Under the recent trend of globalization, a new proposal on education has not been able to avoid the request for multi-cultural trend. Furthermore, education has been exposed to circumstances which are far different from the previous situations in which global cooperation and intercultural understanding have been more emphasized. 'Educational Nomadism'is a metaphor of creating new value and significance of education. In fact, transnational education which could be a crisis and opportunity at the same time has recently been the mainstream throughout the world. In terms of education, Korea has encountered base hollowing-out in which excessive dependence on the US education and autonomous education coexist. In fact, the world has spent a lot of time and money to have better educational background on a resume through redundant expense by the government and parents. Under this critical situation, it's urgent to change Korea's modern education into a creative educational system in connection with an advanced foreign educational system and further develop the advantage of Korea's education. A parent's investment in his/her child is a support to create new culture as well as an assistance for hope and better future of Korean education. A new direction of parents' education fever that has opened a door to global communitas can stir up infinite potential through which the flow of education fever can be changed to the resources of new civilization. The global cooperation and efforts for communitas means the communication with this world. Through this communication, the culture in which people are forced to zero-sum competition can leap into the education for change of civilization which creates pleasure of self sufficiency and donation.
New years' rites serve a religious function to wish for well-being during the year by bidding farewell to the previous year and welcoming the next. In Japan, in mid-December, to welcome Toshigami, kadomatsu, and shimenawagazari are prepared, as well as osechi ryori to be eaten at the beginning of the year. On New Year's Day, people go to shrines and bow to the gods while saying Hatsumode (初詣). On the fifteenth day of the first month, in the course of a rite called Dondoyaki, all the decorations used in the first month and the amulet used in the previous year are burned. In Korea, when the Lunar New Year approaches, people prepare for their ancestral rites and clean their houses. On the first day of the new year, people hold ancestral rites for their ancestors. There are many different seasonal rites, taking place from the beginning of the year to the full moon. In China, Danwonban (團圓飯), in which the whole family sits together and eats on New Year's Eve, is important. Lights are brightly lit up all night, and the sound of firecrackers outside rings out loudly. On the door, the word chun-ryun is attached to wish for prosperity in the new year. According to the cycle of the four seasons, the first lunar month contains a high proportion of the seasonal rites that are repeated every year. The first month represents the beginning of a year, and various rituals are performed in order to wish for good health and abundance during the coming year. In addition, the "folk religious world view" is integral to annual new years' rites, so it is not difficult to understand the religious character and structure of the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese annual ceremonies. This study examines the current status of annual new years' rites in Korea, China, and Japan, and how the rites are structured according to the inflection points in the year. In addition, religious characteristics are reviewed in terms of gods, predictions, and fertility prayers, exorcisms, health, and restoration. In this way, it can be seen that various religious elements such as shamanism, agricultural faith, ancestor worship, Shintoism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism can be witnessed in the annual new years' rites of Korea, China, and Japan. In addition, differences in the presence or absence of these are shown to depend on the country.
These studies were conducted to investigate nutrient sources and supplementary materials of synthetic compost media for Agaricus bisporus culture. Investigation were carried out to establish the optimum composition for compost of Agaricus bisporus methods of out-door fermentation and peakheating with rice straw as the main substrate of the media. The incidence and flora of harmful organisms in rice straw compost and their control were also studied. 1. When rice straw was used as the main substrate in synthetic compost as a carbon source. yields were remarkably high. Fermentation was more rapid than that of barley straw or wheat straw, and the total nitrogen content was high in rice straw compost. 2. Since the morphological and physico-chemical nature of Japonica and Indica types of rice straw are greatly dissimilar. there were apparent differences in the process of compost fermentation. Fermentation of Indica type straw proceeded more rapidly with a shortening the compost period, reducing the water supply, and required adding of supplementary materials for producing stable physical conditions. 3. Use of barley straw compost resulted in a smaller crop compared with rice straw. but when a 50%, barley straw and 50% rice straw mixture was used, the yield was almost the same as that using only rice straw. 4. There were extremely high positive correlations between yield of Agaricus bisporus and the total nitrogen, organic nitrogen, amino acids, amides and amino sugar nitrogen content of compost. The mycerial growth and fruit body formation were severely inhibited by ammonium nitrogen. 5. When rice straw was used as the main substrate for compost media, urea was the most suitable source of nitrogen. Poor results were obtained with calcium cyanamide and ammonium sulfate. When urea was applied three separate times, nitrogen loss during composting was decreased and the total nitrogen content of compost was increased. 6. The supplementation of organic nutrient activated compost fermentation and increased yield of Agaricus bisporus. The best sources of organic nutrients were: perilla meal, sesame meal, wheat bran and poultry manure, etc. 7. Soybean meal, tobacco powder and glutamic acid fermentation by-products which were industrial wastes, could be substituted for perilla meal, sesame meal and wheat bran as organic nutrient sources for compost media. B. When gypsum and zeolite were added to rice straw. physical deterioration of compost due to excess moisture and caramelization was observed. The Indica type of straw was more remarkable in increase of yield of Agricus bisporus by addition of supplementing materials than Japonica straw. 9. For preparing rice straw compost, the best mixture was prepared by 10% poultry manure, 5% perilla meal, 1. 2 to 1. 5% urea and 1% gypsum. At spring cropping, it was good to add rice bran to accelerate heat generation of the compost heap. 10. There was significantly high positive correlation (r=0.97) between accumulated temperature and the decomposition degree of compost during outdoor composting. The yield was highest at accumulated temperatures between 900 and
