• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.23
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• pp.341-372
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• 2004

Since China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on December 11, 2001, China has sped up its active participation in the competition of the world economy by lifting its trade and investment restrictions and limits. Its trading system is getting more and more free and its huge market with a population of 1.3 billion has been getting more and more open. With Chinas WTO accession, China has been honoring its commitments to its WTO members by complying with international business practices and WTO rules. For example, it will cut down its import tariffs for automobiles from the present 80% to 25% by 2006. Its financial sector and service industries are open to foreign investors now. As Chinas biggest business partner, Japan has benefited tremendously from Chinas open policies and deepening economic reform. In order to reduce the costs of production, a large number of enterprises from Japan have set up production bases in China since a Chinese workers wages accounts for only one tenth of those of a Japanese worker on the average. Japan has become one of Chinas biggest investors on a par with the United States of America (USA). How are the Japanese enterprises in Japan and in China adjusting themselves to the rapid changes of the Chinese market? What characteristics do the Japanese enterprises in China have? What effects has Chinas WTO accession had on those Japanese enterprises that have invested in China? This paper finds answers to the above questions. It at first reviews the Sino-Japanese economic and trade relations since 1980s, then analyses the situation and characteristics of Japanese-invested enterprises in China, and explores their problems in China. Finally it puts forward some suggestions for the Japanese enterprises in China.

• Design & Manufacturing
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.7-11
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• 2007

The fabrication of precision optical components by deterministic CNC grinding is an area of great current interest. Replacement of the traditional, craftsman driven, optical fabrication process is essential to reduce costs and increase process flexibility and reliability. Moreover, CNC grinding is well suited to the fabrication of complex shapes such as aspheres, making it possible to design optical systems with fewer components and reduced weight. Current technology is capable of producing surfaces with less than 2 microns peak to valley error, 50 nm rms surface roughness, and less than 1 micron subsurface damage. Bound abrasive tools, in which the abrasive particles are fixed in a second (matrix) material, play an important part in achieving this performance. In this paper, the factors affecting the ultra-fine surface roughness and profile accuracy of machined surfaces of aspheric parts has been analyzed experimentally and theoretically and on ultra-precision aspheric grinding system and precise adjusting mechanism have been designed and manufactured. In the paper we report the results of experiments and modeling performed to examine the effects of machinability, occurring during grinding of optical surfaces, on the tool surface profile. Profiles of machined surface were measured by using SEM. In order to optimize grinding conditions of aspheric lens processing, we performed experiments by design of experiments.

• Land and Housing Review
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.257-266
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• 2017

LH has been using ultra high strength reinforcing bars (SD500 and SD600), since 2011. Such a change requires an adjustment of the old extra rates of bar splice to reflect use of ultra high strength reinforcing bars, as these rates had been set based on SD400 bars. It is particularly difficult to calculate precisely rebar lap-splice locations for large areas, such as those in apartment buildings. This research aims to adjust the extra rates of bar splice to reflect a reasonable rate; the rebar lap-splice length is not an exact estimation, but instead, an extra rates of bar splice is set and the rebar lap-splice length is increased by 2% (D 10) - 7% (025) depending on the bar size. The subjects of this study are LH apartments undergoing frame construction. We studied the quantity estimations from the design drawings, and analyzed the settlement quantities of construction field. The results of the study revealed that, when each of the quantities are analyzed, consider adjusting the extra rates of bar splice of some rebar to 1% - 3.5%. This was caused by an overuse of reinforcing bars in onsite construction and the use of supporting bars that have not been reflected in the documents, among other reasons. Based on the results of our study, an improvement plan for the current extra rates of bar splice seems to be necessary, cutting or raising the rate depending on the analysis of the data. Through this study, we expect to contribute to the calculation of reasonable construction costs, improvements in the quality of rebar work, and improvements in the capacity of design techniques for apartment buildings.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.73-105
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• 2019

In this paper, we investigated the impacts of minimum wage on the working hours and labor income of wage earners considering coverage of minimum wage. The results show that the increase in the proportion of workers influenced by the minimum wage in the industry has a negative effect on the average monthly working hours and the average monthly salary of workers affected by the minimum wage. This implies that firms try to offset the rise in labor costs caused by increase in the minimum wage by adjusting the working hours of the employees influenced by the minimum wage. Our finding suggests that the minimum wage policy would reduce the labor income of workers affected by the minimum wage.

