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Characteristics of Environmental Factors and Vegetation Community of Zabelia tyaihyonii (Nakai) Hisauti & H.Hara among the Target Plant Species for Conservation in Baekdudaegan (백두대간 중점보전종인 댕강나무의 식생 군집 및 환경인자 특성)

  • Kim, Ji-Dong;Lee, Hye-Jeong;Lee, Dong-Hyuk;Byeon, Jun Gi;Park, Byeong Joo;Heo, Tae-Im
    • Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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    • v.111 no.2
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    • pp.201-223
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    • 2022
  • Currently, species extinctions are increasing due to climate change and continued anthropogenic impact. We selected 300 species for conservation with emphasis on plants co-occurring in the Baekdudaegan area, which is a large ecological axis of Korea. We aimed to investigate the vegetation community and environmental characteristics of Zabelia tyaihyonii in the limestone habitat among the target plant species in the Baekdudaegan region to derive effective conservation strategies. In Danyang-gun, Yeongwol-gun, and Jecheon-si, we selected 36 investigation sites where Z. tyaihyonii was present. We investigated the vegetation, flora, soil and physical environment. We also found notable plants such as Thalictrum petaloideum, Sillaphyton podagraria, and Neillia uekii at the investigation sites. We classified forest vegetation community types into 4 vegetation units and 7 species group types. With canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) of the vegetation community and habitat factors, we determined the overall explanatory power to be 75.2%, and we classified the environmental characteristics of the habitat of Z. tyaihyonii into a grouping of three. Among these, we detected a relationship between the environmental factors elevation, slope, organic matter, rock ratio, pH, potassium, and sodium. We identified numerous rare and endemic plants, including Thalictrum petaloideum, in the investigation site, and determined that these groups needed to be preserved at the habitat level. In the classification of the vegetation units analyzed based on the emerging plants and the CCA, we reaffirmed the uniqueness and specificity of the vegetation community in the habitat of Z. tyaihyonii. We anticipate that our results will be used as scientific evidence for the empirical conservation of the native habitats of Z. tyaihyonii.

A Study on the Difficulties Faced by High School Science Teachers in Operating LMO Laboratories (고등학교 LMO 실험실 운영에서 과학교사가 갖는 어려움에 관한 연구)

  • Seongjae Lee;Jiwon Yeo;Sang-Hak Jeon
    • Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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    • v.43 no.1
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    • pp.1-15
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    • 2023
  • As the social and economic value of living modified organisms (LMOs) increase, so do the potential risks they pose to humans and the environment. Therefore, all laboratories using LMOs must establish an LMO laboratory in accordance with the standards required by regulations. Recently, in high school, LMO-related experimental programs have been developed for their educational effects. Also, in this case, it is necessary to comply with the regulation for LMO laboratories. However, high schools are still unfamiliar with the LMO laboratory, and it is difficult for teachers to manage an LMO laboratory because its implementation applies the same standards to general research institutes. In this study, we used causal chain analysis to discover the difficulties each teacher faced while setting up an LMO laboratory by examining three cases. The difficulties experienced by teachers are as follows: the first problem is "reluctance to set up an LMO laboratory," because of "administrative tasks for laboratory registration" and "difficulty in persuading colleagues." The second problem is a difficulty for teachers to operate LMO laboratory in blind spots, due to "inflexible installation and closure," "medical waste disposal," and "LMO education that does not fit the school context." Through this study, although the difficulty of running an LMO laboratory is caused by a lack of necessity and insufficient consideration of the school context, the more fundamental cause was a lack of collaborative planning between the educational field and the operating institutions. The teachers who participate in this research suggest that "using shared LAB" and "preparing opportunities for knowledge sharing" can be considered as strategies for operating the school's LMO laboratory. We feel that this study will provide a useful reference for teachers or schools planning to build an LMO laboratory.

