• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.35-55
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• 2013

Information technology is a critical resource necessary for any company hoping to support and realize its strategic goals, which contribute to growth promotion and sustainable development. The selection of information technology and its strategic use are imperative for the enhanced performance of every aspect of company management, leading a wide range of companies to have invested continuously in information technology. Despite researchers, managers, and policy makers' keen interest in how information technology contributes to organizational performance, there is uncertainty and debate about the result of information technology investment. In other words, researchers and managers cannot easily identify the independent factors that can impact the investment performance of information technology. This is mainly owing to the fact that many factors, ranging from the internal components of a company, strategies, and external customers, are interconnected with the investment performance of information technology. Using an agent-based simulation technique, this research extracts factors expected to affect investment performance on information technology, simplifies the analyses of their relationship with economic modeling, and examines the performance dependent on changes in the factors. In terms of economic modeling, I expand the model that highlights the way in which product quality moderates the relationship between information technology investments and economic performance (Thatcher and Pingry, 2004) by considering the cost of information technology investment and the demand creation resulting from product quality enhancement. For quality enhancement and its consequences for demand creation, I apply the concept of information quality and decision-maker quality (Raghunathan, 1999). This concept implies that the investment on information technology improves the quality of information, which, in turn, improves decision quality and performance, thus enhancing the level of product or service quality. Additionally, I consider the effect of word of mouth among consumers, which creates new demand for a product or service through the information diffusion effect. This demand creation is analyzed with an agent-based simulation model that is widely used for network analyses. Results show that the investment on information technology enhances the quality of a company's product or service, which indirectly affects the economic performance of that company, particularly with regard to factors such as consumer surplus, company profit, and company productivity. Specifically, when a company makes its initial investment in information technology, the resultant increase in the quality of a company's product or service immediately has a positive effect on consumer surplus, but the investment cost has a negative effect on company productivity and profit. As time goes by, the enhancement of the quality of that company's product or service creates new consumer demand through the information diffusion effect. Finally, the new demand positively affects the company's profit and productivity. In terms of the investment strategy for information technology, this study's results also reveal that the selection of information technology needs to be based on analysis of service and the network effect of customers, and demonstrate that information technology implementation should fit into the company's business strategy. Specifically, if a company seeks the short-term enhancement of company performance, it needs to have a one-shot strategy (making a large investment at one time). On the other hand, if a company seeks a long-term sustainable profit structure, it needs to have a split strategy (making several small investments at different times). The findings from this study make several contributions to the literature. In terms of methodology, the study integrates both economic modeling and simulation technique in order to overcome the limitations of each methodology. It also indicates the mediating effect of product quality on the relationship between information technology and the performance of a company. Finally, it analyzes the effect of information technology investment strategies and information diffusion among consumers on the investment performance of information technology.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.156-162
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• 2008

Salmonellosis is a major bacterial zoonosis that causes a variety of disease syndromes, self-limited enteritis to fatal infection in animals and food-borne infection and typhoid fever in humans. Recently, the emergence of multidrug resistant strains of Salmonella spp. causes more serious problems in environment and public health. The present study was investigated the antibacterial effect of Houttuynia cordata ethanol extract(HCEE) for murine salmonellosis. In the cytotoxic effect of HCEE on RAW 264.7 cells, there was no detectable effect with any concentrations between 25 and 100 ${\mu}g/ml$ after 8 h incubation. The bacteriocidal effect of HCEE was not showed on a Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium(S. typhimurium). HCEE makes morphological change of the RAW 264.7 cells, and there was significant decreased bacterial uptake and intracellular replication within Salmonella infected cells. And further nitric oxide(NO) production of Salmonella infected RAW 264.7 cells with HCEE was decreased comparing to RAW 264.7 cells without HCEE until 8 h post infection. Oral administration of HCEE showed a therapeutic effect for S. typhimurium infected BALB/c mice. The mortality of HCEE treated mouse was 80% until 12 days, while that of HCEE untreated mouse was 100 % until 8 days after lethal dose of S. typhimurium infection. These data suggested that HCEE has a potency treatment for intracellular replicative pathogen including salmonellosis, brucellosis, tuberculosis, listeriosis etc., and the application of HCEE makes new strategies for safety medicine development without antibiotic resistance bacterial appearance and residue problem in food and solves the public health problem from antibiotic mis- and over use.