• Journal of Korean Dental Hygiene Science
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.51-58
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• 2020

Oral examination ensures early detection and treatment of oral diseases and improvement of quality of health-related life. This is imperative as it reduces individuals' dental medical expenses and social costs caused by diseases. However, as the low oral examination acceptance rate continues to be a problem, this study was conducted to identify the factors that influence the oral examination of an economically active population. In this study, 4,836 economically active individuals between the ages of 20 and 65 years were studied using data from the 7th National Health and Nutrition Survey in 2018. Logistic regression analysis was performed to determine the factors influencing demographic and sociological characteristics on oral examination after adjusting for complaints of mastication and speech discomfort. As a result of confirming the factors influencing the oral examination, increase in age tended to be inversely proportional to the oral examination. Income level, type of job, and job position were identified as factors that influenced oral examinations. Compared to the group with a high socioeconomic status, which is represented by a group with a high income level or a stable job type or job position, the group with low economic status was found to have a negative effect on oral examination. Oral management of vulnerable groups, who might not be considered while devising oral health management policies, should be promoted through the development and provision of oral health management policies that consider employment status and environment.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.84 no.4
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• pp.489-502
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• 2022

This paper is aimed at developing an optimization-based Finite Element model updating approach for structural damage identification and quantification. A modal flexibility-based error function is introduced, which uses modal assurance criterion to formulate the updating problem as an optimization problem. Because of the inexplicit input/output relationship between the candidate solutions and the error function's output, a robust and efficient optimization algorithm should be employed to evaluate the solution domain and find the global extremum with high speed and accuracy. This paper proposes a new multi-stage Selective Particle Swarm Optimization (SPSO) algorithm to solve the optimization problem. The proposed multi-stage strategy not only fixes the premature convergence of the original Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, but also increases the speed of the search stage and reduces the corresponding computational costs, without changing or adding extra terms to the algorithm's formulation. Solving the introduced objective function with the proposed multi-stage SPSO leads to a smart feedback-wise and self-adjusting damage detection method, which can effectively assess the health of the structural systems. The performance and precision of the proposed method are verified and benchmarked against the original PSO and some of its most popular variants, including SPSO, DPSO, APSO, and MSPSO. For this purpose, two numerical examples of complex civil engineering structures under different damage patterns are studied. Comparative studies are also carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in the presence of measurement errors. Moreover, the robustness and accuracy of the method are validated by assessing the health of a six-story shear-type building structure tested on a shake table. The obtained results introduced the proposed method as an effective and robust damage detection method even if the first few vibration modes are utilized to form the objective function.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.99-120
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• 2010

Due to the wide spread of customers' frequent access of non face-to-face services, there have been many attempts to improve customer satisfaction using huge amounts of data accumulated throughnon face-to-face channels. Usually, a call center is regarded to be one of the most representative non-faced channels. Therefore, it is important that a call center has enough agents to offer high level customer satisfaction. However, managing too many agents would increase the operational costs of a call center by increasing labor costs. Therefore, predicting and calculating the appropriate size of human resources of a call center is one of the most critical success factors of call center management. For this reason, most call centers are currently establishing a department of WFM(Work Force Management) to estimate the appropriate number of agents and to direct much effort to predict the volume of inbound calls. In real world applications, inbound call prediction is usually performed based on the intuition and experience of a domain expert. In other words, a domain expert usually predicts the volume of calls by calculating the average call of some periods and adjusting the average according tohis/her subjective estimation. However, this kind of approach has radical limitations in that the result of prediction might be strongly affected by the expert's personal experience and competence. It is often the case that a domain expert may predict inbound calls quite differently from anotherif the two experts have mutually different opinions on selecting influential variables and priorities among the variables. Moreover, it is almost impossible to logically clarify the process of expert's subjective prediction. Currently, to overcome the limitations of subjective call prediction, most call centers are adopting a WFMS(Workforce Management System) package in which expert's best practices are systemized. With WFMS, a user can predict the volume of calls by calculating the average call of each day of the week, excluding some eventful days. However, WFMS costs too much capital during the early stage of system establishment. Moreover, it is hard to reflect new information ontothe system when some factors affecting the amount of calls have been changed. In this paper, we attempt to devise a new model for predicting inbound calls that is not only based on theoretical background but also easily applicable to real world applications. Our model was mainly developed by the interactive decision tree technique, one of the most popular techniques in data mining. Therefore, we expect that our model can predict inbound calls automatically based on historical data, and it can utilize expert's domain knowledge during the process of tree construction. To analyze the accuracy of our model, we performed intensive experiments on a real case of one of the largest car insurance companies in Korea. In the case study, the prediction accuracy of the devised two models and traditional WFMS are analyzed with respect to the various error rates allowable. The experiments reveal that our data mining-based two models outperform WFMS in terms of predicting the amount of accident calls and fault calls in most experimental situations examined.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.251-259
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• 2014

