• Toxicological Research
• /
• v.28 no.2
• /
• pp.73-79
• /
• 2012

While the ability to develop nanomaterials and incorporate them into products is advancing rapidly worldwide, understanding of the potential health safety effects of nanomaterials has proceeded at a much slower pace. Since 2008, Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) started an investigation to prepare "Strategic Action Plan" to evaluate safety and nano risk management associated with foods, drugs, medical devices and cosmetics using nano-scale materials. Although there are some studies related to potential risk of nanomaterials, physical-chemical characterization of nanomaterials is not clear yet and these do not offer enough information due to their limitations. Their uncertainties make it impossible to determine whether nanomaterials are actually hazardous to human. According to the above mention, we have some problems to conduct the human exposure risk assessment currently. On the other hand, uncertainty about safety may lead to polarized public debate and to businesses unwillingness for further nanotechnology investigation. Therefore, the criteria and methods to assess possible adverse effects of nanomaterials have been vigorously taken into consideration by many international organizations: the World Health Organization, the Organization for Economic and Commercial Development and the European Commission. The object of this study was to develop risk assessment principles for safety management of future nanoproducts and also to identify areas of research to strengthen risk assessment for nanomaterials. The research roadmaps which were proposed in this study will be helpful to fill up the current gaps in knowledge relevant nano risk assessment.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
• /
• v.32 no.1
• /
• pp.84-98
• /
• 2011

The study investigated the linguistic characteristics of middle school students' writing on the themes of earth science through analysis of its genre and register. Data for analysis included $7^{th}$ grade and $9^{th}$ grade students' writings about 'global warming' and 'classification of rocks'. The results of this study include: First, many students were not accustomed to writing in genre, especially exposition genre. Second, in terms of ideational meaning, the material verbs representing action or doing were more dominant than relational verbs that are related to the attribute or definition of things, and additional logical relations were predominant. Third, regarding interpersonal meaning, agents, emotions, subjective opinions appeared in the writings and students did not express their ideas conclusively and revealed feelings of doubt and uncertainty about their knowledge. Fourth, as for textual meaning, most students listed fragments of information using additional conjunctions in simple structures and were not accustomed to writing texts with organizing structures, logical patterns, cohesion, and coherence. From these results, we argued that the scientific writings should be emphasized in science learning that aims to foster scientific literacy. In addition, we discussed the necessity of improving science teachers' perceptions on scientific writing as well as setting up a specific plan in the national curriculum.

• Journal of Environmental Policy
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.149-170
• /
• 2012

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, Durban 2011, ended on December 12, 2011, 36 hours over its schedule, delivering the Durban Package, which consisted of, inter alia, the extension of the period for Kyoto Protocol term and the launch of Ad-hoc working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action. Despite the positive progress made in Durban, the future of post-2012 climate regime still seems cloudy. Before the Durban conference, some of Annex I countries with emissions reduction commitment under the Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period openly declared their intention not to participate in the second one, reducing the effectiveness of Durban agreement. Parties to the conference have a long list of difficult issues disturbing the materialization of the new legal agreement in 2020 such as level of mitigation targets of individual countries and legal nature of their commitment. Given this uncertainty, the Korean government should reinforce its domestic climate policies rather than settling in the fact that it remains as a non-Annex I county party under the Durban Agreement due to the extension of the Kyoto Protocol period. Domestically, it needs to continue to raise the public awareness for rigorous climate policies to transit its economy to low carbon pathway which reduces the country's dependency on fossil fuel in the long term. It is also important to implement cost effective climate policies to cope with domestic resistance and international competitiveness. Internationally, its priority would be working for trust-building in the on-going negotiation meetings to encourage meaningful participation of all parties.

• Journal of Korea Spatial Information System Society
• /
• v.2 no.2 s.4
• /
• pp.59-74
• /
• 2000

