• The International Journal of Costume Culture
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.31-42
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• 1999

The category killer that has been rapidly growing mainly in advanced countries since early 1990's, is a mew distribution model which aims for obtaining market controlling power by surpassing competing businesses in a specific area of products. The domestic situation of category killers is very different from that of advanced ones abroad since it has just been introduced into the Korean market. At the moment, there are only 10 or so companies operating in the market : Geopyung's , Taeheng's , Midopa's , of Sinsegye Department store, adn of Yerim International. The purpose of this study is to examine problems of domestic companies in the present market by analysing the operation status of category killers in domestic markets as well as foreign ones, and to suggest a counter-strategy of category killers for the distribution environment of the 21st century to improve the competitiveness of Korean distribution industry. The competitiveness of category killers lies above all in products lines. Category killers are equipped with the greatest number of products lines among those of competing businesses due to maximized product selections in an limited range. Another source of competitiveness may be found in balanced strategy positioning. That is to say, category killers are in a position where they can adjust policies towards any of the three purposes while aiming at them altogether : prices of discount stores, products range of specialty stores, and customer service level of department stores. It is also necessary for efficient store operation to use information technology such as electronic data interchange (EDI), electronic pose system(EPOS) and electronic funds transfer (EFTPOS). As for the cost structure, category killers can gain an advantage over other business since operating cost of various sections can be saved. There are, however, certain risks that category killers with strong competitiveness may influence on other businesses a great deal and even facilitate their decline. Yet it seems that the growth of category killers will be more viciously restrained by continuous challenges from other businesses. The distribution industry is supposed to develop through such competition and restraint.

• New & Renewable Energy
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.20-26
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• 2023

Emitted CO₂ is an attractive material for microbial electrochemical CO₂ reduction. Microbial electrochemical CO₂ reduction (i.e., microbial electrosynthesis, MES) using biocatalysts has advantages compared to conventional CO₂ reduction using electrocatalysts. However, MES has several challenges, including electrode performance, biocatalysts, and reactor optimization. In this study, an MES system was investigated for optimizing reactor types, counter electrode materials, and CO₂-converting microorganisms to achieve effective CO₂ upcycling. In autotrophic cultivation (supplementation of CO₂ and H₂), CO₂ consumption of Rhodobacter sphaeroides was observed to be four times higher than that with heterotrophic cultivation (supplementation of succinic acid). The bacterial growth in an MES reactor with a single-chambered shape was two times higher than that with a double chamber (H-type MES reactor). Moreover, a single-chambered MES reactor equipped with titanium mesh as the counter electrode (anode) showed markedly increased current density in the graphite felt as a working electrode (cathode) compared to that with a graphite felt counter electrode (anode). These results demonstrate that the optimized conditions of a single chamber and titanium mesh for the counter electrode have a positive effect on microbial electrochemical CO₂ reduction.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.1081-1086
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• 2023

The rapid growth and increasing complexity of modern networks have highlighted the limitations of traditional network architectures. The emergence of SDN (Software-Defined Network) in response to these challenges has changed the existing network environment. The SDN separates the control unit and the data unit, and adjusts the network operation using a centralized controller. However, this structure has also recently caused a huge amount of traffic due to the rapid spread of numerous Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which has not only slowed the transmission speed of the network but also made it difficult to ensure quality of service (QoS). Therefore, this paper proposes a method of load distribution by switching the IP and any server (processor) from the existing data processing scheduling technique, RR (Round-Robin), to mapping when a large amount of data flows in from a specific IP, that is, server overload and data loss.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.30-37
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• 2022

