• Information Systems Review
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.161-179
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• 2009

Nowadays an increasing number of Internet users are running individual websites as Blog or Cyworld. As this type of personal media has a great influence on communication among people, business comes to care about Network Effect, Network Software, and Social Network. For instance, Cyworld created the web service called 'Minihompy' for individual web-logs, and acquired 2.4milion users in 2007. Although many people assumed that the popularity of Minihompy, or Blog would be a passing fad, Cyworld has improved its service, and expanded its Network with various contents. This kind of expansion reflects survival efforts from infinite competitions among ISPs (Internet Service Provider) with focus on enhancing usability to users. However, Cyworld's Network Effect is gradually diminished in these days. Both of low production cost of service vendors and the low searching/conversing costs of users combine to make ISPs hard to keep their market share sustainable. To overcome this lackluster trend, Cyworld has adopted new strategies and try to lock their users in their service. Various efforts to improve the continuance and expansion of Network effect remain unclear and uncertain. If we understand beforehand how a service would improve Network effect, and which service could bring more effect, ISPs can get substantial help in launching their new business strategy. Regardless many diverse ideas to increase their user's duration online ISPs cannot guarantee 'how the new service strategies will end up in profitability. Therefore, this research studies about Network effect of Cyworld's 'Minihompy' using System-Dynamics method which could analyze dynamic relation between users and ISPs. Furthermore, the research aims to predict changes of Network Effect based on the strategy of new service. 'Page View' and 'Duration Time' can be enhanced for the short tenn because they enhance the service functionality. However, these services cannot increase the Network in the long-run. Limitations of this research include that we predict the future merely based on the limited data. We also limit the independent variables over Network Effect only to the following two issues: Increasing the number of users and increasing the Service Functionality. Despite of some limitations, this study perhaps gives some insights to the policy makers or others facing the stiff competition in the network business.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.519-547
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• 2004

This paper analyze problems about scope of specific trade obligations(STOs), principle of dispute settlement procedure, and non-parties in context of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety(POB), which based on sub-paragraph 31(i) of DDA WTO Ministrial Declaration. The implications based on result of this study are as follows. First, to accept the wider scope of STOs under POB in Korea, importing country, won't be harmful to LMOs and Bioindustry. Instead, it will ensure a high level of biosafety concerning the import of LMOs. Exporters can take different kinds of trade measures to countervail adverse effect on the export of LMOs in this case. Therefore importer will endure the aftereffect. However, if korea were in exporter's place, to accept the wider scope STOs under POB will not have a good influence on the export of LMOs. Korea, therefore, should devise scheme for responding to debate about the STOs in MEAs, which have to be based on cost-benefit analysis and scenarios taking into account of speed and level in biotechology progress, status and trend of LMOs R&D and production, and condition of other industries. Second, it is not easy to agree with applying to what's rule between the POB and WTO for settlement dispute. Because there is the incompatibility between the POB characterized according to social rationality and WTO's rules for safety and environmental protection characterized according to scientific rationality. This issue have to be discussed for long period due to gap like that. Accordingly Korea, one of major LMOs importing countries, should suggest continuously that the effort is needed to ensure an adequate level of protection in transboundary movements of LMOs and scientific, environmental and socio-economic study. Third, in case of dispute between party and non-party of the POB, the duties under the WTO of non-party of the POB(if WTO member country) is valid. The country, therefore, will try to settle dispute based on WTO's rules. However, international society have to ensure for sound and safe use of LMOs in the field of transboundary movements. Accordingly Korea should devise scheme for preventing the possibility of dispute between party and non-party of the POB(if WTO member country), which is supported by policy options under the POB.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.679-690
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• 2015

