• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
• /
• v.14 no.12
• /
• pp.7143-7147
• /
• 2013

Background: The survival outcomes for women presenting with early breast cancer are influenced by treatment decisions. In Malaysia, survival outcome is generally poor due to late presentation. Of those who present early, many refuse treatment for complementary therapy. Objective: This study aimed to explore the decision making experiences of women with early breast cancer. Materials and Methods: A qualitative study using individual in-depth interviews was conducted to capture the decision making process of women with early breast cancer in Malaysia. We used purposive sampling to recruit women yet to undergo surgical treatment. A total of eight participants consented and were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide. These women were recruited from a period of one week after they were informed of their diagnoses. A topic guide, based on the Ottawa decision support framework (ODSF), was used to facilitate the interviews, which were audio recorded, transcribed and analysed using a thematic approach. Results: We identified four phases in the decision-making process of women with early breast cancer: discovery (pre-diagnosis); confirmatory ('receiving bad news'); deliberation; and decision (making a decision). These phases ranged from when women first discovered abnormalities in their breasts to them making final surgical treatment decisions. Information was vital in guiding these women. Support from family members, friends, healthcare professionals as well as survivors also has an influencing role. However, the final say on treatment decision was from themselves. Conclusions: The treatment decision for women with early breast cancer in Malaysia is a result of information they gather on their decision making journey. This journey starts with diagnosis. The women's spouses, friends, family members and healthcare professionals play different roles as information providers and supporters at different stages of treatment decisions. However, the final treatment decision is influenced mainly by women's own experiences, knowledge and understanding.

• Korean Journal of Childcare and Education
• /
• v.9 no.5
• /
• pp.109-129
• /
• 2013

This study examined the relationship between perceived participation in decision making and turnover intention among early childhood teachers and tested whether teachers' organizational commitment was a mediating factor. The subjects were 193 early childhood teachers working in day care centers in the Incheon and Gyeonggi-do areas. All valuables were measured by teacher questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed using Manova and Path analysis. The main results of this study were as follows. Firstly, there was a significant difference in perceived participation in decision making, organizational commitment and turnover intention among teachers according to only the type of day care center. Secondly, teachers' participation in decision making was positively related to organizational commitment while both of them were negatively related to turnover intention. Finally, teachers' organizational commitment fully mediated the relationship of participation in decision making to turnover intention. These findings could provide supporting evidence for measures to improve a working environment for early childhood teachers.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
• /
• v.5 no.4
• /
• pp.235-242
• /
• 2016

The emerging High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard attempts to improve coding efficiency by a factor of two over H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) at the expense of an increase in computational complexity. Mode decision with motion estimation (ME) is still one of the most time-consuming computations in HEVC, as it is with H.264/AVC. Thus, fast mode decisions are not only an important issue to be researched, but also an urgent one. Several schemes for fast mode decisions have been presented in reference software and in other studies. However, the conventional hierarchical mode decision can be useless when block-level parallelism is exploited. This paper proposes operation-level exploration that offers more chances for early termination. An early termination condition is checked between integer and fractional MEs and between the parts of one partition type. The fast decision points of the proposed algorithm do not overlap those in previous works. Thus, the proposed algorithms are easily used with other fast algorithms, and consequently, independent speed-up is possible.

• Journal of Labour Economics
• /
• v.27 no.3
• /
• pp.1-23
• /
• 2004

To investigate the interdependence of the decisions on when to retire and how much consume before and after retirement, we compare the pre- (or post-) retirement consumption conditioned on the retirement decision with pre- (or post-) retirement consumption regardless of retirement decision by using the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study(KLIPS). We employ the two-stage switching regression for the econometric method to investigate the interdependence of two decisions of retirement and pre- or post retirement consumption. Then we test the existence of the interdependence in terms of the significance of the estimated selection biases which appear in the pre- (post-) retirement consumption equations for early and late retirees. In those equations, we also compare the income elasticity of the consumption of the early retirees with that of the late retirees. The empirical results show that there is negative selection bias in early retirees' consumption. These results imply that due to the early retirement decision early retirees would have consumed less than they actually have. The income elasticities of the consumption of the early retirees is smaller than that of the late retirees in pre- (or post-) retirement consumption equation. This result shows that relatively longer retirement period due 10 the early retirement affect the pre-retirement consumption. early retirees' marginal propensity to consume should be lower than that of the late retirees.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.385-402
• /
• 2010

Most of the data warehouse (DW) requirements engineering approaches have not distinguished the early requirements engineering phase from the late requirements engineering phase. There are very few approaches seen in the literature that explicitly model the early & late requirements for a DW. In this paper, we propose an AGDI (Agent-Goal-Decision-Information) model to support the early and late requirements for the development of DWs. Here, the notion of agent refers to the stakeholders of the organization and the dependency among agents refers to the dependencies among stakeholders for fulfilling their organizational goals. The proposed AGDI model also supports three interrelated modeling activities namely, organization modeling, decision modeling and information modeling. Here, early requirements are modeled by performing organization modeling and decision modeling activities, whereas late requirements are modeled by performing information modeling activities. The proposed approach has been illustrated to capture the early and late requirements for the development of a university data warehouse exemplifying our model's ability of supporting its decisional goals by providing decisional information.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.44 no.7
• /
• pp.745-754
• /
• 2012