• Korean Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.459-473
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• 2012

This study evaluated the rainfall-runoff characteristics of Non-point Pollution Source (NPS) of the impervious area through on-site monitoring. In this study, trend analysis was performed by various runoff analysis method of non-point pollution source. The characteristics of rainfall at impervious area appeared to be influenced by rainfall strength. It is judged that the measure is required to be prepared against that now that concentration difference of non-point pollution source appeared to be big by precedent number of days of no rainfall. However, it appeared that Rainfall Sustaining Time (RST) has nothing to do with effluent concentration of non-point pollution source, however, the rising tendency that effluent concentration did not appear because the tendency that concentration of non-point pollution source reduces more than 50% within initial 60 min due to first flushing effects and rainfall sustaining time is long. If looking into the outflow tendency of non-point pollution source at the impervious area, it showed the tendency that the concentration lowers gradually as time goes by after initial concentration appeared very high. However, it could be recognized that the concentration of non-point pollution source appeared to be high as the pollutants integrated on the surface of the road during dry season. The Event Mean Concentrations (EMCs) in impervious area were ranged $9.2{\sim}199.3mg{\cdot}L^{-1}$ for TSS, $8.1{\sim}24.2mg{\cdot}L^{-1}$ for $COD_{Mn}$, $0.070{\sim}1.860mg{\cdot}L^{-1}$ for T-N. Based on such runoff characteristics of non-point pollution source, it is judged that it would be desirable to process initial rain efficiently as the measure against initial rain phenomenon at the impervious area.

• Atmosphere
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.471-481
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• 2007

Temperature and precipitation, particularly August and summer, in the Korean peninsular are analyzed. The analyzed period is 1973-2007 for the Korean peninsular (that is, 60 meteorological station average). In addition, 100 year record (1908-2007) of temperature and precipitation in Seoul are also analyzed. Results indicate that the temperatures (mean, maximun, and minimum) of August and summer of 2007, both in Korean peninsular and Seoul, are higher than normal. The increasing rate of minimum temperature for the August and summer during the period from 1973 to 2007 shows greater than the mean and maximum temperature both in Korean peninsular and Seoul due to the global warming and urbanization. Number of tropical night days, defined by the days with above $25^{\circ}C$ in minimum temperature, shows increasing trend both in August and summer from 1973 to 2007 due to the combination effect of the global warming and urbanization. The amount of precipitation, both in August and summer, for Korean peninsular and Seoul shows increasing trend from 1973 to 2007, and 1908 to 2007, respectively. Amount of precipitation and rainy days, both August and summer, during 2000s show greater than those of the 1970s both in Korean peninsular and Seoul. Extreme rainy days (greater than 120mm/day, greater than 80mm/day, greater than 30mm in any 1-hour period and greater than 10mm in any 10-minute period) show increasing trend from 1973 to 2007 for both in August and in summer.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.305-316
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• 2011

Recommender system is the system which, by using automated information filtering technology, recommends products or services to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Those systems are widely used in many different Web retailers such as Amazon.com, Netfix.com, and CDNow.com. Various recommender systems have been developed. Among them, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been known as the most successful and commonly used approach. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. However, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting in advance whether the performance of CF recommender system is acceptable or not is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose a decision making guideline which helps decide whether CF is adoptable for a given application with certain transaction data characteristics. Several previous studies reported that sparsity, gray sheep, cold-start, coverage, and serendipity could affect the performance of CF, but the theoretical and empirical justification of such factors is lacking. Recently there are many studies paying attention to Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method to analyze social relationships among people. SNA is a method to measure and visualize the linkage structure and status focusing on interaction among objects within communication group. CF analyzes the similarity among previous ratings or purchases of each customer, finds the relationships among the customers who have similarities, and then uses the relationships for recommendations. Thus CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. Under the assumption that SNA could facilitate an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in transaction data for CF recommendations, we focus on density, clustering coefficient, and centralization which are ones of the most commonly used measures to capture topological properties of the social network structure. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. We explore how these SNA measures affect the performance of CF performance and how they interact to each other. Our experiments used sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well?known department stores in Korea. Total 396 data set were sampled to construct various types of social networks. The dependant variable measuring process consists of three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used UCINET 6.0 for SNA. The experiments conducted the 3-way ANOVA which employs three SNA measures as dependant variables, and the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure as an independent variable. The experiments report that 1) each of three SNA measures affects the recommendation accuracy, 2) the density's effect to the performance overrides those of clustering coefficient and centralization (i.e., CF adoption is not a good decision if the density is low), and 3) however though the density is low, the performance of CF is comparatively good when the clustering coefficient is low. We expect that these experiment results help firms decide whether CF recommender system is adoptable for their business domain with certain transaction data characteristics.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.220-229
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• 2009