In terms of the international air transport, the open skies policy implies freedom in the sky or opening the sky. In the normative respect, the open skies policy is a kind of open-door policy which gives various forms of traffic right to other countries, but on the other hand it is a policy of free competition in the international air transport. Since the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the United States has signed an open skies agreement with many countries, starting with the Netherlands, so that competitive large airlines can compete in the international air transport market where there exist a lot of business opportunities. South Korea now has an open skies agreement with more than 20 countries. The frequent flyer program (FFP) is part of a broad-based marketing alliance which has been used as an airfare strategy since the U.S. government's airline deregulation. The membership-based program is an incentive plan that provides mileage points to customers for using airline services and rewards customer loyalty in tangible forms based on their accumulated points. In its early stages, the frequent flyer program was focused on marketing efforts to attract customers, but now in the environment of intense competition among airlines, the program is used as an important strategic marketing tool for enhancing business performance. Therefore, airline companies agree that they need to identify customer needs in order to secure loyal customers more effectively. The outcomes from an airline's frequent flyer program can have a variety of effects on international competition. First, the airline can obtain a more dominant position in the air flight market by expanding its air route networks. Second, the availability of flight products for customers can be improved with an increase in flight frequency. Third, the airline can preferentially expand into new markets and thus gain advantages over its competitors. However, there are few empirical studies on the airline frequent flyer program. Accordingly, this study aims to explore the effects of the program on international competition, after reviewing the types of strategic alliance between airlines. Making strategic airline alliances is a worldwide trend resulting from the open skies policy. South Korea also needs to be making open skies agreements more realistic to promote the growth and competition of domestic airlines. The present study is about the performance of the airline frequent flyer program and international competition under the open skies policy. With a sample of five global alliance groups (Star, Oneworld, Wings, Qualiflyer and Skyteam), the study was attempted as an empirical study of the effects that the resource structures and levels of information technology held by airlines in each group have on the type of alliance, and one-way analysis of variance and regression analysis were used to test hypotheses. The findings of this study suggest that both large airline companies and small/medium-size airlines in an alliance group with global networks and organizations are able to achieve high performance and secure international competitiveness. Airline passengers earn mileage points by using non-flight services through an alliance network with hotels, car-rental services, duty-free shops, travel agents and more and show high interests in and preferences for related service benefits. Therefore, Korean airline companies should develop more aggressive marketing programs based on multilateral alliances with other services including hotels, as well as with other airlines.
The anthropomorphism of brands, defined as seeing human beings in brands (Puzakova, Kwak, and Rosereto, 2008) is the focus of this study. Specifically, the research objective is to understand the ways in which brands are rendered humanlike. By analyzing consumer readings of stories found on food product packages we intend to show how marketers and consumers humanize a spectrum of brands and create meanings. Our research question considers the possibility that a single brand may host multiple or single meanings, associations, and personalities for different consumers. We start by highlighting the theoretical and practical significance of our research, explain why we turn our attention to packages as vehicles of brand meaning transfer, then describe our qualitative methodology, discuss findings, and conclude with a discussion of managerial implications and directions for future studies. The study was designed to directly expose consumers to potential vehicles of brand meaning transfer and then engage these consumers in free verbal reflections on their perceived meanings. Specifically, we asked participants to read non-nutritional stories on selected branded food packages, in order to elicit data about received meanings. Packaging has yet to receive due attention in consumer research (Hine, 1995). Until now, attention has focused solely on its utilitarian function and has generated a body of research that has explored the impact of nutritional information and claims on consumer perceptions of products (e.g., Loureiro, McCluskey and Mittelhammer, 2002; Mazis and Raymond, 1997; Nayga, Lipinski and Savur, 1998; Wansik, 2003). An exception is a recent study that turns its attention to non-nutritional packaging narratives and treats them as cultural productions and vehicles for mythologizing the brand (Kniazeva and Belk, 2007). The next step in this stream of research is to explore how such mythologizing activity affects brand personality perception and how these perceptions relate to consumers. These are the questions that our study aimed to address. We used in-depth interviews to help overcome the limitations of quantitative studies. Our convenience sample was formed with the objective of providing demographic and psychographic diversity in order to elicit variations in consumer reflections to food packaging stories. Our informants represent middle-class residents of the US and do not exhibit extreme alternative lifestyles described by Thompson as "cultural creatives" (2004). Nine people were individually interviewed on their food consumption