• Journal of Wetlands Research
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.45-51
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• 2017

Nepal is a landlocked mountainous country in South Asia, located between China to the north and India to the south, east, and west. As such, wastewater management has become one of the most significant problems in urban area of Nepal. In Nepal, the centralized wastewater treatment systems were dysfunctional due to high cost of operation, discontinuous power supply, lack of proper maintenance and proper technical workforce to address the issues. As such, constructed wetlands (CW) were applied to treat various secondary wastewater as alternative to wastewater treatment facilities. Generally, efficiency and sustainability of CW technology depends on proper operation and maintenance and active community involvement. This study summarizes information about 26 CW in Nepal. Specifically, factors including data banking, removal efficiency, quality of discharged water, compliance to water quality standard of Nepal and operation and maintenance were investigated. Considering removal efficiency per pollutant, Ka-1 achieved the greatest reduction for most pollutant followed by B-1, L-3, Ka-5 and K-1. Nepal has practiced CW technology for more than 2 decades but currently, development of technology was interrupted by the inefficient performance of existing facilities. Public awareness about the technology, natural disaster, unavailability of specified substrate materials, lack of fund for further research and experiments has hindered the expansion of technology. In spite of these concerns, CW was still proven as an alternative solution to the present wastewater problems in urban areas of Nepal.

• Journal of Korean society of Dental Hygiene
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.179-191
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to examine the needs of dental hygiene students at a lifelong education center of a three-year-course college for a credit bank system. The subjects in this study were 200 dental hygiene students at a college located in J, which offered courses of a credit bank system. A survey was conducted from May 19 to 23, 2008, to gather data on the acquisition of a bachelor's degree and the credit bank system, and the answer sheets from 184 respondents(92%) were collected. After the collected data were analyzed with SPSS/WIN 12.0 program, the following findings were given: 1. In regard to an intention of taking a bachelor's degree, the largest number of the students investigated(74.5%) intended to do that if they had any chance. As for the reason, 55.6% wanted to get the degree in pursuit of their own personal development. 2. Concerning how to win a bachelor's degree, the largest group that accounted for 63.0% preferred the credit bank systems of college lifelong education centers. 41.8% got interested in the credit bank system mainly because their acquaintances informed them of it. It shows that colleges should reinforce publicity activities if they want to offer the credit bank system. 3. The quality of educational programs and cost had an impact on the choice of an educational institution when they planned to get a bachelor's degree from the credit bank system. Therefore excellent educational programs should be provided, and the government should provide learners with economic help and fund educational institutions. 4. As to comparison of a regular college and the credit bank system as a way to get a bachelor's degree, that was considered to be helpful for finding a job(a mean of 3.39) and for the development of sociability(3.22). That was also deemed to be of use for the improvement of practical job performance, to win public recognition and to be helpful for being well-cultivated, though not many students had those opinions. They took a different view according to academic year(p<.05). 5. Regarding the expected effects of getting a degree from the credit bank system, the greatest group expected it to step up their personal development(3.85). The second largest group expected it to boost job efficacy(3.30), and the students whose academic year was higher had a better opinion. 6. As for future directions for the credit bank system, the largest group put emphasis on the improvement of social perception through intensive P.R. and the enhancement of the qualifications of professors and lecturers(4.02). These opinions were more stressed by the juniors than by the sophomores and seniors, and academic year made a significant difference to their views(p<.05).

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.155-179
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• 2004

This study is about the effectiveness and activation strategies of vacational training programme for the disabled guided by the Ministry of Labour and the Korea Employment Promotion Agency for the Disabled(KEPAD). This research employed quantitative approach. The quantitative research used the samples of 853 disabled people who had finished vocational training programme during recent 3 years. In this research the effectiveness is categorized into two ; product effectiveness and employment effectiveness. Product effectiveness is influenced by the kind of train-center, train-area, train-length. The KEPAD, non-IT job area and train-period over 6 month are more effective. Employment effectiveness is significantly influenced by demo-sociological factor rather than disability factor. Especially the kind of train-center is very important to be employed for the disabled. This implicates that choice of train-center by the disabled and effective management of it by the public sector is very important in developing employment. Effective management, stated above, includes reengineering programmes and functions accountable to the need form the trainee, bridging the gap among train-centers in terms of performance, differentiation of financial support according to the product to save the public fund, encouraging one special programme in one train-center.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.368-379
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• 2022