The Study of the Foundation of Establishing the Value of the Unification of the Korean Peninsula in Muliticultural Society of Korea -focused on a possibility of the mulitucultural conception of culture and emotion (한국 다문화 사회에서 한반도 통일의 가치정립의 토대에 대한 연구 -문화 개념과 정서 개념의 다문화적 접근의 가능성을 중심으로)

  • Song, Sun-Young
    • Journal of Ethics
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    • no.80
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    • pp.51-77
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    • 2011
  • This study aims to explore how to establish any foundation of the value of the unification of the Korean Peninsula in multicultural society of Korea. Its main issue is related to Korean identity of a nation and its shared value among the mulitcultural members, in particular, of North Koreans including defectors, foreign workers, and immigrants of international marriage and their children. For this study, I would utilize a given research of the application of two concepts of culture to multicultural levels by criticizing its limit; as an alternative, furthermore, I would pay attention to the possibility of the concept of emotion in multicultural members. A short feature in a given study of two conceptions of culture in a multicultural society is as follows: the first is to regard it as the patterns of meanings and symbols, which is very useful to understand others or other culture; secondly, to see it as the lasting process of perfection in human life, which makes us recognize ourselves as a member, so to speak, identity. In application it to Korean muliticultural members, however, there are crucial and complicated problems according to the cases of their lives. For North Koreans, firstly, they tend to get the conception of Korean identity in terms of ideological policies and education of North Korean government. This means that they have a strong hatred towards the word multiculture, in the level of recognizing the self-culture. Secondly, North Korean defectors also have the recognition of the self-culture, but their serious problem is discriminative treatments by South Korean in terms of socio-economics, in the process of their settlement. Thirdly, parents and their children in multicultural family can have their identity as Korean. In parents, however, the level is double that they can have both identities of Korean as well as of their countries. The foundation, therefore, of the value of the unification in the Korean Peninsula is closely related to the issue of identity as Korean. To recognize it, it is possible only to consider and reflect all members' lives by applying the dual conceptions of culture to their multicultural lives. That is not of outer system, but of inner, relational and cultural emotion, which enables them to share their common value of unification.

Contactless Data Society and Reterritorialization of the Archive (비접촉 데이터 사회와 아카이브 재영토화)

  • Jo, Min-ji
    • The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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    • no.79
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    • pp.5-32
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    • 2024
  • The Korean government ranked 3rd among 193 UN member countries in the UN's 2022 e-Government Development Index. Korea, which has consistently been evaluated as a top country, can clearly be said to be a leading country in the world of e-government. The lubricant of e-government is data. Data itself is neither information nor a record, but it is a source of information and records and a resource of knowledge. Since administrative actions through electronic systems have become widespread, the production and technology of data-based records have naturally expanded and evolved. Technology may seem value-neutral, but in fact, technology itself reflects a specific worldview. The digital order of new technologies, armed with hyper-connectivity and super-intelligence, not only has a profound influence on traditional power structures, but also has an a similar influence on existing information and knowledge transmission media. Moreover, new technologies and media, including data-based generative artificial intelligence, are by far the hot topic. It can be seen that the all-round growth and spread of digital technology has led to the augmentation of human capabilities and the outsourcing of thinking. This also involves a variety of problems, ranging from deep fakes and other fake images, auto profiling, AI lies hallucination that creates them as if they were real, and copyright infringement of machine learning data. Moreover, radical connectivity capabilities enable the instantaneous sharing of vast amounts of data and rely on the technological unconscious to generate actions without awareness. Another irony of the digital world and online network, which is based on immaterial distribution and logical existence, is that access and contact can only be made through physical tools. Digital information is a logical object, but digital resources cannot be read or utilized without some type of device to relay it. In that respect, machines in today's technological society have gone beyond the level of simple assistance, and there are points at which it is difficult to say that the entry of machines into human society is a natural change pattern due to advanced technological development. This is because perspectives on machines will change over time. Important is the social and cultural implications of changes in the way records are produced as a result of communication and actions through machines. Even in the archive field, what problems will a data-based archive society face due to technological changes toward a hyper-intelligence and hyper-connected society, and who will prove the continuous activity of records and data and what will be the main drivers of media change? It is time to research whether this will happen. This study began with the need to recognize that archives are not only records that are the result of actions, but also data as strategic assets. Through this, author considered how to expand traditional boundaries and achieves reterritorialization in a data-driven society.

