• Title/Summary/Keyword: Information System Reliability

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Spatial Distribution of Urban Heat and Pollution Islands using Remote Sensing and Private Automated Meteorological Observation System Data -Focused on Busan Metropolitan City, Korea- (위성영상과 민간자동관측시스템 자료를 활용한 도시열섬과 도시오염섬의 공간 분포 특성 - 부산광역시를 대상으로 -)

  • HWANG, Hee-Soo;KANG, Jung Eun
    • Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
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    • v.23 no.3
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    • pp.100-119
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    • 2020
  • During recent years, the heat environment and particulate matter (PM10) have become serious environmental problems, as increases in heat waves due to rising global temperature interact with weakening atmospheric wind speeds. There exist urban heat islands and urban pollution islands with higher temperatures and air pollution concentrations than other areas. However, few studies have examined these issues together because of a lack of micro-scale data, which can be constructed from spatial data. Today, with the help of satellite images and big data collected by private telecommunication companies, detailed spatial distribution analyses are possible. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the spatial distribution patterns of urban heat islands and urban pollution islands within Busan Metropolitan City and to compare the distributions of the two phenomena. In this study, the land surface temperature of Landsat 8 satellite images, air temperature and particulate matter concentration data derived from a private automated meteorological observation system were gridded in 30m × 30m units, and spatial analysis was performed. Analysis showed that simultaneous zones of urban heat islands and urban pollution islands included some vulnerable residential areas and industrial areas. The political migration areas such as Seo-dong and Bansong-dong, representative vulnerable residential areas in Busan, were included in the co-occurring areas. The areas have a high density of buildings and poor ventilation, most of whose residents are vulnerable to heat waves and air pollution; thus, these areas must be considered first when establishing related policies. In the industrial areas included in the co-occurring areas, concrete or asphalt concrete-based impervious surfaces accounted for an absolute majority, and not only was the proportion of vegetation insufficient, there was also considerable vehicular traffic. A hot-spot analysis examining the reliability of the analysis confirmed that more than 99.96% of the regions corresponded to hot-spot areas at a 99% confidence level.

An Efficient Estimation of Place Brand Image Power Based on Text Mining Technology (텍스트마이닝 기반의 효율적인 장소 브랜드 이미지 강도 측정 방법)

  • Choi, Sukjae;Jeon, Jongshik;Subrata, Biswas;Kwon, Ohbyung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.21 no.2
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    • pp.113-129
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    • 2015
  • Location branding is a very important income making activity, by giving special meanings to a specific location while producing identity and communal value which are based around the understanding of a place's location branding concept methodology. Many other areas, such as marketing, architecture, and city construction, exert an influence creating an impressive brand image. A place brand which shows great recognition to both native people of S. Korea and foreigners creates significant economic effects. There has been research on creating a strategically and detailed place brand image, and the representative research has been carried out by Anholt who surveyed two million people from 50 different countries. However, the investigation, including survey research, required a great deal of effort from the workforce and required significant expense. As a result, there is a need to make more affordable, objective and effective research methods. The purpose of this paper is to find a way to measure the intensity of the image of the brand objective and at a low cost through text mining purposes. The proposed method extracts the keyword and the factors constructing the location brand image from the related web documents. In this way, we can measure the brand image intensity of the specific location. The performance of the proposed methodology was verified through comparison with Anholt's 50 city image consistency index ranking around the world. Four methods are applied to the test. First, RNADOM method artificially ranks the cities included in the experiment. HUMAN method firstly makes a questionnaire and selects 9 volunteers who are well acquainted with brand management and at the same time cities to evaluate. Then they are requested to rank the cities and compared with the Anholt's evaluation results. TM method applies the proposed method to evaluate the cities with all evaluation criteria. TM-LEARN, which is the extended method of TM, selects significant evaluation items from the items in every criterion. Then the method evaluates the cities with all selected evaluation criteria. RMSE is used to as a metric to compare the evaluation results. Experimental results suggested by this paper's methodology are as follows: Firstly, compared to the evaluation method that targets ordinary people, this method appeared to be more accurate. Secondly, compared to the traditional survey method, the time and the cost are much less because in this research we used automated means. Thirdly, this proposed methodology is very timely because it can be evaluated from time to time. Fourthly, compared to Anholt's method which evaluated only for an already specified city, this proposed methodology is applicable to any location. Finally, this proposed methodology has a relatively high objectivity because our research was conducted based on open source data. As a result, our city image evaluation text mining approach has found validity in terms of accuracy, cost-effectiveness, timeliness, scalability, and reliability. The proposed method provides managers with clear guidelines regarding brand management in public and private sectors. As public sectors such as local officers, the proposed method could be used to formulate strategies and enhance the image of their places in an efficient manner. Rather than conducting heavy questionnaires, the local officers could monitor the current place image very shortly a priori, than may make decisions to go over the formal place image test only if the evaluation results from the proposed method are not ordinary no matter what the results indicate opportunity or threat to the place. Moreover, with co-using the morphological analysis, extracting meaningful facets of place brand from text, sentiment analysis and more with the proposed method, marketing strategy planners or civil engineering professionals may obtain deeper and more abundant insights for better place rand images. In the future, a prototype system will be implemented to show the feasibility of the idea proposed in this paper.