The need to remove the cause of traffic accidents by improving the engineering system for a vehicle and the road in order to minimize the accident hazard. This is likely to cause traffic accident continue to take a large and significant social cost and time to improve the reliability and efficiency of this generally poor road, thereby generating a lot of damage to the national traffic accident caused by improper environmental factors. In order to minimize damage from traffic accidents, the cause of accidents must be eliminated through technological improvements of vehicles and road systems. Generally, it is highly probable that traffic accident occurs more often on roads that lack safety measures, and can only be improved with tremendous time and costs. In particular, traffic accidents at intersections are on the rise due to inappropriate environmental factors, and are causing great losses for the nation as a whole. This study aims to present safety countermeasures against the cause of accidents by developing an intersection Traffic safety evaluation model. It will also diagnose vulnerable traffic points through BPA (Back -propagation algorithm) among artificial neural networks recently investigated in the area of artificial intelligence. Furthermore, it aims to pursue a more efficient traffic safety improvement project in terms of operating signalized intersections and establishing traffic safety policies. As a result of conducting this study, the mean square error approximate between the predicted values and actual measured values of traffic accidents derived from the BPA is estimated to be 3.89. It appeared that the BPA appeared to have excellent traffic safety evaluating abilities compared to the multiple regression model. In other words, The BPA can be effectively utilized in diagnosing and practical establishing transportation policy in the safety of actual signalized intersections.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.4-17
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• 2000

Purpose : This study aimed to investigate and to evaluate the present conditions of hospice programs in Korea for supplying data useful in making policy in hospice, which is not institutionalized yet. Method : For this purpose we surveyed 59 hospice programs regarding the general characteristics, manpower, patients, services, financial conditions, and facilities. Thirty-seven hospice programs answered the questionnaires. Result : They were 11 tertiary hospitals, 11 other hospitals, 3 clinics, 12 home care hospice, and 1 freestanding hospice. Only 9 hospice programs have all of the essential professionals: physicians, nurses, social workers, clergies, and volunteers. In some hospice programs, volunteers who had not been trained for hospice provided services to terminal patients. More than half of the hospice said they provided services to the patients who lost their consciousness and were not suitable for hospice care. 16% of the hospice said they did not keep the patients' record. Some hospitals including tertiary hospitals provided such intensive care as radiotherapy, TPN, injections to hospice patients. Many hospice programs other than hospitals didn't charge patients for hospice care. 60% of the hospice said they suffered from financial problems. Most of the hospice wards were not built for hospice use at first. So they did not have such supplementary facilities as dayroom, waiting room, special bathing facilities etc. Conclusion : For improving the quality of terminal patients and promoting the cost effective use of health care resources, it is necessary to consider the institutionalization of hospice. The institutionalization of hospice programs can improve the quality of hospice care and the standardization of the hospice program can hasten its institutionalization.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.149-162
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• 2014

Course guidance is a mentoring process which is performed before students register for coming classes. The course guidance plays a very important role to students in checking degree audits of students and mentoring classes which will be taken in coming semester. Also, it is intimately involved with a graduation assessment or a completion of ABEEK certification. Currently, course guidance is manually performed by some advisers at most of universities in Korea because they have no electronic systems for the course guidance. By the lack of the systems, the advisers should analyze each degree audit of students and curriculum information of their own departments. This process often causes the human error during the course guidance process due to the complexity of the process. The electronic system thus is essential to avoid the human error for the course guidance. If the relation data model-based system is applied to the mentoring process, then the problems in manual way can be solved. However, the relational data model-based systems have some limitations. Curriculums of a department and certification systems can be changed depending on a new policy of a university or surrounding environments. If the curriculums and the systems are changed, a scheme of the existing system should be changed in accordance with the variations. It is also not sufficient to provide semantic search due to the difficulty of extracting semantic relationships between subjects. In this paper, we model a course mentoring ontology based on the analysis of a curriculum of computer science department, a structure of degree audit, and ABEEK certification. Ontology-based course guidance system is also proposed to overcome the limitation of the existing methods and to provide the effectiveness of course mentoring process for both of advisors and students. In the proposed system, all data of the system consists of ontology instances. To create ontology instances, ontology population module is developed by using JENA framework which is for building semantic web and linked data applications. In the ontology population module, the mapping rules to connect parts of degree audit to certain parts of course mentoring ontology are designed. All ontology instances are generated based on degree audits of students who participate in course mentoring test. The generated instances are saved to JENA TDB as a triple repository after an inference process using JENA inference engine. A user interface for course guidance is implemented by using Java and JENA framework. Once a advisor or a student input student's information such as student name and student number at an information request form in user interface, the proposed system provides mentoring results based on a degree audit of current student and rules to check scores for each part of a curriculum such as special cultural subject, major subject, and MSC subject containing math and basic science. Recall and precision are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The recall is used to check that the proposed system retrieves all relevant subjects. The precision is used to check whether the retrieved subjects are relevant to the mentoring results. An officer of computer science department attends the verification on the results derived from the proposed system. Experimental results using real data of the participating students show that the proposed course guidance system based on course mentoring ontology provides correct course mentoring results to students at all times. Advisors can also reduce their time cost to analyze a degree audit of corresponding student and to calculate each score for the each part. As a result, the proposed system based on ontology techniques solves the difficulty of mentoring methods in manual way and the proposed system derive correct mentoring results as human conduct.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.129-155
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• 2008