Business Application of Convolutional Neural Networks for Apparel Classification Using Runway Image (합성곱 신경망의 비지니스 응용: 런웨이 이미지를 사용한 의류 분류를 중심으로)

  • Seo, Yian;Shin, Kyung-shik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.3
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    • pp.1-19
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    • 2018
  • Large amount of data is now available for research and business sectors to extract knowledge from it. This data can be in the form of unstructured data such as audio, text, and image data and can be analyzed by deep learning methodology. Deep learning is now widely used for various estimation, classification, and prediction problems. Especially, fashion business adopts deep learning techniques for apparel recognition, apparel search and retrieval engine, and automatic product recommendation. The core model of these applications is the image classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). CNN is made up of neurons which learn parameters such as weights while inputs come through and reach outputs. CNN has layer structure which is best suited for image classification as it is comprised of convolutional layer for generating feature maps, pooling layer for reducing the dimensionality of feature maps, and fully-connected layer for classifying the extracted features. However, most of the classification models have been trained using online product image, which is taken under controlled situation such as apparel image itself or professional model wearing apparel. This image may not be an effective way to train the classification model considering the situation when one might want to classify street fashion image or walking image, which is taken in uncontrolled situation and involves people's movement and unexpected pose. Therefore, we propose to train the model with runway apparel image dataset which captures mobility. This will allow the classification model to be trained with far more variable data and enhance the adaptation with diverse query image. To achieve both convergence and generalization of the model, we apply Transfer Learning on our training network. As Transfer Learning in CNN is composed of pre-training and fine-tuning stages, we divide the training step into two. First, we pre-train our architecture with large-scale dataset, ImageNet dataset, which consists of 1.2 million images with 1000 categories including animals, plants, activities, materials, instrumentations, scenes, and foods. We use GoogLeNet for our main architecture as it has achieved great accuracy with efficiency in ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). Second, we fine-tune the network with our own runway image dataset. For the runway image dataset, we could not find any previously and publicly made dataset, so we collect the dataset from Google Image Search attaining 2426 images of 32 major fashion brands including Anna Molinari, Balenciaga, Balmain, Brioni, Burberry, Celine, Chanel, Chloe, Christian Dior, Cividini, Dolce and Gabbana, Emilio Pucci, Ermenegildo, Fendi, Giuliana Teso, Gucci, Issey Miyake, Kenzo, Leonard, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Marni, Max Mara, Missoni, Moschino, Ralph Lauren, Roberto Cavalli, Sonia Rykiel, Stella McCartney, Valentino, Versace, and Yve Saint Laurent. We perform 10-folded experiments to consider the random generation of training data, and our proposed model has achieved accuracy of 67.2% on final test. Our research suggests several advantages over previous related studies as to our best knowledge, there haven't been any previous studies which trained the network for apparel image classification based on runway image dataset. We suggest the idea of training model with image capturing all the possible postures, which is denoted as mobility, by using our own runway apparel image dataset. Moreover, by applying Transfer Learning and using checkpoint and parameters provided by Tensorflow Slim, we could save time spent on training the classification model as taking 6 minutes per experiment to train the classifier. This model can be used in many business applications where the query image can be runway image, product image, or street fashion image. To be specific, runway query image can be used for mobile application service during fashion week to facilitate brand search, street style query image can be classified during fashion editorial task to classify and label the brand or style, and website query image can be processed by e-commerce multi-complex service providing item information or recommending similar item.