Strain improvement and morphology investigation in bioreactor cultures were undertaken in suspended cultures of Phellinus linteus mycelia for mass production of protein-bound polysaccharides(soluble ${\beta}$-D-glucan), a powerful immuno-stimulating agent. Phellineus sp. screened for this research was identified as Phellinus linteues through ITS rDNA sequencing method and blast search, demonstrating 99.7% similarity to other Phellinus linteus strains. Intensive strain improvement program was carried out by obtaining large amounts of protoplasts for the isolation of single cell colonies. Rapid and large screening of high-yielding producers was possible because large numbers of protoplasts ($1{\times}10^5{\sim}10^6\;protoplasts/ml$) formed using the banding filtration method with the cell wall-disrupting enzymes could be regenerated in relatively high regeneration frequency($10^{-2}{\sim}10^{-3}$) in the newly developed regeneration medium. It was demonstrated that the strains showing high performances in the protoplast regeneration and solid growth medium were able to produce 5.8~6.4%(w/w) of ${\beta}$-D-glucan and 13~15 g/L of biomass in stable manners in suspended shake-flask cultures of P. linteus mycelia. In addition, cell mass increase was observed to be the most important in order to enhance ${\beta}$-D-glucan productivity during the course of strain improvement program, since the amount of ${\beta}$-D-glucan extracted from the cell wall of P. linteus mycelia was almost constant on the unit biomass basis. Therefore we fully investigated the fungal cell morphology, generally known as one of the key factors affecting cell growth extent in the bioreactor cultures of mycelial fungal cells. It was found that, in order to obtain as high cell mass as possible in the final production bioreactor cultures, the producing cells should be proliferated in condensed filamentous forms in the growth cultures, and optimum amounts of these filamentous cells should be transferred as active inoculums to the production bioreactor. In this case, ideal morphologies consisting of compacted pellets less than 0.5mm in diameter were successfully induced in the production cultures, resulting in shorter period of lag phase, 1.5 fold higher specific cell growth rate and 3.3 fold increase in the final biomass production as compared to the parallel bioreactor cultures of different morphological forms. It was concluded that not only the high-yielding but also the good morphological characteristics led to the significantly higher biomass production and ${\beta}$-D-glucan productivity in the final production cultures.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.1-34
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• 1978

On July 8, 1977, 432mm of precipitation which is the largest daily storm in Korea fell on the city of Anyang where a nearby suburban community of Seoul. Average storm intensities of 90mm per hour were recorded during the period from 1900~2200 hours on this date. Area of landslides triggered by this storm is about 96 hectares resulting from 1,876 places within about 12,600 hectares of the watershed studied. These hazards injured hundreds of human lives and took 122 human lives. Rail and highway systems were disrupted and about 30 hectares of rice paddies were washed away and hundreds of hectares were inundated. About 500 houses were destroyed. The objectives of this study are (a) to describe the problem areas, identifying critical factors causing the landslide hazards including earth and stone-debris avalanches, (b) suggest measures which might enhance the effectiveness of stabilization measures, and (c) also suggest the landslide and flood damage prevention methods from the point view of the upper-watershed conservation techniques in Anyang hollow-basin.

