• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.249-261
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• 2010

As consumers' concern for the environment has continued to increase, many firms have actively engaged in environmental marketing to achieve their objectives. However, consumers' high concerns about the environment are not always reflected in their purchasing behavior. This indicates the need for an in-depth understanding of the development of green consumption within the individual's belief system. In consideration of psychological approaches, a large body of research has examined the factors underlying ecologically conscious "green" consumer behavior and the interrelationships of these factors. However, most previous studies have concentrated on Western countries. Using a sample of Korean consumers, this study attempts to understand the basis of Korean green consumerism and find universal values that are cross-culturally important in guiding consumers' environmental attitudes and behaviors. To this end, this study relates Schwartz's 10 universal values (Schwartz 1992) to environmental behaviors in a hierarchical model of value-attitude-behavior. With reference to the value-attitude-behavior framework, the conceptual model developed for the study explains what motivations can be manifested in Korean consumers' environmental attitudes, and subsequently how the attitudes affect their green choices. Using the pattern of relationships among values that can be related to environmentalism, the first hypothesis holds that there would be particular relationships between motivational value types and environmental attitudes. Hypothesis 2 assumes that environmental attitudes predict environmental behaviors. On the basis of the claim that favorable attitudes toward the environment may be expressed in many different behaviors, the assumption is that consumers' favorable attitudes toward the environment would be linked to a variety of environmental behaviors because people with high environmental attitudes can be more interested in and knowledgeable about environmental actions. Consistent with H2, H3 hypothesizes that there would be a positive relationship between different types of environmental behavior. A total of 564 university students participated in the study. The sample included 308 men, 254 women, and two participants who did not indicate their gender. The average age of the participants was 22.5 years, with a range of 19 to 39. Regarding majors, special efforts were made to draw the participants from different departments of the university. Data were collected by a survey administered via self-completion questionnaires., which assessed the participants' value priorities, environmental attitudes, and behaviors. Path analysis conducted to test the proposed model found the overall fit to be ${\chi}^2$=72.01 (p=0.00), GFI=0.983, CFI=0.982, NFI=0.970, RMR=0.070, and REMSEA=0.050. Thus, most of the fit measures indicated a good fit of the model with the data, and a hierarchical relationship from values to environmental attitudes to environmental non-purchasing behavior to environmental purchasing behavior was confirmed. An assessment of all the predicted paths by path coefficients led to several major hypothesized effects being confirmed. Out of the ten value types, universalism and power were significantly but conversely related to environmental attitudes. In line with the other studies, these findings confirm that environmental attitudes are an important factor in leading to a variety of green behaviors. Finally, significant relationships were found between environmental purchasing and non-purchasing behaviors. The path analysis supported the idea that universalism values provide a motivation for Korean consumers' greenness and indirectly promote environmental acts through favorable attitudes toward the environment. Participants with high environmental attitudes were found to actively engage in diverse forms of green consumer behavior. This research provides an opportunity to examine cross-cultural differences with respect to values leading to environmentalism, and, further, to verify previous findings. The study also examined the attitude-behavior relationship with respect to three distinct types of environmental behaviors. The different strengths of paths between green attitudes and behaviors suggest that researchers should consider the specificity of behavior explained as an effort to improve the low attitude-behavior correlation. Finally, the findings here illustrate that with increased environmental concerns among people, they come to include more such behaviors in their green portfolios.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.91-110
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• 2011