Directions of Implementing Documentation Strategies for Local Regions (지역 기록화를 위한 도큐멘테이션 전략의 적용)

  • Seol, Moon-Won
    • The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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    • no.26
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    • pp.103-149
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    • 2010
  • Documentation strategy has been experimented in various subject areas and local regions since late 1980's when it was proposed as archival appraisal and selection methods by archival communities in the United States. Though it was criticized to be too ideal, it needs to shed new light on the potentialities of the strategy for documenting local regions in digital environment. The purpose of this study is to analyse the implementation issues of documentation strategy and to suggest the directions for documenting local regions of Korea through the application of the strategy. The documentation strategy which was developed more than twenty years ago in mostly western countries gives us some implications for documenting local regions even in current digital environments. They are as follows; Firstly, documentation strategy can enhance the value of archivists as well as archives in local regions because archivist should be active shaper of history rather than passive receiver of archives according to the strategy. It can also be a solution for overcoming poor conditions of local archives management in Korea. Secondly, the strategy can encourage cooperation between collecting institutions including museums, libraries, archives, cultural centers, history institutions, etc. in each local region. In the networked environment the cooperation can be achieved more effectively than in traditional environment where the heavy workload of cooperative institutions is needed. Thirdly, the strategy can facilitate solidarity of various groups in local region. According to the analysis of the strategy projects, it is essential to collect their knowledge, passion, and enthusiasm of related groups to effectively implement the strategy. It can also provide a methodology for minor groups of society to document their memories. This study suggests the directions of documenting local regions in consideration of current archival infrastructure of Korean as follows; Firstly, very selective and intensive documentation should be pursued rather than comprehensive one for documenting local regions. Though it is a very political problem to decide what subject has priority for documentation, interests of local community members as well as professional groups should be considered in the decision-making process seriously. Secondly, it is effective to plan integrated representation of local history in the distributed custody of local archives. It would be desirable to implement archival gateway for integrated search and representation of local archives regardless of the location of archives. Thirdly, it is necessary to try digital documentation using Web 2.0 technologies. Documentation strategy as the methodology of selecting and acquiring archives can not avoid subjectivity and prejudices of appraiser completely. To mitigate the problems, open documentation system should be prepared for reflecting different interests of different groups. Fourth, it is desirable to apply a conspectus model used in cooperative collection management of libraries to document local regions digitally. Conspectus can show existing documentation strength and future documentation intensity for each participating institution. Using this, documentation level of each subject area can be set up cooperatively and effectively in the local regions.

Characteristic on the Layout and Semantic Interpretation of Chungryu-Gugok, Dongaksan Mountain, Gokseong (곡성 동악산 청류구곡(淸流九曲)의 형태 및 의미론적 특성)

