• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.369-379
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• 2015

Objectives: The lack of reliable information on environmental pollution and health impacts related to asbestos contamination from abandoned mines has drawn attention to the need for a community health study. This study was performed to evaluate asbestos-related health symptoms among residents near abandoned asbestos mines located in the Chungcheong Provinces. In addition, exposure assessment for asbestos is needed although the exposure to asbestos was in the past. Methods: Past exposure to asbestos among inhabitants near abandoned asbestos mines was estimated by using surface sampling of deposited dust in indoor and outdoor residences. A total of 54 participants were divided into two groups with (34 cases) and without (20 controls) diseases related to asbestos. Surface sampling of deposited dust was carried out in indoor and outdoor residences by collecting 105 samples. Deposited dust for sampling was analyzed by polarization microscope (PLM) and scanning electron microscope?energy dispersive x-ray spectrometer (SEM-EDX) to detect asbestos. Subsequently, the elements of the deposited dust with asbestos were analyzed by SEM-EDX to assess the contribution of sources such as abandoned mines, slate and soil. Results: Among the 105 samples, asbestos was detected by PLM in 29 (27.6%) sampling points, and detected by SEM in 56 (48.6%) sampling points. Asbestos in indoor residences was detected by PLM in four sampling points, and by SEM in 12 sampling points. Asbestos detection in indoor residences may be due to ventilation between indoors and outdoors, and indicates long-term exposure. The asbestos detection rate for outdoor residences in the case group was higher than that in the control group. This can be explained as the case group having had higher exposure to asbestos, and there has been continuous exposure to asbestos in the control group as well as the case group. Conclusion: Past residential asbestos exposure may be associated with asbestosis among local residents near abandoned asbestos mines. Odds ratios were calculated for asbestos detection in outdoor residence by logistic regression analysis. Odds ratio between asbestos detection and asbestosis pulmonum was 3.36 (95% CI 0.90-12.53) (p=0.072), adjusting for age, sex, smoking status and work history with multi-variable logistic regression by PLM analysis method.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.33-41
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• 2017

Background: Phosphate rock and its by-product are widely used in various industries to produce phosphoric acid, gypsum, gypsum board, and fertilizer. Owing to its high level of natural radioactive nuclides (e.g., $^{238}U$ and $^{226}Ra$), the radiological safety of workers who work with phosphate rock should be systematically managed. In this study, $^{238}U$, $^{232}Th$, $^{226}Ra$, and $^{40}K$ levels were measured to analyze the transport characteristics of these radionuclides in the production cycle of phosphate rock. Materials and Methods: Energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence and gamma spectrometry were used to determine the activity of $^{238}U$, $^{232}Th$, $^{226}Ra$, and $^{40}K$. To evaluate the extent of secular disequilibrium, the analytical results were compared using statistical methods. Finally, the distribution of radioactivity across different stages of the phosphate rock production cycle was evaluated. Results and Discussion: The concentration ratios of $^{226}Ra$ and $^{238}U$ in phosphate rock were close to 1.0, while those found in gypsum and fertilizer were extremely different, reflecting disequilibrium after the chemical reaction process. The nuclide with the highest activity level in the production cycle of phosphate rock was $^{40}K$, and the median $^{40}K$ activity was $8.972Bq{\cdot}g^{-1}$ and $1.496Bq{\cdot}g^{-1}$, respectively. For the $^{238}U$ series, the activity of $^{238}U$ and $^{226}Ra$ was greatest in phosphate rock, and the distribution of activity values clearly showed the transport characteristics of the radionuclides, both for the byproducts of the decay sequences and for their final products. Conclusion: Although the activity of $^{40}K$ in k-related fertilizer was relatively high, it made a relatively low contribution to the total radiological effect. However, the activity levels of $^{226}Ra$ and $^{238}U$ in phosphate rock were found to be relatively high, near the upper end of the acceptable limits. Therefore, it is necessary to systematically manage the radiological safety of workers engaged in phosphate rock processing.