This paper analyzes the cases where the hotels have increased their services and enhanced their work process through IT solutions to cope with computerization globalization. Also the cases have been studies where national hotels use the CRM solution internally to respond effectively to customers requests, increase customer analysis, and build marketing strategies. In particular, this study discusses the introduction of the CRM solutions and CRM sales business and marketing services using a process for utilizing the presumed, CRM by introducing effective DEA(Data Envelopment Analysis). First, the comparison has done regarding the relative efficiency of L Company with the CCR model, then compared L Company's restaurants and facilities' effectiveness through BCC model. L Company reached a conclusion that it is important to precisely create and manage sales data which are the preliminary data for CRM, and for that reason it made it possible to save sales data generated by POS system on each sales performance database. In order to do that, it newly established Oracle POS system and LORIS POS system concerned with restaurants for food and beverage as well as rooms, and made it possible to stably generate and manage sales data and manage. Moreover, it set up a composite database to control comprehensively the results of work processes during a specific period by collecting customer registration information and made it possible to systematically control the information on sales performances. By establishing a system which unifies database and managing it comprehensively, impeccability of data has been greatly enhanced and a problem which generated asymmetric data could be thoroughly solved. Using data accumulated on the comprehensive database, sales data can be analyzed, categorized, classified through data mining engine imbedded in Polaris CRM and the results can be organized on data mart to provide them in the form of CRM application data. By transforming original sales data into forms which are easy to handle and saving them on data mart separately, it enabled acquiring well-organized data with ease when engaging in various marketing operations, holding a morning meeting and working on decision-making. By using summarized data at data mart, it was possible to process marketing operations such as telemarketing, direct mailing, internet marketing service and service product developments for perceived customers; moreover, information on customer perceptions which is one of CRM's end-products could feed back into the comprehensive database. This research was undertaken to find out how effectively CRM has been employed by comparing and analyzing the management performance of each enterprise site and store after introducing CRM to Hotel enterprises using DEA technique. According to the research results, efficiency evaluation for each site was calculated through input and output factors to find out comparative CRM system usage efficiency of L's Company four sites; moreover, with regard to stores, the sizes of workforce and budget application show a huge difference and so does the each store efficiency. Furthermore, by using the DEA technique, it could assess which sites have comparatively high efficiency and which don't by comparing and evaluating hotel enterprises IT project outcomes such as CRM introduction using the CCR model for each site of the related enterprises. By using the BCC model, it could comparatively evaluate the outcome of CRM usage at each store of A site, which is representative of L Company, and as a result, it could figure out which stores maintain high efficiency in using CRM and which don't. It analyzed the cases of CRM introduction at L Company, which is a hotel enterprise, and precisely evaluated them through DEA. L Company analyzed the customer analysis system by introducing CRM and achieved to provide customers identified through client analysis data with one to one tailored services. Moreover, it could come up with a plan to differentiate the service for customers who revisit by assessing customer discernment rate. As tasks to be solved in the future, it is required to do research on the process analysis which can lead to a specific outcome such as increased sales volumes by carrying on test marketing, target marketing using CRM. Furthermore, it is also necessary to do research on efficiency evaluation in accordance with linkages between other IT solutions such as ERP and CRM system.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.117-129
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• 2015

As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, a large volume of information is posted on the Internet with exponential growth every day. Accordingly, it is not unusual that investors in stock markets gather and compile firm-specific or market-wide information through online searches. Importantly, it becomes easier for investors to acquire value-relevant information for their investment decision with the help of powerful search tools on the Internet. Our study examines whether or not the Internet helps investors assess a firm's value better by using firm-level data over long periods spanning from January 2004 to December 2013. To this end, we construct weekly-based search volume for information technology (IT) services firms on the Internet. We limit our focus to IT firms since they are often equipped with intangible assets and relatively less recognized to the public which makes them hard-to measure. To obtain the information on those firms, investors are more likely to consult the Internet and use the information to appreciate the firms more accurately and eventually improve their investment decisions. Prior studies have shown that changes in search volumes can reflect the various aspects of the complex human behaviors and forecast near-term values of economic indicators, including automobile sales, unemployment claims, and etc. Moreover, search volume of firm names or stock ticker symbols has been used as a direct proxy of individual investors' attention in financial markets since, different from indirect measures such as turnover and extreme returns, they can reveal and quantify the interest of investors in an objective way. Following this line of research, this study aims to gauge whether the information retrieved from the Internet is value relevant in assessing a firm. We also use search volume for analysis but, distinguished from prior studies, explore its impact on return comovements with market returns. Given that a firm's returns tend to comove with market returns excessively when investors are less informed about the firm, we empirically test the value of information by examining the association between Internet searches and the extent to which a firm's returns comove. Our results show that Internet searches are negatively associated with return comovements as expected. When sample is split by the size of firms, the impact of Internet searches on return comovements is shown to be greater for large firms than small ones. Interestingly, we find a greater impact of Internet searches on return comovements for years from 2009 to 2013 than earlier years possibly due to more aggressive and informative exploit of Internet searches in obtaining financial information. We also complement our analyses by examining the association between return volatility and Internet search volumes. If Internet searches capture investors' attention associated with a change in firm-specific fundamentals such as new product releases, stock splits and so on, a firm's return volatility is likely to increase while search results can provide value-relevant information to investors. Our results suggest that in general, an increase in the volume of Internet searches is not positively associated with return volatility. However, we find a positive association between Internet searches and return volatility when the sample is limited to larger firms. A stronger result from larger firms implies that investors still pay less attention to the information obtained from Internet searches for small firms while the information is value relevant in assessing stock values. However, we do find any systematic differences in the magnitude of Internet searches impact on return volatility by time periods. Taken together, our results shed new light on the value of information searched from the Internet in assessing stock values. Given the informational role of the Internet in stock markets, we believe the results would guide investors to exploit Internet search tools to be better informed, as a result improving their investment decisions.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.53-77
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• 2015