  • Rho, Jae-Hyun;Shin, Sang-Sup;Huh, Joon;Lee, Jung-Han;Han, Sang-Yub
    • Journal of the Korean Institute of Traditional Landscape Architecture
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    • v.32 no.4
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    • pp.24-36
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    • 2014
  • The result of the research conducted for the purpose of investigating the semantic value and the layout of the Cheongryu Gugok of Dorimsa Valley, which exhibits a high level of completeness and scenic preservation value among the three gugoks distributed in the area around Mt. Dongak of Gogseong is as follows.4) The area around Cheongryu Gugok shows a case where the gugok culture, which has been enjoyed as a model of the Neo-Confucianism culture and bedrock scenery, such as waterfall, riverside, pond, and flatland, following the beautiful valley, has been actually substituted, and is an outstanding scenery site as stated in a local map of Gokseong-hyeon in 1872 as "Samnam Jeil Amban Gyeryu Cheongryu-dong(三南第一巖盤溪流 淸流洞: Cheongryu-dong, the best rock mooring in the Samnam area)." Cheongryu Gugok, which is differentiated through the seasonal scenery and epigrams established on both land route and waterway, was probably established by the lead of Sun-tae Jeong(丁舜泰, ?~1916) and Byeong-sun Cho(曺秉順, 1876~1921) before 1916 during the Japanese colonization period. However, based on the fact that a number of Janggugiso of ancient sages, such as political activists, Buddhist leaders, and Neo-Confucian scholars, have been established, it is presumed to have been utilized as a hermit site and scenery site visited by masters from long ago. Cheongryu Gugok, which is formed on the rock floor of the bed rock of Dorimsa Valley, is formed in a total length of 1.2km and average gok(曲) length of 149m on a mountain type stream, which appears to be shorter compared to other gugoks in Korea. The rock writings of the three gugoks in Mt. Dongak, such as Cheongryu Gugok, which was the only one verified in the Jeonnam area, total 165 in number, which is determined to be the assembly place for the highest number of rock writings in the nation. In particular, a result of analyzing the rock writings in Cheongryu Gugok totaling 112 places showed 49pieces(43.8%) with the meaning of 'moral training' in epigram, 21pieces (18.8%) of human life, 16pieces(14.2%) of seasonal scenery, and 12pieces(10.6%) of Janggugiso such as Jangguchur, and the ratio occupied by poem verses appeared to be six cases(3.6%). Sweyeonmun(鎖烟門), which was the first gok of land route, and Jesiinganbyeolyucheon(除是人間別有天) which was the ninth gok of the waterway, corresponds to the Hongdanyeonse(虹斷烟鎖) of the first gok and Jesiinganbyeolyucheon of the ninth gok established in Jaecheon, Chungbuk by Se-hwa Park(朴世和, 1834~1910), which is inferred to be the name of Gugok having the same origin. In addition, the Daeeunbyeong(大隱屛) of the sixth gok. of land route corresponds to the Chu Hsi's Wuyi-Gugok of the seventh gok, which is acknowledged as the basis for Gugok Wollim, and the rock writings and stonework of 'Amseojae(巖棲齋)' and 'Pogyeongjae(抱經齋)' between the seventh gok and eighth gok is a trace comparable with Wuyi Jeongsa(武夷精舍) placed below Wuyi Gugok Eunbyeon-bong, which is understood to be the activity base of Cheongryu-dong of the Giho Sarim(畿湖士林). The rock writings in the Mt. Dongak area, including famous sayings by masters such as Sunsaeuhje(鮮史御帝, Emperor Gojong), Bogahyowoo(保家孝友, Emperor Gojong), Manchunmungywol(萬川明月, King Joengjo), Biryeobudong(非禮不動, Chongzhen Emperor of the Ming Dynasty)', Samusa(思無邪, Euijong of the Ming Dynasty), Baksechungpwoong(百世淸風, Chu Hsi), and Chungryususuk-Dongakpungkyung(淸流水石 動樂風景, Heungseon Daewongun) can be said to be a repository of semantic symbolic cultural scenery, instead of only expressing Confucian aesthetics. In addition, Cheongryu Gugok is noticeable with its feature as a cluster of cultural scenery of the three religions of Confucian-Buddhism-Taoism, where the Confucianism value system, Buddhist concept, and Taoist concept co-exists for mind training and cultivation. Cheongryu Gugok has a semantic feature and spatial character as a basis for history and cultural struggle for the Anti-Japan spirit that has been conceived during the process of establishing and utilizing the spirit of the learning, loyalty for the Emperor and expulsion of barbarians, and inspiration of Anti-Japan force, by inheriting the sense of Dotong(道統) of Neo-Confucianism by the Confucian scholar class at the end of the Joseon era that is represented by Ik-hyun Choi(崔益鉉, 1833~1906), Woo Jeon(田愚, 1841~1922), Woo-man Gi(奇宇萬, 1846~1916), Byung-sun Song(宋秉璿, 1836~1905), and Hyeon Hwang(黃玹, 1855~1910).