This study aims to understand the characteristics of Korean language learners and propose appropriate teaching plans for them through a focus group interview with Korean language instructors who had experience in teaching Korean at university-attached institutions in Hong Kong. For this purpose, the investigator interviewed ten instructors who taught Korean for at least five years. Korean language learners in Hong Kong who were in their twenties, but there were diverse age groups, including those in their fifties or older. Their motivations for learning Korean included the Korean Wave and the influence of support from the Continuing Education Fund by the Hong Kong government. Korean language learners in Hong Kong were characterized by active learning desire and effort, continuous learning intention, passive performance in speaking, and sensitivity to the disclosure of private information. Based on these findings, the study proposes to devise teaching and learning methods based on various age groups in a class and teaching methods for speaking that reflect the characteristics of Korean language learners in Hong Kong to teach Korean more effectively. The study is significant as a field study that examines the learning motivations, learning attitudes, and difficulties with Korean study of Korean language learners based on an unprecedented survey of the characteristics of common local Korean learners in Hong Kong.

• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.143-162
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• 2022

Altmetrics is an alternative impact evaluation index that evaluates the social interest in the research performance of individuals or institutions in universities, research institutions, and research fund support institutions. This study empirically analyzed what kind of attention a papers of domestic library and information science researchers published in an international academic journal was receiving in the international community using Altmetric explorer. As a result of the analysis, 230 papers were tracked. The average Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) was 6.63, but there were 2 papers that received overwhelming attention (over 170 points) as they were mentioned in news report and Twitter. Second, there was a tendency for high AAS to appear in cases where a domestic researcher participated as a co-author and the main author belonged to an overseas institution, and in the case where the research funds were supported by foreign government agencies. In addition to the field of the library information science or information system, the papers classified as the field of public health service and education showed high AAS, and it was confirmed that these papers were published in the journals of various fields such as life science. Finally, it was confirmed that there was a weak correlation of r =0.25 between the AAS and the number of citations of the analyzed paper, but a strong correlation of r =0.68 between the number of Mendeley readers and the number of citations.

• Korean small business review
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.87-110
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• 2019

The structural and sustainable implementation of the microfinance policy is required to be successful. To this end, the government should focus on availability and accessibility of the public microfinance, away from providing the beneficial financing (financial benefits)featured by the combination of the welfare and finance in the past. In addition, the government-sponsored microfinance needs to aim for performance-oriented evaluation that leads to stabilization of financial life of ordinary people or increase of income, moving away from conventional funding based on the scale and the quantity for the poor. It is necessary to implement the following policies in order for the Moon's administration to take the government-sponsored microfinance to the next level. The government-sponsored microfinance must be in the market failure domain, but nonetheless, it is required to be managed by structural and sustainable ways so that it complies with the market principles and does not crowd out the private microfinance. Last but not least, making the best use of the capital market function can be a way to fund social enterprises or social economy enterprises. This aims to enable catalyst capital in the capital market to play a prime role for the inflow of private capital for the purpose of creating the social value.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.177-191
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• 2023

This study analyzes the types of linkages between major projects used by firms that attracted venture capital among firms that received government support in the field of SME startups. It identifies the types of linkages between support programs related to attracting venture investment and verifies the usefulness of integrated and cooperative support. The main findings of this study are as follows. First, Startup Success Packages, Startup Foundation Funds*, Youth Entrepreneurship Centers, and Training are the main programs used by startups and venture firms, and support-implementing agencies use these programs to provide support for each stage of growth. Second, the majority of startups and venture firms receiving policy support for job creation and manpower enhancement projects. Third, export-type growth companies receive continuous support from MSS, MOTIE, MSIT, and KIPO. Fourth, job creation programs drive the employment performance and creation of companies. Fifth, local government support projects tend to rely heavily on central government support programs. Sixth, growth companies in the startup and venture sector have a clear link to credit guarantee scheme by KIBO. These findings provide empirical evidence on the necessity and feasibility of integrated and collaborative support, and are expected to contribute to the direction of better support policies.

