover, our neural network predicted 5124 putative domain linkers in structurally un-annotated regions without sequence similarity to PDB or CDD sequences, which suggest to the possible existence of novel structural domains. As a comparison, we performed the same analysis by identifying low-complexity regions (LCR), which are known to encode unstructured polypeptide segments, and observed that the fraction of LCRs that correlate with domain termini is similar to that of domain linkers. However, domain linkers and LCRs appeared to identify different types of domain boundary regions, as only 32% of the putative domain linkers overlapped with LCRs. CONCLUSION: Overall, our study indicates that the two methods detect independent and complementary regions, and that the combination of these methods can substantially improve the sensitivity of the domain boundary prediction. This finding should enable the identification of novel structural domains, yielding new targets for large scale protein analyses

行動活性が閾値下うつのデフォルトモードネットワーク結合に及ぼす影響 : 安静時fMRIを用いた予備的検討

広島大学(Hiroshima University)博士(医学)Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Sciencedoctora