Korea has witnessed an increasing number of domestic patent applications, but a majority of them are not utilized to their maximum potential but end up becoming obsolete. According to the 2012 National Congress' Inspection of Administration, about 73% of patents possessed by universities and public-funded research institutions failed to lead to creating social values, but remain latent. One of the main problem of this issue is that patent creators such as individual researcher, university, or research institution lack abilities to commercialize their patents into viable businesses with those enterprises that are in need of them. Also, for enterprises side, it is hard to find the appropriate patents by searching keywords on all such occasions. This system proposes a patent recommendation system that can identify and recommend intellectual rights appropriate to users' interested fields among a rapidly accumulating number of patent assets in a more easy and efficient manner. The proposed system extracts core contents and technology sectors from the existing pool of patents, and combines it with secondary social knowledge, which derives from tags information created by users, in order to find the best patents recommended for users. That is to say, in an early stage where there is no accumulated tag information, the recommendation is done by utilizing content characteristics, which are identified through an analysis of key words contained in such parameters as 'Title of Invention' and 'Claim' among the various patent attributes. In order to do this, the suggested system extracts only nouns from patents and assigns a weight to each noun according to the importance of it in all patents by performing TF-IDF analysis. After that, it finds patents which have similar weights with preferred patents by a user. In this paper, this similarity is called a "Domain Similarity". Next, the suggested system extract technology sector's characteristics from patent document by analyzing the international technology classification code (International Patent Classification, IPC). Every patents have more than one IPC, and each user can attach more than one tag to the patents they like. Thus, each user has a set of IPC codes included in tagged patents. The suggested system manages this IPC set to analyze technology preference of each user and find the well-fitted patents for them. In order to do this, the suggeted system calcuates a 'Technology_Similarity' between a set of IPC codes and IPC codes contained in all other patents. After that, when the tag information of multiple users are accumulated, the system expands the recommendations in consideration of other users' social tag information relating to the patent that is tagged by a concerned user. The similarity between tag information of perferred 'patents by user and other patents are called a 'Social Simialrity' in this paper. Lastly, a 'Total Similarity' are calculated by adding these three differenent similarites and patents having the highest 'Total Similarity' are recommended to each user. The suggested system are applied to a total of 1,638 korean patents obtained from the Korea Industrial Property Rights Information Service (KIPRIS) run by the Korea Intellectual Property Office. However, since this original dataset does not include tag information, we create virtual tag information and utilized this to construct the semi-virtual dataset. The proposed recommendation algorithm was implemented with JAVA, a computer programming language, and a prototype graphic user interface was also designed for this study. As the proposed system did not have dependent variables and uses virtual data, it is impossible to verify the recommendation system with a statistical method. Therefore, the study uses a scenario test method to verify the operational feasibility and recommendation effectiveness of the system. The results of this study are expected to improve the possibility of matching promising patents with the best suitable businesses. It is assumed that users' experiential knowledge can be accumulated, managed, and utilized in the As-Is patent system, which currently only manages standardized patent information.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.129-143
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• 2012