• 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 Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.135-149
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• 2020

Artificial intelligences are changing world. Financial market is also not an exception. Robo-Advisor is actively being developed, making up the weakness of traditional asset allocation methods and replacing the parts that are difficult for the traditional methods. It makes automated investment decisions with artificial intelligence algorithms and is used with various asset allocation models such as mean-variance model, Black-Litterman model and risk parity model. Risk parity model is a typical risk-based asset allocation model which is focused on the volatility of assets. It avoids investment risk structurally. So it has stability in the management of large size fund and it has been widely used in financial field. XGBoost model is a parallel tree-boosting method. It is an optimized gradient boosting model designed to be highly efficient and flexible. It not only makes billions of examples in limited memory environments but is also very fast to learn compared to traditional boosting methods. It is frequently used in various fields of data analysis and has a lot of advantages. So in this study, we propose a new asset allocation model that combines risk parity model and XGBoost machine learning model. This model uses XGBoost to predict the risk of assets and applies the predictive risk to the process of covariance estimation. There are estimated errors between the estimation period and the actual investment period because the optimized asset allocation model estimates the proportion of investments based on historical data. these estimated errors adversely affect the optimized portfolio performance. This study aims to improve the stability and portfolio performance of the model by predicting the volatility of the next investment period and reducing estimated errors of optimized asset allocation model. As a result, it narrows the gap between theory and practice and proposes a more advanced asset allocation model. In this study, we used the Korean stock market price data for a total of 17 years from 2003 to 2019 for the empirical test of the suggested model. The data sets are specifically composed of energy, finance, IT, industrial, material, telecommunication, utility, consumer, health care and staple sectors. We accumulated the value of prediction using moving-window method by 1,000 in-sample and 20 out-of-sample, so we produced a total of 154 rebalancing back-testing results. We analyzed portfolio performance in terms of cumulative rate of return and got a lot of sample data because of long period results. Comparing with traditional risk parity model, this experiment recorded improvements in both cumulative yield and reduction of estimated errors. The total cumulative return is 45.748%, about 5% higher than that of risk parity model and also the estimated errors are reduced in 9 out of 10 industry sectors. The reduction of estimated errors increases stability of the model and makes it easy to apply in practical investment. The results of the experiment showed improvement of portfolio performance by reducing the estimated errors of the optimized asset allocation model. Many financial models and asset allocation models are limited in practical investment because of the most fundamental question of whether the past characteristics of assets will continue into the future in the changing financial market. However, this study not only takes advantage of traditional asset allocation models, but also supplements the limitations of traditional methods and increases stability by predicting the risks of assets with the latest algorithm. There are various studies on parametric estimation methods to reduce the estimated errors in the portfolio optimization. We also suggested a new method to reduce estimated errors in optimized asset allocation model using machine learning. So this study is meaningful in that it proposes an advanced artificial intelligence asset allocation model for the fast-developing financial markets.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.337-348
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• 2012

The Yellow Sea Ecoregion Conservation Project is a joint international project which is carried out under the purposes of conserving the habitats in the Yellow Sea Ecoregion and biodiversity from various threats that damage ecosystems, informing the importance and value of the Yellow Sea Ecoregion, and promoting the understanding and interests of Korea, China and Japan. Subsequent to the Yellow Sea Ecoregion Planning Programme which had been performed during the period from 2002 to 2006, the Yellow Sea Ecoregion Support Project has been performed over 7 years in total from 2007 to 2014. Panasonic is sponsoring the financing of the project, and the organizations in charge of the project by country are Korea Institute of Ocean Science & Technology for Korea and World Wide Fund for Nature branches for China and Japan. While the Yellow Sea Ecoregion Planning Programme was focused on the biological assessment and the selection of potential priority area by scientific review, the Yellow Sea Ecoregion Support Project is oriented toward practical activities targeting more diversified stakeholder. Especially, this project plans to support direct conservation activities in the region and participation and cooperation from local residents. The project plan is comprised of 3 phases. During the first period from 2008 to 2009, small grant projects were operated targeting 16 institutions of Korea and China, and for the second period from 2010 to 2012, one place each was selected as demonstration site for habitat conservation in Korea and China respectively and supported for three years to introduce the conservation method based on international standards such as the management of marine protected areas, ecosystem-based management and community-based management and simultaneously to develop habitat conservation activities suitable for national and regional characteristics. During the period from 2013 to 2014 which is the last phase, the project plans to distribute the performance of small grant projects and demonstration site activities through a series of forums among stakeholder. Through the activities described above, the recognition of general public on the conservation of the Yellow Sea Ecoregion was changed positively, and community-based management began to be reflected in the policies for the marine protected areas of central and local government.