A Study on the Influence of the Selective Attributes of Home Meal Replacement on Perceived Utilitarian Value and Repurchase Intention: Focus on Consumers of Large Discount and Department Stores (HMR(Home Meal Replacement) 선택속성이 지각된 효용적 가치, 재구매 의도에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구: 대형 할인마트와 백화점 구매고객을 대상으로)

  • Seo, Kyung-Hwa;Choi, Won-Sik;Lee, Soo-Bum
    • Journal of the East Asian Society of Dietary Life
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    • v.21 no.6
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    • pp.934-947
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    • 2011
  • The purpose of this study is to analyze products for good taste and convenience, which become an engine to constantly create customers. In addition, this study is aimed at investigating the relationship between the selective attributes of Home Meal Replacement, the perceived utilitarian value, and the repurchase intention, and drawing new suggestions on the Home Meal Replacement market from a new marketing perspective. Based on a total of 215 samples, this study reviewed the reliability and fitness of the research model and verified a total of 5 hypothesized using the Amos program. The result of study modeling was GFI=0.905, AGFI=0.849, NFI=0.889, CFI=0.945, and RMR=0.0.092 at the level of $x^2$=230.22 (df=126, p<0.001). First, the food quality (${\beta}$=0.221), convenience (${\beta}$=0.334), packing (${\beta}$=0.278), and employee service (${\beta}$=0.204) of home meal replacement consideration attributes had a positive (+) influence on perceived utilitarian value. Second, perceived utilitarian value (${\beta}$=0.584) had a positive (+) influence on repurchase intention. The factors to differentiate one company from other competitors in terms of the utilitarian value are the quality of food, convenience, wrapping, and services by employees. This study has illustrated the need to focus on the development of a premium menu to compete with other companies and to continue to research and develop nutritious foods that are easy to cook. Moreover, the key factors to have a distinct and constant competitive edge over other companies are the alleviation of consumer anxiety over wrapping container materials, the development of more designs, and the accumulation of service know-how. Therefore, it is necessary for a company to strongly develop the key factors based on its resources as a core capability.

Application of Support Vector Regression for Improving the Performance of the Emotion Prediction Model (감정예측모형의 성과개선을 위한 Support Vector Regression 응용)

  • Kim, Seongjin;Ryoo, Eunchung;Jung, Min Kyu;Kim, Jae Kyeong;Ahn, Hyunchul
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.3
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    • pp.185-202
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    • 2012
  • .Since the value of information has been realized in the information society, the usage and collection of information has become important. A facial expression that contains thousands of information as an artistic painting can be described in thousands of words. Followed by the idea, there has recently been a number of attempts to provide customers and companies with an intelligent service, which enables the perception of human emotions through one's facial expressions. For example, MIT Media Lab, the leading organization in this research area, has developed the human emotion prediction model, and has applied their studies to the commercial business. In the academic area, a number of the conventional methods such as Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) or Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been applied to predict human emotion in prior studies. However, MRA is generally criticized because of its low prediction accuracy. This is inevitable since MRA can only explain the linear relationship between the dependent variables and the independent variable. To mitigate the limitations of MRA, some studies like Jung and Kim (2012) have used ANN as the alternative, and they reported that ANN generated more accurate prediction than the statistical methods like MRA. However, it has also been criticized due to over fitting and the difficulty of the network design (e.g. setting the number of the layers and the number of the nodes in the hidden layers). Under this background, we propose a novel model using Support Vector Regression (SVR) in order to increase the prediction accuracy. SVR is an extensive version of Support Vector Machine (SVM) designated to solve the regression problems. The model produced by SVR only depends on a subset of the training data, because the cost function for building the model ignores any training data that is close (within a threshold ${\varepsilon}$) to the model prediction. Using SVR, we tried to build a model that can measure the level of arousal and valence from the facial features. To validate the usefulness of the proposed model, we collected the data of facial reactions when providing appropriate visual stimulating contents, and extracted the features from the data. Next, the steps of the preprocessing were taken to choose statistically significant variables. In total, 297 cases were used for the experiment. As the comparative models, we also applied MRA and ANN to the same data set. For SVR, we adopted '${\varepsilon}$-insensitive loss function', and 'grid search' technique to find the optimal values of the parameters like C, d, ${\sigma}^2$, and ${\varepsilon}$. In the case of ANN, we adopted a standard three-layer backpropagation network, which has a single hidden layer. The learning rate and momentum rate of ANN were set to 10%, and we used sigmoid function as the transfer function of hidden and output nodes. We performed the experiments repeatedly by varying the number of nodes in the hidden layer to n/2, n, 3n/2, and 2n, where n is the number of the input variables. The stopping condition for ANN was set to 50,000 learning events. And, we used MAE (Mean Absolute Error) as the measure for performance comparison. From the experiment, we found that SVR achieved the highest prediction accuracy for the hold-out data set compared to MRA and ANN. Regardless of the target variables (the level of arousal, or the level of positive / negative valence), SVR showed the best performance for the hold-out data set. ANN also outperformed MRA, however, it showed the considerably lower prediction accuracy than SVR for both target variables. The findings of our research are expected to be useful to the researchers or practitioners who are willing to build the models for recognizing human emotions.