The correlations between Large Early Release Frequency (LERF) and Early Fatality need to be investigated for risk-informed application and regulation. In Regulatory Guide (RG) -1.174, while there are decision-making criteria using the measures of Core Damage Frequency (CDF) and LERF, there are no specific criteria on LERF. Since there are both huge uncertainties and large costs needed in off-site consequence calculation, a LERF assessment methodology needs to be developed, and its correlation factor needs to be identified, for risk-informed decision-making. A new method for estimating off-site consequence has been presented and performed for assessing health effects caused by radioisotopes released from severe accidents of nuclear power plants in this study. The MACCS2 code is used for validating the source term quantitatively regarding health effects, depending on the release characteristics of radioisotopes during severe accidents. This study developed a method for identifying correlations between LERF and Early Fatality and validates the results of the model using the MACCS2 code. The results of this study may contribute to defining LERF and finding a measure for risk-informed regulations and risk-informed decision-making.

• Knowledge Management Research
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.49-63
• /
• 2006

The objective of the study is to verify the discriminatory power of technology innovation in predicting Early Stage Ventures' success or failure. To accomplish this objective, we test early stage ventures'(Firm's period is below 3 years)technology innovation and performance. The result of the study is expected to be useful in loan evaluation, investment decision, internal management decision making and business improvement. The results of study is as follows. First, Early Stage Ventures' technology innovation power is composed of 4 major indexes(technology, marketability, manufacturing infra and economic feasibility). Second, we find that thirty-seven minor indexes are significant ex-ante variable which are discriminating between firms' success and failure in Early Stage Ventures. Also thirty-seven minor indexes explain 57.2% of the total variance. This explainable power of these indexes is similar to that of the existing 58 index elements. Finally, we find that the most important technology innovation power of Early Stage Ventures' is economic feasibility.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
• /
• 2015.10a
• /
• pp.213-216
• /
• 2015

Despite the significant increase of Korean contractors in the international construction market, many SMCCs (Small & Medium Construction Companies) have suffered in the global financial crisis, and some of them have been kicked out of the international market after experiencing huge losses on projects. SMCCs face obstacles in the international market, such as an insufficient ability to gather information and inappropriate management of associated risks, which lead to difficulties in establishing effective business strategies. In other words, making immature decisions without an effective business strategy may cause not only the failure of one project but also the bankruptcy of the SMCC. To overcome this, the research presented herein aims to propose a decision support system for SMCCs, which would screen projects and make a go/no-go decision at the early stages of international projects. The proposed system comprises a double axis: (1) a profit prediction model, which evaluates 10 project properties using an objective methodology based on a historical project performance database and roughly suggests expected profit rate, and (2) a feasibility assessment model, which evaluates 17 project environment factors in a subjective and quantitative methodology based on experience and supervision. Finally, a web-based system is established to enhance the practical usability, which is expected to be a good reference for inexperienced SMCCs to make proper decisions and establish effective business strategies.

• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
• /
• v.6 no.2
• /
• pp.78-83
• /
• 2011

In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient early stopping method to reduce the average number of iterations. The conventional early stopping methods have too much computational complexity to compute the stopping criterion. Thus, only the hard decision based early stopping method is suitable to realize the hardware of LDPC decoder. However, this method also can increase the computational complexity of LDPC decoder. The proposed method can effectively reduce the computational complexity of stopping criterion as we do not compute hard decision, and we combine the stopping criterion with horizontal shuffling scheduling decoding scheme. The simulation results show that a new early stopping method achieves acceptable bit error rate performance also reduces the average number of iterations.

• Molecules and Cells
• /
• v.43 no.2
• /
• pp.182-187
• /
• 2020

When cells are stimulated by growth factors, they make a critical choice in early G₁ phase: proceed forward to S phase, remain in G₁, or revert to G₀ phase. Once the critical decision is made, cells execute a fixed program independently of extracellular signals. The specific stage at which the critical decision is made is called the restriction point or R-point. The existence of the R-point raises a major question: what is the nature of the molecular machinery that decides whether or not a cell in G₁ will continue to advance through the cell cycle or exit from the cell cycle? The R-point program is perturbed in nearly all cancer cells. Therefore, exploring the nature of the R-point decision-making machinery will provide insight into how cells consult extracellular signals and intracellular status to make an appropriate R-point decision, as well into the development of cancers. Recent studies have shown that expression of a number of immediate early genes is associated with the R-point decision, and that the decision-making program constitutes an oncogene surveillance mechanism. In this review, we briefly summarize recent findings regarding the mechanisms underlying the context-dependent R-point decision.