preferences and behavior. Participants were asked to have a look at the twelve displayed food product packages and read all the textual information on the package, after which we continued with questions that focused on the consumer interpretations of the reading material (Scott and Batra, 2003). On average, each participant reflected on 4-5 packages. Our in-depth interviews lasted one to one and a half hours each. The interviews were tape recorded and transcribed, providing 140 pages of text. The products came from local grocery stores on the West Coast of the US and represented a basic range of food product categories, including snacks, canned foods, cereals, baby foods, and tea. The data were analyzed using procedures for developing grounded theory delineated by Strauss and Corbin (1998). As a result, our study does not support the notion of one brand/one personality as assumed by prior work. Thus, we reveal multiple brand personalities peacefully cohabiting in the same brand as seen by different consumers, despite marketer attempts to create more singular brand personalities. We extend Fournier's (1998) proposition, that one's life projects shape the intensity and nature of brand relationships. We find that these life projects also affect perceived brand personifications and meanings. While Fournier provides a conceptual framework that links together consumers’ life themes (Mick and Buhl, 1992) and relational roles assigned to anthropomorphized brands, we find that consumer life projects mold both the ways in which brands are rendered humanlike and the ways in which brands connect to consumers' existential concerns. We find two modes through which brands are anthropomorphized by our participants. First, brand personalities are created by seeing them through perceived demographic, psychographic, and social characteristics that are to some degree shared by consumers. Second, brands in our study further relate to consumers' existential concerns by either being blended with consumer personalities in order to connect to them (the brand as a friend, a family member, a next door neighbor) or by distancing themselves from the brand personalities and estranging them (the brand as a used car salesman, a "bunch of executives.") By focusing on food product packages, we illuminate a very specific, widely-used, but little-researched vehicle of marketing communication: brand storytelling. Recent work that has approached packages as mythmakers, finds it increasingly challenging for marketers to produce textual stories that link the personalities of products to the personalities of those consuming them, and suggests that "a multiplicity of building material for creating desired consumer myths is what a postmodern consumer arguably needs" (Kniazeva and Belk, 2007). Used as vehicles for storytelling, food packages can exploit both rational and emotional approaches, offering consumers either a "lecture" or "drama" (Randazzo, 2006), myths (Kniazeva and Belk, 2007; Holt, 2004; Thompson, 2004), or meanings (McCracken, 2005) as necessary building blocks for anthropomorphizing their brands. The craft of giving birth to brand personalities is in the hands of writers/marketers and in the minds of readers/consumers who individually and sometimes idiosyncratically put a meaningful human face on a brand.
Recommender system has become one of the most important technologies in e-commerce in these days. The ultimate reason to shop online, for many consumers, is to reduce the efforts for information search and purchase. Recommender system is a key technology to serve these needs. Many of the past studies about recommender systems have been devoted to developing and improving recommendation algorithms and collaborative filtering (CF) is known to be the most successful one. Despite its success, however, CF has several shortcomings such as cold-start, sparsity, gray sheep problems. In order to be able to generate recommendations, ordinary CF algorithms require evaluations or preference information directly from users. For new users who do not have any evaluations or preference information, therefore, CF cannot come up with recommendations (Cold-star problem). As the numbers of products and customers increase, the scale of the data increases exponentially and most of the data cells are empty. This sparse dataset makes computation for recommendation extremely hard (Sparsity problem). Since CF is based on the assumption that there are groups of users sharing common preferences or tastes, CF becomes inaccurate if there are many users with rare and unique tastes (Gray sheep problem). This study proposes a new algorithm that utilizes Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques to resolve the gray sheep problem. We utilize 'degree centrality' in SNA to identify users with unique preferences (gray sheep). Degree centrality in SNA refers to the number of direct links to and from a node. In a network of users who are connected through common preferences or tastes, those with unique tastes have fewer links to other users (nodes) and they are isolated from other users. Therefore, gray sheep can be identified by calculating degree centrality of each node. We divide the dataset into two, gray sheep and others, based on the degree centrality of the users. Then, different similarity measures and recommendation methods are applied to these two datasets. More detail algorithm is as follows: Step 1: Convert the initial data which is a two-mode network (user to item) into an one-mode network (user to user). Step 2: Calculate degree centrality of each node and separate those nodes having degree centrality values lower than the pre-set threshold. The threshold value is determined by simulations such that the accuracy of CF for the remaining dataset is maximized. Step 3: Ordinary CF algorithm is applied to the remaining dataset. Step 4: Since the separated dataset consist of users with unique tastes, an ordinary CF algorithm cannot generate recommendations for them. A 'popular item' method is used to generate recommendations for these users. The F measures of the two datasets are weighted by the numbers of nodes and summed to be used as the final performance metric. In order to test performance improvement by this new algorithm, an empirical study was conducted using a publically available dataset - the MovieLens data by GroupLens research team. We used 100,000 evaluations by 943 users on 1,682 movies. The proposed algorithm was compared with an ordinary CF algorithm utilizing 'Best-N-neighbors' and 'Cosine' similarity method. The empirical results show that F measure was improved about 11% on average when the proposed algorithm was used