Recently, the rapid progress of a number of standardized web technologies and the proliferation of web users in the world bring an explosive increase of producing and consuming information documents on the web. In addition, most companies have produced, shared, and managed a huge number of information documents that are needed to perform their businesses. They also have discretionally raked, stored and managed a number of web documents published on the web for their business. Along with this increase of information documents that should be managed in the companies, the need of a solution to locate information documents more accurately among a huge number of information sources have increased. In order to satisfy the need of accurate search, the market size of search engine solution market is becoming increasingly expended. The most important functionality among much functionality provided by search engine is to locate accurate information documents from a huge information sources. The major metric to evaluate the accuracy of search engine is relevance that consists of two measures, precision and recall. Precision is thought of as a measure of exactness, that is, what percentage of information considered as true answer are actually such, whereas recall is a measure of completeness, that is, what percentage of true answer are retrieved as such. These two measures can be used differently according to the applied domain. If we need to exhaustively search information such as patent documents and research papers, it is better to increase the recall. On the other hand, when the amount of information is small scale, it is better to increase precision. Most of existing web search engines typically uses a keyword search method that returns web documents including keywords which correspond to search words entered by a user. This method has a virtue of locating all web documents quickly, even though many search words are inputted. However, this method has a fundamental imitation of not considering search intention of a user, thereby retrieving irrelevant results as well as relevant ones. Thus, it takes additional time and effort to set relevant ones out from all results returned by a search engine. That is, keyword search method can increase recall, while it is difficult to locate web documents which a user actually want to find because it does not provide a means of understanding the intention of a user and reflecting it to a progress of searching information. Thus, this research suggests a new method of combining ontology-based search solution with core search functionalities provided by existing search engine solutions. The method enables a search engine to provide optimal search results by inferenceing the search intention of a user. To that end, we build an ontology which contains concepts and relationships among them in a specific domain. The ontology is used to inference synonyms of a set of search keywords inputted by a user, thereby making the search intention of the user reflected into the progress of searching information more actively compared to existing search engines. Based on the proposed method we implement a prototype search system and test the system in the patent domain where we experiment on searching relevant documents associated with a patent. The experiment shows that our system increases the both recall and precision in accuracy and augments the search productivity by using improved user interface that enables a user to interact with our search system effectively. In the future research, we will study a means of validating the better performance of our prototype system by comparing other search engine solution and will extend the applied domain into other domains for searching information such as portal.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.11D no.1
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• pp.183-194
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• 2004

The existing management job of research expenses has been divided into three parts： budget planning, budget draw-up, and exact settlement of budget. However, it caused some problems. Under this current circumstance it is required to obtain research expenses steadily, to operate efficiently and to use them clearly to solve such problems. As a result of a study on data warehouse development process of existing system integration company (Inmon, IBM) to reflect current trend described above, data warehouse development process of Inmon uses systematic and gradual access as a classical development cycle method. It causes overlap and feedback to the previous step in the process of each step Is requested. And another problem that it is difficult to toil what function refers and corrects data because functions and data are separated during performing development process at data warehouse development process of IBM is caused. Integrated management data warehouse development process of research expenses in the enterprise environment which applies UML at planning and analysis step, design step and implement and test step is suggested in this paper. Information retrieval agent uses existing budget plan DB, budget draw-up DB and budget settlement DB to find out information that a user wants to know. Information retrieval agent collects and saves information at integration database and information integration agent extracts, transports, transforms and loads the data. Information integration agent reduces a user's efforts to access to a number of information sources and check each of them. It also screens out data that a user may not need. As a result, integrated management data warehouse development process of research expenses in the enterprise environment reflects a user's requirements as much as possible and provides various types of information to make a decision which is needed to establish the policy of research expense management. It helps an end user approach his/her desired analysis information quickly and get various data from the comprehensive viewpoint rather than the fragmentary viewpoint. Furthermore, as it integrated three systems into one, it is possible to share data, to integrate the system, to reduce operating expenses and to simplify supporting environment for the decision making.

