In the present study I describe the 150-year history of school-based English language assessment in Japan. This history is divided into four major periods according to the purposes of English language education set by the government in the different periods: (1) 1860 to 1945, when English was first introduced and taught in schools mainly for elite classes; (2) 1945 to 1960's, when English becam...

In the study of what kinds of stimuli do or do not capture attention, one of the most productive ideas has been the notion of contingent capture–that is, that what captures attention depends on your current task goals. Most of this research has been conducted in the context of visual search studies either with or without precues indicating the likely location of the target. We begin with a disc...

Precursor-B cell receptor (pre-BCR) signaling represents a crucial checkpoint at the pre-B cell stage. Aberrant pre-BCR signaling is considered as a key factor for B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (BCP-ALL) development. BCP-ALL are believed to be arrested at the pre-BCR checkpoint independent of pre-BCR expression. However, the cellular stage at which BCP-ALL are arrested and wheth...

This study was dedicated to investigate the predictive value of pre- and post-induction chemotherapy plasma EBV (Epstein-Barr Virus) DNA level and tumor volume for the radiosensitivity of locally advanced NPC. 129 previously untreated locally advanced NPC patients were enrolled. Plasma EBV-DNA copy number and tumor volume was detected before and after induction chemotherapy. The tumor volume wa...

The task of partial copy detection in videos aims at finding if one or more segments of a query video have (transformed) copies in a large dataset. Since collecting and annotating large datasets of real partial copies are extremely time-consuming, previous video copy detection research used either small-scale datasets or large datasets with simulated partial copies by imposing several pre-defin...

Gene amplification is a hallmark of cancer with chromosomal instability although the underlying mechanism by which altered copy numbers are maintained is largely unclear. Cohesin, involved in sister chromatid cohesion, DNA repair, cell cycle progression and transcriptional regulation of key developmental genes, is frequently overexpressed in human cancer. Here we show that cohesin-dependent cha...