Disease threatens plant growth and recognizing the type of disease is essential to making a remedy. In recent years, deep learning has witnessed a significant improvement for this task, however, a large volume of labeled images is one of the requirements to get decent performance. But annotated images are difficult and expensive to obtain in the agricultural field. Therefore, designing an efficient and effective strategy is one of the challenges in this area with few labeled data. Transfer learning, assuming taking knowledge from a source domain to a target domain, is borrowed to address this issue and observed comparable results. However, current transfer learning strategies can be regarded as a supervised method as it hypothesizes that there are many labeled images in a source domain. In contrast, unsupervised transfer learning, using only images in a source domain, gives more convenience as collecting images is much easier than annotating. In this paper, we leverage unsupervised transfer learning to perform plant disease recognition, by which we achieve a better performance than supervised transfer learning in many cases. Besides, a vision transformer with a bigger model capacity than convolution is utilized to have a better-pretrained feature space. With the vision transformer-based unsupervised transfer learning, we achieve better results than current works in two datasets. Especially, we obtain 97.3% accuracy with only 30 training images for each class in the Plant Village dataset. We hope that our work can encourage the community to pay attention to vision transformer-based unsupervised transfer learning in the agricultural field when with few labeled images.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.53-68
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• 2018

Community-based ecotourism (CBE), if well-developed can be a practical approach for promoting socio-economic well-being and sustaining ecological resources. The growth and its development worldwide especially in developing economies is a welcome development. The study aimed at assessing the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary in Ghana, as an example of traditional conservation system of management that has ensured greater community participation, equity, inclusiveness, and multi-level stakeholder partnership. In-depth interviews with key informants and documentary analysis of relevant peer reviewed and grey literature were the main qualitative data collection used. Results revealed that majority of the interviewees support and value the current system of traditional management. The enforcement of rules and regulations and other cultural and religious practices were discussed by key informants. Opportunities for multiple livelihood strategies as a result of the CBE is seen as critical for increasing local's acceptance and participation. The remarkable growth of the sanctuary, as well as the increase in human population, has created a shortage of land for domestic and other commercial purposes which is identified as posing a major challenge to the sustenance of the sanctuary. The study recommends diversification of livelihood opportunities presented by the presence of the sanctuary like the introduction of homestay concept, craft making- wood carving, painting, artisan shops.

• Journal of Korean Society for Atmospheric Environment
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.280-288
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• 2016

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have given rise to climate change which is one of the most serious environmental challenges that the world faces today. In response, Republic of Korea has proposed "Low Carbon, Green Growth" as a new economic paradigm accompanying with the ultimate aim of building a sense of responsibility for the environment. Korean government has set the ambitious national GHG emission reduction target which aims 37% reduction in the business-as-usual (BAU) level of 2030. The transportation sector plays a key role in this target. In the transportation sector, the GHG reduction target of 34.3% in the BAU level by 2020 has been allocated in order to consider the industrial specificity. Furthermore, it is known that the GHG reduction in the transportation sector has relatively minimal side effects compared to those of other sectors. In order to meet this national GHG reduction target, Korean government has set $CO_2$ emission regulation of vehicle for 2020. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the reduction effects by the average GHG regulation of vehicles. $CO_2$ emissions, between 2009 and 2013 were analysed by reduction measure such as technology improvement, light-weight, segment shift, diesel vehicle sales. During this period, $CO_2$ of vehicle was reduced every year by 19.9 g/km (i.e., 3.3% reduction per year). $CO_2$ reduction of imported vehicle is greater than domestic vehicle because of segment shift toward small size vehicle and higher diesel vehicle sales.

• Korea journal of population studies
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.179-205
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• 2007

Demography has grown as an independent academic discipline in Korea during past 30 years by describing and examining changes of population components such as fertility, mortality, migration, and census, and the "Population Association of Korea" stands on the midst of the growth. High fertility of the 1960s and 70s, which was considered as a hurdle of economic growth, particularly boosted the prosper of demography in Korea by inviting a number of non-demographers as well as demographers to population-related research projects. However, as fertility gradually decreases and becomes no-threat anymore beginning the early 1990s, social interests in demography has withered to lose its academic soils in Korea. A recent phenomenon of the lowest low fertility has revived social need and interest in demography. Unfortunately, once curtailed capacity of Korean demography is not sufficient enough to provide academic and/or practical resources now. This research is conducted to cerebrate the 30th anniversary of "Population Association of Korea" and to seek ways to cultivate academic soils again and to rebuild the capacity of demography in Korea. To do this, this research examines the causes of current struggles of Korean demography by comparing its academic environments with that of America, and offers suggestions for its brighter future.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.289-309
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• 2013