• Journal of Home Health Care Nursing
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• v.6
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• pp.33-45
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• 1999

The purpose of this study was to develop a basic framework and criteria for evaluation of quality care provided to patients with the attributes of disease in the home care nursing field, and to provide measurement tools for home health care in the future. The study design was a developmental study for evaluation of hospital-based HCN(home care nursing) in Korea. The study process was as follows: a home care nursing study team of College of Nursing. Yonsei University reviewed the nursing records of 47 patients who were enrolled at Yonsei University Medical Center Home Care Center in March, 1995. Twenty-five patients were insured at that time, were selected from 47 patients receiving home care service for study feasibility with six disease groups; Caesarean Section (C/S), simple nephrectomy, Liver cirrhosis(LC), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD), Lung cancer or cerebrovascular accident(CVA). In this study, the following items were selected : First step : Preliminary study 1. Criteria and items were selected on the basis of related literature on each disease area. 2. Items were identified by home care nurses. 3. A physician in charge reviewed the criteria and content of selected items. 4. Items were revised through preliminary study offered to both HCN patients and discharged patients from the home care center. Second step : Pretest 1. To verify the content of the items, a pretest was conducted with 18 patients of which there were three patients in each of the six selected disease groups. Third step : Test of reliability and validity of tools 1. Using the collected data from 25 patients with either cis, Simple nephrectomy, LC, COPD, Lung cancer, or CVA. the final items were revised through a panel discussion among experts in medical care who were researchers, doctors, or nurses. 2. Reliability and validity of the completed tool were verified with both inpatients and HCN patients in each of field for researches. The study results are as follows: 1. Standard for discharge with HCN referral The referral standard for home care, which included criteria for discharge with HCN referral and criteria leaving the hospital were established. These were developed through content analysis from the results of an open-ended questionnaire to related doctors concerning characteristic for discharge with HCN referral for each of the disease groups. The final criteria was decided by discussion among the researchers. 2. Instrument for measurement of health statusPatient health status was measured pre and post home care by direct observation and interview with an open-ended questionnaire which consisted of 61 items based on Gorden's nursing diagnosis classification. These included seven items on health knowledge and health management, eight items on nutrition and metabolism, three items on elimination, five items on activity and exercise, seven items on perception and cognition, three items on sleep and rest, three items on self-perception, three items on role and interpersonal relations, five items on sexuality and reproduction, five items on coping and stress, four items on value and religion, three items on family. and three items on facilities and environment. 3. Instrument for measurement of self-care The instrument for self-care measurement was classified with scales according to the attributes of the disease. Each scale measured understanding level and practice level by a Yes or No scale. Understanding level was measured by interview but practice level was measured by both observation and interview. Items for self-care measurement included 14 for patients with a CVA, five for women who had a cis, ten for patients with lung cancer, 12 for patients with COPD, five for patients with a simple nephrectomy, and 11 for patients with LC. 4. Record for follow-up management This included (1) OPD visit sheet, (2) ER visit form, (3) complications problem form, (4) readmission sheet. and (5) visit note for others medical centers which included visit date, reason for visit, patient name, caregivers, sex, age, time and cost required for visit, and traffic expenses, that is, there were open-end items that investigated OPD visits, emergency room visits, the problem and solution of complications, readmissions and visits to other medical institution to measure health problems and expenditures during the follow up period. 5. Instrument to measure patients satisfaction The satisfaction measurement instrument by Reisseer(1975) was referred to for the development of a tool to measure patient home care satisfaction. The instrument was an open-ended questionnaire which consisted of 11 domains; treatment, nursing care, information, time consumption, accessibility, rapidity, treatment skill, service relevance, attitude, satisfaction factors, dissatisfaction factors, overall satisfaction about nursing care, and others. In conclusion, Five evaluation instruments were developed for home care nursing. These were (1)standard for discharge with HCN referral. (2)instrument for measurement of health status, (3)instrument for measurement of self-care. (4)record for follow-up management, and (5)instrument to measure patient satisfaction. Also, the five instruments can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the service to assure quality. Further research is needed to increase the reliability and validity of instrument through a community-based HCN evaluation.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.29 no.spc1
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• pp.63-64
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• 1996