The rate of antibiotics prescription for an acute airway infection significantly varies depending upon the diagnosis type, specialty, and the location of the hospital along with many other related factors. The objective of this study is to empirically investigate the possible relationship between the antibiotics prescription rates for an acute airway infection and the degree of competition in the hospital market regions of mainly the providers of primary medical care services such as clinics, internal medicines, pediatrics and otorhinolaryngology department. Using the data from Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) regarding the hospitals' antibiotics prescription rates for the acute airway infection and controlling for selected variables of demand and supply sectors, this study tries to figure out that the degree of competition in the hospital market, regardless of what type of competition indexes we employed, has a statistically significant effect on the variations of antibiotics prescription rate of the clinics in local areas. This result implies that as an economic consideration itself, the change in the degree of competition in the hospital market can play a crucial role influencing the treatment behaviors of the medical doctors. More specifically, this study reveals that as the degree of competition increases the antibiotics prescription rate goes up. This result means that if the market becomes more competitive in a specific region so that it might cause a reduction in doctor's income, doctors with rational decision-making process, recognize that the benefit created from inducing patients' seemingly unnecessary demand for medical care (income effect) would be higher than the costs associated with sustaining their targeted income (substitution effect). It is because that the doctors are more likely to prescribe antibiotics which create relatively higher margins than other medical care services in order to sustain their targeted income when the hospital market competition becomes tighter. Even though this study empirically confirms that antibiotics prescription can be affected by the economic incentives, it still raises following issues as limitations of the study: first issue is about the representativeness of the hospital regions segregated for this study, which might be weak in explaining whether these regions are mutually exclusive in reality. Patients actually consider the quality of services, transportation cost, time costs, and any other related factors choosing the doctors or hospitals, and in that sense, this study rules out 'border-crossing' in using the medical care services. Second issue arises in capturing the data of antibiotics prescription rate. Since we use the average rate for each medical institution, we cannot figure out the average rate for each patient so that we are not able to control for the variation of patients' medical conditions. It is because of the unavailability of data regarding each patient's medical condition from HIRA. Thirdly, since this study mainly analyzes the medical institutions providing primary care such as clinics, internal medicines, pediatrics, and otorhinolaryngology department, it is skeptical of whether those institutions can represent the hospital market in respective regions and truly reflect the degree of competition. It needs to extend the study areas and disease types as well as any micro data for future studies.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.157-183
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• 2008