Changes in Agricultural Extension Services in Korea (한국농촌지도사업(韓國農村指導事業)의 변동(變動))

  • Fujita, Yasuki;Lee, Yong-Hwan;Kim, Sung-Soo
    • Journal of Agricultural Extension & Community Development
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    • v.7 no.1
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    • pp.155-166
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    • 2000
  • When the marcher visited Korea in fall 1994, he was shocked to see high rise apartment buildings around the capitol region including Seoul and Suwon, resulting from rising demand of housing because of urban migration followed by second and third industrial development. After 6 years in March 2000, the researcher witnessed more apartment buildings and vinyl house complexes, one of the evidences of continued economic progress in Korea. Korea had to receive the rescue finance from International Monetary Fund (IMF) because of financial crisis in 1997. However, the sign of recovery was seen in a year, and the growth rate of Gross Domestic Products (GDP) in 1999 recorded as high as 10.7 percent. During this period, the Korean government has been working on restructuring of banks, enterprises, labour and public sectors. The major directions of government were; localization, reducing administrative manpower, limiting agricultural budgets, privatization of public enterprises, integration of agricultural organization, and easing of various regulations. Thus, the power of central government shifted to local government resulting in a power increase for city mayors and county chiefs. Agricultural extension services was one of targets of government restructuring, transferred to local governments from central government. At the same time, the number of extension offices was reduced by 64 percent, extension personnel reduced by 24 percent, and extension budgets reduced. During the process of restructuring, the basic direction of extension services was set by central Rural Development Administration Personnel management, technology development and supports were transferred to provincial Rural Development Administrations, and operational responsibilities transferred to city/county governments. Agricultural extension services at the local levels changed the name to Agricultural Technology Extension Center, established under jurisdiction of city mayor or county chief. The function of technology development works were added, at the same time reducing the number of educators for agriculture and rural life. As a result of observations of rural areas and agricultural extension services at various levels, functional responsibilities of extension were not well recognized throughout the central, provincial, and local levels. Central agricultural extension services should be more concerned about effective rural development by monitoring provincial and local level extension activities more throughly. At county level extension services, it may be desirable to add a research function to reflect local agricultural technological needs. Sometimes, adding administrative tasks for extension educators may be helpful far farmers. However, tasks such as inspection and investigation should be avoided, since it may hinder the effectiveness of extension educational activities. It appeared that major contents of the agricultural extension service in Korea were focused on saving agricultural materials, developing new agricultural technology, enhancing agricultural export, increasing production and establishing market oriented farming. However these kinds of efforts may lead to non-sustainable agriculture. It would be better to put more emphasis on sustainable agriculture in the future. Agricultural extension methods in Korea may be better classified into two approaches or functions; consultation function for advanced farmers and technology transfer or educational function for small farmers. Advanced farmers were more interested in technology and management information, while small farmers were more concerned about information for farm management directions and timely diffusion of agricultural technology information. Agricultural extension service should put more emphasis on small farmer groups and active participation of farmers in these groups. Providing information and moderate advice in selecting alternatives should be the major activities for consultation for advanced farmers, while problem solving processes may be the major educational function for small farmers. Systems such as internet and e-mail should be utilized for functions of information exchange. These activities may not be an easy task for decreased numbers of extension educators along with increased administrative tasks. It may be difficult to practice a one-to-one approach However group guidance may improve the task to a certain degree.

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