Securing publicness and efficiencies are the two core goals for implementing quasi-public bus system. However, researches for evaluating the quasi-public bus system with respect to the two goals have been very limited. This study represents an attempt to evaluate the system performance in these two aspects. To achieve this, a framework for performance evaluation is developed. Utilizing the framework, the 5-year performances of the quasi-public bus system in Busan are evaluated. Acess, agency and public interests are employed as criteria for publicness evaluation. Financial aspects of operators, labor, vehicle utilization, productivity and operational costs are selected as indicators for efficiency evaluation. The results show that the publicness of bus services has been vastly improved, while the efficiency has been also improved in most areas except in cost and vehicle utilization aspects. The results of this study will be of use for planners and policy-makers developing strategies for system improvement. It is hoped that this study can be further refined by adding and adjusting indicators which this study may neglect or ignore.

• Horticultural Science & Technology
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.431-438
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• 2017

This study investigated the effect of pre-planting nitrogen (N) fertilization levels added to a soilless root medium on the growth of 'Dotaerang Dia' tomato seedlings. The N levels were varied for a total of 7 treatments: 0, 100, 250, 500, 750, 1,000, or $1,500mg{\cdot}L^{-1}$. The pH of the root media gradually rose in all treatments as the seedlings grew; however, the differences in the pH were not significant among the treatments. The electrical conductivity (EC) of the root media was significantly different among the treatments from sowing to week three, then drastically decreased after week four, which diminished the differences in the EC among the treatments. At week six, plant height, leaf length, leaf width, number of leaves, and fresh and dry weights of the shoot were highest for the treatment with $500mg{\cdot}L^{-1}N$. In contrast, the treatment with $1,500mg{\cdot}L^{-1}N$ had the lowest results for all growth measurements. The fresh weight was 67% heavier in the $500mg{\cdot}L^{-1}N$ treatment compared to the $1,500mg{\cdot}L^{-1}N$ treatment. The total N content in the tissues was lowest in the treatment with $0mg{\cdot}L^{-1}N$ and highest in the treatment with $1,000mg{\cdot}L^{-1}N$. The contents of calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), and metal micronutrients in the tissues were highest in the $250mg{\cdot}L^{-1}N$ treatment. A previous study demonstrated that adjusting the fertilization level to promote growth to over 90% of the maximum growth is a good strategy for lowering production costs and preventing damage due to excessive fertilizer absorption by crops. Our results indicated that the optimal pre-planting N fertilization level for tomato plug seedlings should be lower than $500mg{\cdot}L^{-1}$ and the optimum tissue N contents should be around 3.21% to 4.60%.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.129-140
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• 1991

The primary purpose of price regulation on public utilities and other public services is not to prevent them from rising and control inflation but to allocate resources efficiently and reflect social values, when market does not function perfectly. That is, price regulation by government is a policy tool which is aimed at microeconomic effects. Therefore, when a microeconomic policy tool is used for macroeconomic policy objectives, such as price stabilization, we can have problems stemming from the mismatch. One of the examples is distortions in the relative price structure of resources. As government suppresses increases in regulated prices in an effort to reduce inflationary pressures, some of the public services become relatively cheaper, resulting in excess use of those services under regulation. Also, inflexibility of adjusting regulated prices to the overall price changes results in deterioration of qualities of public services. This paper proposes a set of reform proposals which are itnended to minimize such government failures. It is argued that the authority of price regulation should be decentralized, and ultimately done by independent regulatory commissions for each service. The pricing should be based on the principle of separate and independent accounting by each service unit and the principle of beneficiaries bearing the costs of services.