The nature of distant faint blue field galaxies remains a mystery, despite the fact that much attention has been devoted to this subject in the last decade. Galaxy counts, particularly those in the optical and near ultraviolet bandpasses, have been demonstrated to be well in excess of those expected in the 'no-evolution' scenario. This has usually been taken to imply that galaxies were brighter in the past, presumably due to a higher rate of star formation. More recently, redshift surveys of galaxies as faint as B$\~$24 have shown that the mean redshift of faint blue galaxies is lower than that predicted by standard evolutionary models (de-signed to fit the galaxy counts). The galaxy number count data and redshift data suggest that evolutionary effects are most prominent at the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function. While these data constrain the form of evolution of the overall luminosity function, they do not constrain evolution in individual galaxies. We are carrying out a series of observations as part of a long-term program aimed at a better understanding of the nature and amount of luminosity evolution in individual galaxies. Our study uses the luminosity-linewidth relation (Tully-Fisher relation) for disk galaxies as a tool to study luminosity evolution. Several studies of a related nature are being carried out by other groups. A specific experiment to test a 'no-evolution' hypothesis is presented here. We have used the AUTOFIB multifibre spectro-graph on the 4-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) and the Rutgers Fabry-Perot imager on the Cerro Tolalo lnteramerican Observatory (CTIO) 4-metre tele-scope to measure the internal kinematics of a representative sample of faint blue field galaxies in the red-shift range z = 0.15-0.4. The emission line profiles of [OII] and [OIII] in a typical sample galaxy are significantly broader than the instrumental resolution (100-120 km $s^{-l}$), and it is possible to make a reliable de-termination of the linewidth. Detailed and realistic simulations based on the properties of nearby, low-luminosity spirals are used to convert the measured linewidth into an estimate of the characteristic rotation speed, making statistical corrections for the effects of inclination, non-uniform distribution of ionized gas, rotation curve shape, finite fibre aperture, etc.. The (corrected) mean characteristic rotation speed for our distant galaxy sample is compared to the mean rotation speed of local galaxies of comparable blue luminosity and colour. The typical galaxy in our distant sample has a B-band luminosity of about 0.25 L$\ast$ and a colour that corresponds to the Sb-Sd/Im range of Hub-ble types. Details of the AUTOFIB fibre spectroscopic study are described by Rix et al. (1996). Follow-up deep near infrared imaging with the 10-metre Keck tele-scope+ NIRC combination and high angular resolution imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope's WFPC2 are being used to determine the structural and orientation parameters of galaxies on an individual basis. This information is being combined with the spatially resolved CTIO Fabry-Perot data to study the internal kinematics of distant galaxies (Ing et al. 1996). The two main questions addressed by these (preliminary studies) are: 1. Do galaxies of a given luminosity and colour have the same characteristic rotation speed in the distant and local Universe? The distant galaxies in our AUTOFIB sample have a mean characteristic rotation speed of $\~$70 km $s^{-l}$ after correction for measurement bias (Fig. 1); this is inconsistent with the characteristic rotation speed of local galaxies of comparable photometric proper-ties (105 km $s^{-l}$) at the > $99\%$ significance level (Fig. 2). A straightforward explanation for this discrepancy is that faint blue galaxies were about 1-1.5 mag brighter (in the B band) at z $\~$ 0.25 than their present-day counterparts. 2. What is the nature of the internal kinematics of faint field galaxies? The linewidths of these faint galaxies appear to be dominated by the global disk rotation. The larger galaxies in our sample are about 2"-.5" in diameter so one can get direct insight into the nature of their internal velocity field from the $\~$ I" seeing CTIO Fabry-Perot data. A montage of Fabry-Perot data is shown in Fig. 3. The linewidths are too large (by. $5\sigma$) to be caused by turbulence in giant HII regions.