Because efficiency of the 1st-phase NGIS investment(1995-2000) has not been clearly measured, the action taken in the 2nd-phase NGIS project requires NGIS budgets to be evaluated in terms of effectiveness. Especially, the effective investments in local governments are critical for the NGIS projects, because they execute the much larger amount of budgets in total than other GIS projects. As indicated, for the successful NGIS implementation, it is important to obtain continuous political and financial supports from decision makers. As a persuasion measure for the budget appropriation, CBA(Cost-Benefit Analysis) and CEA(Cost-Efficiency Analysis) can play an important role for the decision makers. The major concern of this paper is how to measure the costs and benefits of the GIS implementation by considering important characteristics of the GIS projects in local governments, and existing theories are reviewed for this concern. The GISs in local governments can have different stages in terms of its evolution and the effectiveness of the applications can be represented variously. To identify categories for measuring costs and benefits of the various GISs, case studies and success stories are reviewed from both the foreign and domestic research. The categories of costs and benefits are determined from the tangible and intangible aspects. The categories for the quantitative and qualitative measure are proposed to evaluate the GISs in local governments. After measuring costs and benefits, three key evaluation methods in cost-benefit analysis are suggested as follows: 1) the benefit: cost ratio (B/C), 2) Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and 3) the net present values (NPV) of the costs and benefits. The sensitivity and uncertainty analysis are also helpful to make a decision for the GIS budget appropriation in local governments. In conclusion, although cost-benefit analysis is not an easy undertaking, it is certain that it can play an important role in the future for the GIS funding decisions in local governments.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
• /
• v.18B no.1
• /
• pp.29-38
• /
• 2011

In order to derive domain-independent heuristics from the specification of a planning problem, it is required to relax the given problem and then solve the relaxed one. In this paper, we present a new planning graph, Merged Planning Graph(MPG), and GD heuristics for solving contingent planning problems with both uncertainty about the initial state and non-deterministic action effects. The merged planning graph is an extended one to be applied to the contingent planning problems from the relaxed planning graph, which is a common means to get effective heuristics for solving the classical planning problems. In order to get heuristics for solving the contingent planning problems with sensing actions and non-deterministic actions, the new graph utilizes additionally the effect-merge relaxations of these actions as well as the traditional delete relaxations. Proceeding parallel to the forward expansion of the merged planning graph, the computation of GD heuristic excludes the unnecessary redundant cost from estimating the minimal reachability cost to achieve the overall set of goals by analyzing interdependencies among goals or subgoals. Therefore, GD heuristics have the advantage that they usually require less computation time than the overlap heuristics, but are more informative than the max and the additive heuristics. In this paper, we explain the experimental analysis to show the accuracy and the search efficiency of the GD heuristics.

• Computers and Concrete
• /
• v.32 no.3
• /
• pp.247-261
• /
• 2023

Due to the non-uniform distribution of meso-structure, the diffusion of chloride ions in concrete show the characteristics of characteristics of randomness and fuzziness, which leads to the non-uniform distribution of chloride ions and the non-uniform corrosion of steel rebar in concrete. This phenomenon is supposed as the main reason causing the uncertainty of the bearing capacity deterioration of reinforced concrete structures. In order to analyze and predict the durability of reinforced concrete structures under chloride environment, the random features of chloride ions transport in concrete were studied in this research from in situ meso-structure of concrete. Based on X-ray CT technology, the spatial distribution of coarse aggregates and pores were recognized and extracted from a cylinder concrete specimen. In considering the influence of ITZ, the in situ mesostructure of concrete specimen was reconstructed to conduct a numerical simulation on the diffusion of chloride ions in concrete, which was verified through electronic microprobe technology. Then a stochastic study was performed to investigate the distribution of chloride ions concentration in space and time. The research indicates that the influence of coarse aggregate on chloride ions diffusion is the synthetic action of tortuosity and ITZ effect. The spatial distribution of coarse aggregates and pores is the main reason leading to the non-uniform distribution of chloride ions both in spatial and time scale. The chloride ions concentration under a certain time and the time under a certain concentration both satisfy the Lognormal distribution, which are accepted by Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Chi-square test. This research provides an efficient method for obtain mass stochastic data from limited but representative samples, which lays a solid foundation for the investigation on the service properties of reinforced concrete structures.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
• /
• v.4
• /
• pp.43-71
• /
• 1975