• 월간산업보건
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• s.8
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• pp.4-30
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• 1988

Examination of working environments was conducted to get more detailed data about harmful working environments and to make a contribution to more effective management. Study was carried out on 722 factories located in Taegu city and eight counties in Kyungpook Province, Korea, for a period of one year, from February 1 to December 30, 1986. The total number and proportion of workers exposed to harmful material was 37,697, 45.2% among 83,368 workers. The results according to exposed material were as follows: 1. In the case of noise, proportion of exceeding the 8-hour TLV was 59%, Included were nail-cutting in assembly metal manufacturing industry and weaving process in textile. 2. Dust in mill process of coal manufacturing industries exceeded the TLV of second class of dust at all parts and exceeded the TLV at 6% as a whole.: 3. The fields of industry lower than 70 lux of illumination were storage equipment of food, auto-winder of textile, painting of wood wares and coal mixing, and 44% of all cases was lower than standard. 4. As a result of temperature index investigation(WBGT), about 12% of all sujects exceeded limit value. Included parts were rolling machine and reducing room. 5. In the case of organic solvents, TLV was exceeded at about 8%, The parts exceeded TLV according to materials belonged to this category were as follows. 1) Toluene: adhesive work in assembly metal manufacturing 2) Xylene: printing and paint mixing in chemical manufacturing 3) Methyl ethytl ketone: paint mixing in all parts examined and coating machine partially in chemical manufacturing 4) Methyl isobutyl ketone: printing in chemical manufacturing 5) Acetone: vapor polishing in assembly metal manufacturing 6. Among specified chemical materials, the concentration of HC1 in the air in metal assembly manufacturing factory exceeded TLV. in one of three assembly metal manufacturing examined. Others, such as benzene, acetic acid, formic acid, sodium hydroxide, formalin, ammonia, copper, chromate etc. were lower than TLV in its indoor atmospheric concentration. As a whole, the proportion of exceeding TLV was about 0.8% 7. The concentrations of inorganic lead were lower than TLV in all parts examined. The results of this investigation show the fact that current management of working environments is not satisfactory, and so more active management is needed.

• 한국노년학
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.155-170
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• 2005

The purpose of study is to compare the level of participation of the elderly people in the activity of production between Korea and Canada and to identify the factors related to the participation of the elderly people in the activity of production between Korea and Canada. In order to conduct a comparative culture study two data sets were used; one was the 1999 Survey of Time Use collected by Korean Statistics Office and the other was 1998 Survey of Time Use collected by Canadian Statistics Office. Many countries have been collected a time use survey and used to study labor, welfare, and culture. Total number of 17,730 Korean and 2,729 Canadian between 55 and 84 were included to analyze the data. It is clear from the results that older people engage in various productive behaviors, particularly when the definition of activities is broadened to include unpaid work. It is also clear the overall productive contributions are higher among older Koreans than among older Canadians. While the focus in this study has been strictly on productive activities, the aging well literature suggests that the ability to remain independent in later life is enhanced through continued engagement in productive activities. It is thus critical that we better understand the nature of later-life activities and in particular the wide-ranging contributions made by older people. This is an important area of further exploration.

• Food Science of Animal Resources
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.50-54
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• 2002

The aim of this work to determine the formation of lactulose during heat treatment process as a contribution to the estabilishment of limits of chemical indicators for different types of heat processed milk and analyze of lactulose for the reconstituted milk added samples. The HTST(75$\^{C}$/15s) and UHT(130$\^{C}$/2∼3s) treatment realized with a pilot plant and heat-treated samples were stroed at 4, 10, 30$\^{C}$ for 4 weeks. Changes in lactulose was evaluated at 7 days intervals. The other heat treatment was sealed in glass tube and heated at 75$\^{C}$ for 10 to 120s and heated at 130$\^{C}$ for 2 to 60s in a thermostatically controlled constant temperature bath of glycerol. The reconstituted milk was made with full fat dry milk that reconstituted with deionized water to 10% total solid, and was added to milk at 10, 20, 30% respectively. The samples processed with a HTST pilot plant showed that lactulose was contained at 1.47∼1.52mg/10()ml and 8.19 ∼8.32mg/100ml for UHT-treated samples. Changes in the lactulose content of heat-treated samples during storage at 4 and 10$\^{C}$ for 4 weeks caused a slight increase, however a noticeable increase was observed at 30$\^{C}$ for 4 week. The glass tube samples showed that high correlations between relative increase in content of lactulose and increasing processing times(75$\^{C}$ : r = 0.986, 130$\^{C}$ : r = 0.987, respectively). Added with reconstituted milk would cause a increase of the lactulose content linear with increasing addition amount(r = 0.982). This results observed for lactulose in commercial milk samples would applied to the detection of chemical changes during heat treatment and illegal use of reconstituted milk.

• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.1-11
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• 2018

It is ten years since the Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification system was implemented in Korea, and the government aims to acquire GAP certification up to 25% of the total agricultural areas by 2022. As of the end of 2017, 6.3% of the total cultivated area and 8.1% of the total farm households were certified, which is slower than expected. The purpose of this study was to investigate the causes of the GAP accreditation through the surveys and on site inspections of the GAP certified farmers and to propose the development plans according to the problems analysis of the current system in order to expand the GAP certification. Certified farmers recognized the need for agricultural safety and hygiene, but there were a lot of nonconformities regarding practical practices. This is due to the ambiguity of the certification standards and the wrong ways in the training method for the producers. GAP certification is slow to expand to farmers and low consumer awareness is considered a structural problem of GAP certification system, and improvement measures are needed accordingly. It is necessary to convert the state-led GAP certification system into a state-led private certification system. It is necessary for the government to focus on policy, research and follow-up management. In addition, it is necessary to establish a separate organization in the form of a contribution organization for the certification, education, and public relations. In addition, long-term plan must be established and systematically carried out. It is necessary to integrate too many certification agencies compared to the farming scale of Korea, and it is necessary to realize the application fee for realizing the financial independence of the certification body and correct certification work. In addition, inspector qualification standards should be strengthened and training system should be improved to nurture high quality inspectors. Simplified certification standards based on statutes need to be subdivided into practical action plans. In order to improve the GAP certification system, it is necessary to have a discussion through a committee composed of specialists from industry and academia, and it will be possible to contribute to the safety of the food of the people through the production of safe by drawing concrete development plans.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.77-92
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• 2014

Recently, numerous documents including unstructured data and text have been created due to the rapid increase in the usage of social media and the Internet. Each document is usually provided with a specific category for the convenience of the users. In the past, the categorization was performed manually. However, in the case of manual categorization, not only can the accuracy of the categorization be not guaranteed but the categorization also requires a large amount of time and huge costs. Many studies have been conducted towards the automatic creation of categories to solve the limitations of manual categorization. Unfortunately, most of these methods cannot be applied to categorizing complex documents with multiple topics because the methods work by assuming that one document can be categorized into one category only. In order to overcome this limitation, some studies have attempted to categorize each document into multiple categories. However, they are also limited in that their learning process involves training using a multi-categorized document set. These methods therefore cannot be applied to multi-categorization of most documents unless multi-categorized training sets are provided. To overcome the limitation of the requirement of a multi-categorized training set by traditional multi-categorization algorithms, we propose a new methodology that can extend a category of a single-categorized document to multiple categorizes by analyzing relationships among categories, topics, and documents. First, we attempt to find the relationship between documents and topics by using the result of topic analysis for single-categorized documents. Second, we construct a correspondence table between topics and categories by investigating the relationship between them. Finally, we calculate the matching scores for each document to multiple categories. The results imply that a document can be classified into a certain category if and only if the matching score is higher than the predefined threshold. For example, we can classify a certain document into three categories that have larger matching scores than the predefined threshold. The main contribution of our study is that our methodology can improve the applicability of traditional multi-category classifiers by generating multi-categorized documents from single-categorized documents. Additionally, we propose a module for verifying the accuracy of the proposed methodology. For performance evaluation, we performed intensive experiments with news articles. News articles are clearly categorized based on the theme, whereas the use of vulgar language and slang is smaller than other usual text document. We collected news articles from July 2012 to June 2013. The articles exhibit large variations in terms of the number of types of categories. This is because readers have different levels of interest in each category. Additionally, the result is also attributed to the differences in the frequency of the events in each category. In order to minimize the distortion of the result from the number of articles in different categories, we extracted 3,000 articles equally from each of the eight categories. Therefore, the total number of articles used in our experiments was 24,000. The eight categories were "IT Science," "Economy," "Society," "Life and Culture," "World," "Sports," "Entertainment," and "Politics." By using the news articles that we collected, we calculated the document/category correspondence scores by utilizing topic/category and document/topics correspondence scores. The document/category correspondence score can be said to indicate the degree of correspondence of each document to a certain category. As a result, we could present two additional categories for each of the 23,089 documents. Precision, recall, and F-score were revealed to be 0.605, 0.629, and 0.617 respectively when only the top 1 predicted category was evaluated, whereas they were revealed to be 0.838, 0.290, and 0.431 when the top 1 - 3 predicted categories were considered. It was very interesting to find a large variation between the scores of the eight categories on precision, recall, and F-score.