• Neonatal Medicine
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.154-162
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• 2009

Purpose: Death is an important problem for physicians and parents in neonatal intensive care unit. This study was intended to evaluate the mortality rate, causes of death, and the change of mortality rate by year for infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit. Methods: We retrospectively surveyed the medical records of the infants who were admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit at Asan Medical Center and who died before discharge between 1998 and 2007. Gestational age, birth weight, gender, time to death and the underlying diseases related to the causes of infant deaths and obtained from the medical records and analyzed according to year. Results: A total of 6,289 infants were admitted and 264 infants died during the study period. The overall mortality rate was 4.2%. For very low and extremely low birth weight infants, the mortality rate was 10.6% and 21.4%, respectively. There was no significant change in the mortality rate during the study period. Prematurity related complications and congenital anomalies were the conditions most frequently associated with death in the neonatal intensive care unit. of the infant deaths 37.1% occurred within the first week of life. Conclusion: Even though a remarkable improvement in neonatal intensive care has been achieved in recent years, the overall mortality rate has not changed. To reduce the mortality rate, it is important to control sepsis and prevent premature births. The first postnatal week is a critical period for deaths in the neonatal intensive care unit.

• Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.23-33
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• 2021

In Korea, many reservoirs have been built for the purpose of solving the food shortage problem and supplying agricultural water. However, the current 75.6% of the reservoirs are in serious aged as more than 50 years have passed since the year of construction. In the case of such an aging reservoir, the stability due to scour and erosion inside the reservoir is very reduced, and if concentrated rainfall due to recent abnormal weather occurs, the aging reservoir may collapse, leading to a lot of damage to property and human life. Accordingly, each agency that manages aging reservoirs uses Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) as an injection material and applies the grouting method. However, in the case of OPC, it may deteriorate over time and water leakage may occur again. And there are environmental problems such as consumption of natural resources and generation of greenhouse gases. So, there is a need to develop new materials and methods that can replace the OPC. In this study, an laboratory test and analysis were performed on the grout material developed to induce a curing reaction similar to that of OPC by recycling power plant byproduct. In addition, test in the field such as electric resistivity survey, Standard Penetration Test (SPT), and field permeability test were performed to analyzed to reinforcement effect and determine the possibility of using instead of OPC. As a results of the test, in the case of recycled power plant byproduct, the compressive strength was 2.9 to 3.2 times and the deformation modulus was 2.3 to 3.3 times higher, indicating that it is excellent in strength and can be used instead of OPC. And it was analyzed that the N value of the reservoir was increased by 1~2, and the coefficient of permeability (k) decreased to the level of 8.9~42.5%. showing sufficient reinforcing effect in terms of order.

• Korean Journal of Heritage: History & Science
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.66-79
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• 2022

In the mid-Kofun period, the technology employed in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula had reached the Japanese archipelago, and a Japanese-style unglazed earthenware called Sueki was produced. During the early period of the spread of technology, regional elements from all over the Korean Peninsula remained strong, with production on the Japanese archipelago carried out only in very limited regions. After that, production in all parts of the archipelago began gradually. The Sueki culture was introduced to the Japanese archipelago with the technology of the Korean Peninsula; however, many excavations have been reported in the Korean Peninsula(these excavations are even called Suekitype). Many of these excavations were conducted in Jeolla-do, Yeongnam, and the Yeongsan River basin. As revealed in previous studies, however, many imitations were excavated around Jeolla-do, while Sueki of the Japanese archipelago were excavated from tombs in the Yeongnam area. The excavation period was generally from the late 5^th century to the early 6^th century(especially from the TK23 to MT15 stage), which is fundamentally different from that of Jeolla-do. Regarding the locations where Sueki were excavated, the majority were found in the tombs of local authorities. They were rarely excavated from the tombs of the royal people. Furthermore, there is no evidence of special meaning given to funeral ceremonies or Sueki in the Japanese archipelago form; therefore, most of them are thought to have been treated the same as unglazed earthenware. Considering the tombs as a whole, influential people(groups, families, and forces) were not only connected to certain areas of the Gaya region but also had complex and larger relationships. In other words, the Sueki excavated from the Yeongnam area may reflect the rise and fall of the forces in each Gaya region and the changes of the Yeongnam period. The role of negotiation and exchange can be seen not only from the fact that influential people in the central government of the Gaya region were involved but also from the existence of areas(groups, families, forces) discovered in the Gaya region indicating mutual relationships.