Operations research has developed rapidly since its origins in World War II. Practitioners of O. R. have contributed to almost every aspect of government and business. More recently, a number of operations researchers have turned their attention to library and information systems, and the author believes that significant research has resulted. It is the purpose of this essay to introduce the library audience to some of these accomplishments, to present some of the author's hypotheses on the subject of library management to which he belives O. R. has great potential, and to suggest some future research directions. Some problem areas in librianship where O. R. may play a part have been discussed and are summarized below. (1) Library location. It is usually necessary to make balance between accessibility and cost In location problems. Many mathematical methods are available for identifying the optimal locations once the balance between these two criteria has been decided. The major difficulties lie in relating cost to size and in taking future change into account when discriminating possible solutions. (2) Planning new facilities. Standard approaches to using mathematical models for simple investment decisions are well established. If the problem is one of choosing the most economical way of achieving a certain objective, one may compare th althenatives by using one of the discounted cash flow techniques. In other situations it may be necessary to use of cost-benefit approach. (3) Allocating library resources. In order to allocate the resources to best advantage the librarian needs to know how the effectiveness of the services he offers depends on the way he puts his resources. The O. R. approach to the problems is to construct a model representing effectiveness as a mathematical function of levels of different inputs(e.g., numbers of people in different jobs, acquisitions of different types, physical resources). (4) Long term planning. Resource allocation problems are generally concerned with up to one and a half years ahead. The longer term certainly offers both greater freedom of action and greater uncertainty. Thus it is difficult to generalize about long term planning problems. In other fields, however, O. R. has made a significant contribution to long range planning and it is likely to have one to make in librarianship as well. (5) Public relations. It is generally accepted that actual and potential users are too ignorant both of the range of library services provided and of how to make use of them. How should services be brought to the attention of potential users? The answer seems to lie in obtaining empirical evidence by controlled experiments in which a group of libraries participated. (6) Acquisition policy. In comparing alternative policies for acquisition of materials one needs to know the implications of each service which depends on the stock. Second is the relative importance to be ascribed to each service for each class of user. By reducing the level of the first, formal models will allow the librarian to concentrate his attention upon the value judgements which will be necessary for the second. (7) Loan policy. The approach to choosing between loan policies is much the same as the previous approach. (8) Manpower planning. For large library systems one should consider constructing models which will permit the skills necessary in the future with predictions of the skills that will be available, so as to allow informed decisions. (9) Management information system for libraries. A great deal of data can be available in libraries as a by-product of all recording activities. It is particularly tempting when procedures are computerized to make summary statistics available as a management information system. The values of information to particular decisions that may have to be taken future is best assessed in terms of a model of the relevant problem. (10) Management gaming. One of the most common uses of a management game is as a means of developing staff's to take decisions. The value of such exercises depends upon the validity of the computerized model. If the model were sufficiently simple to take the form of a mathematical equation, decision-makers would probably able to learn adequately from a graph. More complex situations require simulation models. (11) Diagnostics tools. Libraries are sufficiently complex systems that it would be useful to have available simple means of telling whether performance could be regarded as satisfactory which, if it could not, would also provide pointers to what was wrong. (12) Data banks. It would appear to be worth considering establishing a bank for certain types of data. It certain items on questionnaires were to take a standard form, a greater pool of data would de available for various analysis. (13) Effectiveness measures. The meaning of a library performance measure is not readily interpreted. Each measure must itself be assessed in relation to the corresponding measures for earlier periods of time and a standard measure that may be a corresponding measure in another library, the 'norm', the 'best practice', or user expectations.