Social enterprise has moved from periphery to take center stage. Social enterprises are a truly global phenomenon and associated with solving social problems with business approaches. While the numbers of social enterprises have grown and their impact is likely to continue to do so, it would be dangerous to assume that the revolutionary momentum will automatically continue, because social enterprise faced sustainability challenges. This study collected the data from directory of Korean Social Enterprise to conduct a quantitative research on the growth of social enterprise in South Korea. This study conducted longitudinal analysis of 491 social enterprise certified between 2007 and 2010, of economic performance with financial index and social impact with employment structure. Though global financial crisis, Korean social enterprises show that there is a considerable increase in all of quantitative and qualitative aspects. Korean social enterprises have provided meaningful work to those normally excluded from the labour market and tried to raise their life of working. In the future, Korean social enterprises should find a way to balance social and financial performance and ensure the sustainability of the business.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.155-172
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• 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic not only posed an enormous human crisis, but also had a profound impact on firms' survival. Social distancing and global lockdown measures designed to protect human lives have paradoxically impaired the business environment. As a result, firms that sought to gain competitive advantage by leveraging external resources were cut off from the external world and faced unexpected challenges. Under these circumstances, researches were conducted in the early stage of the pandemic to explore how certain firms survived while others fell, but they were limited to re-examining business performance using traditional financial factors. However, this study aims to investigate the role of entrepreneurs' competency in crisis situations from the Resource-Based View (RBV), as such competency plays an important role in improving business performance and subsequently the probability of startups' survival. Specifically, we evaluated the performance as of end of 2019 of 1,127 startups evaluated by the Korea Technology Finance Corporation (KOTEC), which provides policy financing based on technology assessment, in 2016. We then conducted an empirical study to determine the mediating role of business performance in the relationship between entrepreneurial competencies and firm survival by verifying how many of the sample firms were still in operation at the end of June 2023, when the Korean government declared COVID-19 as an endemic. For this purpose, we defined technological, financial, and marketing competencies as the sub-factors of entrepreneurial competency, and sales growth rate and employment growth rate as the sub-factors of business performance. The results of the empirical analysis showed that technological and financial competencies of the entrepreneur had a positive impact on both business performance and firm survival, and that sales growth rate and employment growth rate mediated the relationship between technological competence and firm survival. However, the positive influence of entrepreneurs' financial competence of the survival of startups was only evident through the growth of employment. This study is the first study in South Korea to define the survival factors of startups in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and is expected to contribute to the theoretical and practical discussions on the importance of entrepreneurs' competency as a firms' survival factor based on RVB.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.649-662
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• 2017

Since 1980, the number of universities have increased dramatically. However, compared to the quantitative growth, the lack of qualitative growth has often been criticized. Students entering university are estimated to decrease by half in 2025 compared to 2014. In swift response to challenges with decreasing student enrollment, the first University Reform Evaluation (URE) for innovating universities, was conducted and resulted in controversy. Opposition is based on distrust of the overall system, questioning the reliability of the evaluation process utilized for the URE evaluation index. Meta-evaluation is required to improve the quality of evaluation, and standards developed prior to conducting the URE. Therefore, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary for the evaluation of human resource development. This research uses the interdisciplinary approach from the human resources development point of view in attempting to develop meta-evaluation criteria which will enable effective evaluation and analysis of URE. The meta-evaluation standard features the creation of the ERPOU model, by conducting literature review, and considers data from expert symposiums, and surveys. The ERPOU model consists of 5 evaluation fields, 21 evaluation categories, and 42 evaluation standards.