'New Universities for Regional Innovation(NURI)' is a financial aid program designed to promote the development of universities as a major component of Regional Innovation System (RIS). In particular, this program emphasizes the role of regional universities to provide the qualified graduates for the regional economy. This paper is to evaluate the effect of NURI, focusing on the change of graduates' employment. The effect of the program can be evaluated by the quality of graduates' accumulated human capital, and graduates' employment performance represents the graduates' quality evaluated in the labor market. This is also believed to be a good performance indicator of the NURI program. We utilize the graduate employment survey of Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI), and calculate the graduates' employment rates of the departments that received the financial support of NURI (treatment group). We also calculate the graduates' employment rates of the departments that applied for the support of the NURI program but were not selected (comparison group). By using difference-in-differences method, we compare the change of graduates' employment rates in treatment and comparison groups before and after the program came in effect. Compared with the employment rates in 2004 before the NURI program started, the graduates employment rates improved in both groups in 2005 and 2006. The improvement of the employment rates in the treatment group is larger than that in the comparison group. Moreover, the difference of improvement gets larger in the year 2006 than in 2005, which means those students who were affected more years by the NURI program are more likely to be employed. However, the difference is not statistically significant, and we cannot definetely conclude that NURI showed the desired effect on the quality of the college graduates. We calculate employment rates in two ways; whether to treat going on to graduate education as an employment or not. The result was qualitatively the same in both cases. We also tracked quality of employment by investigating the firm size where the graduates of the treatment group were employed. By utilizing data from the Employment Insurance Fund, we measure the firm size by the number of employees. We did not find any deterioration of employment quality between 2005 and 2006, though it deteriorates in 2007. Therefore, the improvement of employment rates until 2006, though not statistically significant, does not seem to come at the cost of employment quality. The interpretation of this result cannot help being very limited. First, this evaluation covers such a short time period. It only covers two years after the program started, 2005 and 2006. Second, the extent of the improvement in employment rates is not satisfactory considering the amount of financial support, even though it can be argued that the employment has improved since the inception of the program. Subsequent evaluation of the program is required to certify the NURI programs' longer term effectiveness.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.125-148
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• 2014

This paper performs a historical analysis on the various factors contributing to the current carbon lock-in of Korean electricity industry by using techo-institutional complex. The possibilities of the industry's carbon lock-out toward more sustainable development are also investigated. It turns out that market, firm, consumer, and government factors are all responsible for the development of the carbon lock-in of Korean power industry; the Korean government consistently favoring large power plants based on the economy of scale; below-cost electricity tariff; inflation policy to suppress increases in power price; rapid demand growth in summer and winter seasons; rigidities of electricity tariff; and expansion of gas-fired and imported coal-fired large power plants. On the other hand, except for nuclear power generation and smart grid, environment laws and new and renewable energy laws are the other remaining factors contributing to the carbon lock-out. Considering three key points that Korea is an export-oriented economy, the generation mix is the most critical factor to decide the amounts of carbon emission in the power industry, and the share of industry and commercial power consumption is over 85%, it is unlikely that Korea will achieve the carbon lock-out of power industry in the near future. Therefore, there are needs for more integrated approaches from market, firm, consumer, and government all together in order to achieve the carbon lock-out in the electricity industry. Firstly, from the market perspective, it is necessary to persue more active new and renewable energy penetration and to guarantee consumer choices by mitigating the incumbent's monopoly power as in the OECD countries. Secondly, from the firm perspective, the promotion of distributed energy system is urgent, which includes new and renewable resources and demand resources. Thirdly, from the consumer perspective, more green choices in the power tariff and customer awareness on the carbon lock-out are needed. Lastly, the government shall urgently improve power planning frameworks to include the various externalities that were not properly reflected in the past such as environmental and social conflict costs.

• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.788-818
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• 2009

Renewable energy refers to solar energy, biomass energy, hydrogen energy, wind power, fuel cell, coal liquefaction and vaporization, marine energy, waste energy, and liquidity fuel made out of byproduct of geothermal heat, hydrogen and coal; it excludes energy based on coal, oil, nuclear energy and natural gas. Developed countries have recognized the importance of these energies and thus have set the mid to long term plans to develop and commercialize the technology and supported them with drastic political and financial measures. Considering the growing recognition to the field, it is necessary to analysis up-to-now achievement of the government's related projects, in the standards of type of renewable energy, management of sectional goals, and its commercialization. Korean government is chiefly following suit the USA and British policies of developing and distributing renewable energy. However, unlike Japan which is in the lead role in solar rays industry, it still lacks in state-directed support, participation of enterprises and social recognition. The research regarding renewable energy has mainly examinedthe state of supply of each technology and suitability of specific region for applying the technology. The evaluation shows that the research has been focused on supply and demand of renewable as well as general energy and solution for the enhancement of supply capacity in certain area. However, in-depth study for commercialization and the increase of capacity in industry followed by development of the technology is still inadequate. 'Cost-benefit model for each energy source' is used in analysis of technology development of renewable energy and quantitative and macro economical effects of its commercialization in order to foresee following expand in related industries and increase in added value. First, Investment on the renewable energy technology development is in direct proportion both to the product and growth, but product shows slightly higher index under the same amount of R&D investment than growth. It indicates that advance in technology greatly influences the final product, the energy growth. Moreover, while R&D investment on renewable energy product as well as the government funds included in the investment have proportionate influence on the renewable energy growth, private investment in the total amount invested has reciprocal influence. This statistic shows that research and development is mainly driven by government funds rather than private investment. Finally, while R&D investment on renewable energy growth affects proportionately, government funds and private investment shows no direct relations, which indicates that the effects of research and development on renewable energy do not affect government funds or private investment. All of the results signify that although it is important to have government policy in technology development and commercialization, private investment and active participation of enterprises are the key to the success in the industry.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.125-139
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• 2013

Big data refers to the data that cannot be processes with conventional contemporary data technologies. As smart devices and social network services produces vast amount of data, big data attracts much attention from researchers. There are strong demands form governments and industries for bib data as it can create new values by drawing business insights from data. Since various new technologies to process big data introduced, academic communities also show much interest to the big data domain. A notable advance related to the big data technology has been in various fields. Big data technology makes it possible to access, collect, and save individual's personal data. These technologies enable the analysis of huge amounts of data with lower cost and less time, which is impossible to achieve with traditional methods. It even detects personal information that people do not want to open. Therefore, people using information technology such as the Internet or online services have some level of privacy concerns, and such feelings can hinder continued use of information systems. For example, SNS offers various benefits, but users are sometimes highly exposed to privacy intrusions because they write too much personal information on it. Even though users post their personal information on the Internet by themselves, the data sometimes is not under control of the users. Once the private data is posed on the Internet, it can be transferred to anywhere by a few clicks, and can be abused to create fake identity. In this way, privacy intrusion happens. This study aims to investigate how perceived personal information overload in SNS affects user's risk perception and information privacy concerns. Also, it examines the relationship between the concerns and user resistance behavior. A survey approach and structural equation modeling method are employed for data collection and analysis. This study contributes meaningful insights for academic researchers and policy makers who are planning to develop guidelines for privacy protection. The study shows that information overload on the social network services can bring the significant increase of users' perceived level of privacy risks. In turn, the perceived privacy risks leads to the increased level of privacy concerns. IF privacy concerns increase, it can affect users to from a negative or resistant attitude toward system use. The resistance attitude may lead users to discontinue the use of social network services. Furthermore, information overload is mediated by perceived risks to affect privacy concerns rather than has direct influence on perceived risk. It implies that resistance to the system use can be diminished by reducing perceived risks of users. Given that users' resistant behavior become salient when they have high privacy concerns, the measures to alleviate users' privacy concerns should be conceived. This study makes academic contribution of integrating traditional information overload theory and user resistance theory to investigate perceived privacy concerns in current IS contexts. There is little big data research which examined the technology with empirical and behavioral approach, as the research topic has just emerged. It also makes practical contributions. Information overload connects to the increased level of perceived privacy risks, and discontinued use of the information system. To keep users from departing the system, organizations should develop a system in which private data is controlled and managed with ease. This study suggests that actions to lower the level of perceived risks and privacy concerns should be taken for information systems continuance.