• Journal of the Korean Association of African Studies
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• v.29
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• pp.27-53
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• 2009

At the start of the new century, South Africa probably had the largest number of HIV-infected people of any country in the world. The only nation that comes close is India with a population of one billion people compared to South Africa's figure of 57 million. The tragedy is that this did not have to happen. South Africa was aware of the dangers posed by AIDS as early as 1985. In 1991, the national survey of women attending antenatal clinics found that only 0.8percent were infected. In 1994, when the new government took power, the figure was still comparatively low at 7.6 %. The 2004 figure which has been published is 26.5%. This article tracks the epidemic globally, in the region and in South Africa. I explain some of the basic concepts around the disease and look at what may happen with respect to numbers. The situation is bad, and the number of people falling ill, dying and leaving families will rise over next few years. This will impact on South Africa in a number of important ways. This article assesses the demographic, economic and social consequences of the epidemic. It disposes of a number of myths and present the real facts. The AIDS in South Africa is not related to individuals only. It warns that AIDS in Africa is becoming a community and systemic problem. The acuteness of the problem does not stem merely from the fact that communities are affected, or could even be wipe out by the end of this decade, but from the fact that AIDS will place incredible burdens and obligations upon medical services, health care and religious communities such as churches. The facts confront churches' mission with the important question: who is going to take care of all the patients and where? The reality is that people dying of AIDS will have to be cared for at home by relatives and friends. A further question that arises is whether our people are prepared for this. AIDS was considered to be a homo-plague and the hunt was on for a scapegoat in the light of the fatal implication of the disease. At present we are in the strategic phase where we all realize that it will be of no avail to scare people with the ominous threat of AIDS AIDS destroys the optimism of our achievement ethics. This exposure of the culture of optimism is also an exposure of the so-called 'human basic fear which accuses Christianity that their concept of sin is a damper on man's search for liberation and basic need to be freed from all Imitation. AIDS is also a test for our ecclesiastical genuineness and the sincerity of our mission sensibility. It poses the question: How unconditional is Christian love? Is there room for the AIDS sufferer in the community of believers, despite the fact he is an acknowledged homosexual? The question to put to the church is whether the community of believers is an exclusive to put to the koinonia which excludes homosexuals. They may be welcome on principle, but in actual fact are not acceptable to the church community. As South Africa enters the new century, it is clear that the epidemic is not having a measurable impact. However, the impact of AIDS is gradual, subtle and incremental. The author's proposal of what is currently most needed in South Africa is that the little things will make a difference. It's about doing lots of little things better at grassroots level, with the emphasis on doing. There are so many community, churches and NGOs initiatives worth building on and intensifying. One must not underestimate the therapeutic value of working together in small groups to overcome a problem

• Journal of Legislation Research
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• no.41
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• pp.43-85
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• 2011

Child and youth welfare law in Korea is vague and complex. In a narrow sense it means the research on the provisions of the Child Welfare Act. In a broad sense it embraces all of the social welfare system regarding to the protection for children and youth. Regardless of the scope of child and youth welfare law it should be cleared what the term of child and youth means in Korean legal regulation. Historically, child protection in Korea was based on the good intentions of individuals to protect war orphan children from poverty or danger after the end of the Korean War. It is the story of the evolving status of children from being viewed as dependant of the parents to becoming rights-based citizens, even not in Constitution. In Korea neither parents nor children have constitutionally recognized right. According to Korean Constitution the parents have only the obligation to educate their children. And the state ist obliged to improve the welfare of the youth(section 34). In compliance with this article there are lots of statutes regulating youth welfare. This article reviews the legal definition of child and youth to test the uncertain definition of child and youth welfare in relation to the treatment of children's and youth's legal status in Korea. According to the Child Welfare Act child is the person under age of 18, while the legal definition of youth oscillates between the person under the age of 19 and the person over the age 9 to the age of 23. As a result child welfare is often used as the synonym of youth welfare, and vice versa. The lack of the arrangement of the legal definition of child and youth is based on the historical reasons that the legal definitions of youth (under the age of 19 or over the age 9 to the age of 23) newly appeared in the statutes regulating youth welfare, whereas the Child Welfare Act still maintained the definition of child under the age of 18. In order to get rid of the confusion of the definition of the child and youth, a part of certain statues should combine with another Act according to the purpose of the individual amended statutes. And the definition of child and youth should be subdivided into 3 or 4 classes, namely infant(0-6), child(7-13), youth(14-18) and young adult(19-26). Furthermore this article proposes a reform of the existing legal system pursuant to the nature of the law, i.g. whether the issued or amended Act takes on a selective(residual) or universal character.