• Korean Journal of Adult Nursing
• /
• v.12 no.2
• /
• pp.184-195
• /
• 2000

It has been believed that cancer is an omnious factor threatening the future and life itself. Patients having the disease experience anxiety, fear, feeling of weakness, depression and feelings of uncertainty and hopelessness. Most cancer patients, however, have expectations of possible recovery and a better future, very different from the patients who feel hopeless. Therefore. hope allows people to respond effectively to the fatal disease they have and prevents them from detoriorating physically and spiritually, positively influencing their survival, response to treatment and sense of security. Studies previously performed showed that hope is positively correlated with social and family supports, self-esteem, spiritual well-being, responsive action, health promotion behavior and quality of life. Thus, the study attempted to provide basic information on nursing cancer patients by investigating their levels of hope and determining predictive factors which influence hope. For the study 200 cancer patients in two university hospitals located in Pusan were sampled as subjects. Data were collected for twenty nine days from Feburary 1, 1999 to March 1. Instrumets for the study included 10 items from the self-esteem scale by Rosenberg (1965), 39 hope measurements by Kim and Lee(1965), 16 of the social support scale by Tae(1986) and 16 of the general characteristics scale, all of which totaled 81 items. The data were analyzed using the SPSS program. General characteristics of the investigated based on numbers and percentage. Hope, self-esteem and social support were analyzed using means, minimum, maximum and standard deviation. Relations among the foregoing three factors were analyzed using Pearson' correlation coefficient. Levels of hope in cancer patients were determined using t-test, ANOVA and Scheffe test. Predictive factors influencing hope were investigated using multiple stepwise regression analysis. Results of the study are summarized as follows: 1. An average level of hope was $185.55{\pm}23.39$ points(96 min. and 234 max.) 2. Levels of hope showed a significant difference among them according to sex (t=-3.69, P=.000), age(F=4.714, P=.000), job(F=3.247, P=.008), monthly income (F=6.113, P=.003), treatment charge (F=3.796, P=.011), supportive resources (F=10.554, P=.000), diagnosis(F=2.287, P=.029), perceived health status(F=22.184, P=.000), level of pain(F=3.334, P=.021), religion (F=4.911, P=.001) and religion's effect in life (F=11.706, P=.000), 3. For the subjects, self-esteem and social support were $38.32{\pm}7.21$(13 min, and 50 max.) and $52.97{\pm}8.49$points(28 min, 80 max.). Concerning social support, average levels of family support and medical support were found $35.95{\pm}6.05$(18 min, and 40 max) and $27.02{\pm}4.99$ points(20 min and 40 max). The hope the cancer patients showed significant correlations with self-esteem (r=.588, P=.000), family support(r=.224, p=.001) and medical support(r=.221, P=.002). 4. The five variables related to hope (self-esteem, religion's effect in life, perceived health status, social support and age) accounted for 54.2 percent of the hope level; especially, self-esteem was the highest at 34.6%. As shown in the above results, predictive factors which most influence hope in cancer patients were self-esteem and religion's effect of life. Therefore, nursing interventions to increase self-esteem should be developed. Regarding religion's effects, studies on spiritual aspects should be carried out in a way that contributes to promotion of hope.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.275-281
• /
• 2018

It is known that he pollutant emitted from the combustion process of marine fuel oil causes air pollution and harmful effects to the human body. Accordingly, IMO regulates pollutants emitted from ships. However, the regulation of Particulate Matter (PM) is still in the process of debate, so preemptive action is needed. Fundamental research on PM is essential. In this study, the Dimensionless Light Extinction Constant ($K_e$) of fuel oil used in marine diesel engines was measured and analyzed to construct the basic data of the PM generated from marine-based fuel oil. The fuel oil used in the land diesel engine was measured in the same way for character comparison. Both fuel oils differ in sulfur content and density. The $K_e$ was measured via the optical method using a 633 nm laser and was determined by using the volume fraction of PM collected by the gravimetric filter method. The $K_e$ of the PM discharged from marine fuel oil is 8.28, and the land fuel oil is 8.44. The $K_e$ of two fuel oils was similar within the measurement uncertainty range. However, it was found by comparison with the value obtained by the Rayleigh-Limit solution that the light scattering portion could be large. Also, it was found that light extinction characteristics could be different due to the relationship between light transmittance and collected mass.

• Journal of Korea Port Economic Association
• /
• v.30 no.4
• /
• pp.69-89
• /
• 2014

The business performance of port industry is steadily getting worse due to international environmental regulation. The port industry should be prepared according to ambient condition change. IMO(International Maritime Organization) is tightening up environmental regulation of vessel and maritime industry field. ECA(Emission Control Area), starting with the Baltic, has initialized and has been expanded. Korea must strengthen the control of vessel in accordance with IMO's restriction, if Korea is designated as emission control area. These situations cause the expansion of LNG-fuelled ships. Add to the larger trend of ships, Korean government should be done a preemptive action against LNG bunkering industry. This study proposes the concept of floating offshore LNG bunkering system and is conducted its economic feasibility evaluation based on empirical analysis. We examine the theoretical foundation and basic information via "A Planning Study on the Engineering Development of Floating Offshore LNG Bunkering Terminal" in 2013 and we evaluate the business potential by using the report above mentioned. The results of this study are as follows. The values of B/C analysis are between 0.679 and 2.516 depending on market share and R&D contributiveness. In case of 10.9%(market share), if market share are 50% and 60%, the value of B/C analysis are 0.697 and 0.837 respectively. Except in two cases, all remaining values are over 1.0. Moreover, the research is conducted sensitivity analysis to remove the project uncertainty. In order to maintain economical validity, a project manager have to establish business strategies which are not to cause increase of expense and sustain market share and R&D contributiveness in the scenario with normal levels.