Critical Success Factor of Noble Payment System: Multiple Case Studies (새로운 결제서비스의 성공요인: 다중사례연구)

  • Park, Arum;Lee, Kyoung Jun
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.20 no.4
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    • pp.59-87
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    • 2014
  • In MIS field, the researches on payment services are focused on adoption factors of payment service using behavior theories such as TRA(Theory of Reasoned Action), TAM(Technology Acceptance Model), and TPB (Theory of Planned Behavior). The previous researches presented various adoption factors according to types of payment service, nations, culture and so on even though adoption factors of identical payment service were presented differently by researchers. The payment service industry relatively has strong path dependency to the existing payment methods so that the research results on the identical payment service are different due to payment culture of nation. This paper aims to suggest a successful adoption factor of noble payment service regardless of nation's culture and characteristics of payment and prove it. In previous researches, common adoption factors of payment service are convenience, ease of use, security, convenience, speed etc. But real cases prove the fact that adoption factors that the previous researches present are not always critical to success to penetrate a market. For example, PayByPhone, NFC based parking payment service, successfully has penetrated to early market and grown. In contrast, Google Wallet service failed to be adopted to users despite NFC based payment method which provides convenience, security, ease of use. As shown in upper case, there remains an unexplained aspect. Therefore, the present research question emerged from the question: "What is the more essential and fundamental factor that should takes precedence over factors such as provides convenience, security, ease of use for successful penetration to market". With these cases, this paper analyzes four cases predicted on the following hypothesis and demonstrates it. "To successfully penetrate a market and sustainably grow, new payment service should find non-customer of the existing payment service and provide noble payment method so that they can use payment method". We give plausible explanations for the hypothesis using multiple case studies. Diners club, Danal, PayPal, Square were selected as a typical and successful cases in each category of payment service. The discussion on cases is primarily non-customer analysis that noble payment service targets on to find the most crucial factor in the early market, we does not attempt to consider factors for business growth. We clarified three-tier non-customer of the payment method that new payment service targets on and elaborated how new payment service satisfy them. In case of credit card, this payment service target first tier of non-customer who can't pay for because they don't have any cash temporarily but they have regular income. So credit card provides an opportunity which they can do economic activities by delaying the date of payment. In a result of wireless phone payment's case study, this service targets on second of non-customer who can't use online payment because they concern about security or have to take a complex process and learn how to use online payment method. Therefore, wireless phone payment provides very convenient payment method. Especially, it made group of young pay for a little money without a credit card. Case study result of PayPal, online payment service, shows that it targets on second tier of non-customer who reject to use online payment service because of concern about sensitive information leaks such as passwords and credit card details. Accordingly, PayPal service allows users to pay online without a provision of sensitive information. Final Square case result, Mobile POS -based payment service, also shows that it targets on second tier of non-customer who can't individually transact offline because of cash's shortness. Hence, Square provides dongle which function as POS by putting dongle in earphone terminal. As a result, four cases made non-customer their customer so that they could penetrate early market and had been extended their market share. Consequently, all cases supported the hypothesis and it is highly probable according to 'analytic generation' that case study methodology suggests. We present for judging the quality of research designs the following. Construct validity, internal validity, external validity, reliability are common to all social science methods, these have been summarized in numerous textbooks(Yin, 2014). In case study methodology, these also have served as a framework for assessing a large group of case studies (Gibbert, Ruigrok & Wicki, 2008). Construct validity is to identify correct operational measures for the concepts being studied. To satisfy construct validity, we use multiple sources of evidence such as the academic journals, magazine and articles etc. Internal validity is to seek to establish a causal relationship, whereby certain conditions are believed to lead to other conditions, as distinguished from spurious relationships. To satisfy internal validity, we do explanation building through four cases analysis. External validity is to define the domain to which a study's findings can be generalized. To satisfy this, replication logic in multiple case studies is used. Reliability is to demonstrate that the operations of a study -such as the data collection procedures- can be repeated, with the same results. To satisfy this, we use case study protocol. In Korea, the competition among stakeholders over mobile payment industry is intensifying. Not only main three Telecom Companies but also Smartphone companies and service provider like KakaoTalk announced that they would enter into mobile payment industry. Mobile payment industry is getting competitive. But it doesn't still have momentum effect notwithstanding positive presumptions that will grow very fast. Mobile payment services are categorized into various technology based payment service such as IC mobile card and Application payment service of cloud based, NFC, sound wave, BLE(Bluetooth Low Energy), Biometric recognition technology etc. Especially, mobile payment service is discontinuous innovations that users should change their behavior and noble infrastructure should be installed. These require users to learn how to use it and cause infra-installation cost to shopkeepers. Additionally, payment industry has the strong path dependency. In spite of these obstacles, mobile payment service which should provide dramatically improved value as a products and service of discontinuous innovations is focusing on convenience and security, convenience and so on. We suggest the following to success mobile payment service. First, non-customers of the existing payment service need to be identified. Second, needs of them should be taken. Then, noble payment service provides non-customer who can't pay by the previous payment method to payment method. In conclusion, mobile payment service can create new market and will result in extension of payment market.

Antecedents of Trust and Effects on Committment in B2B e-Marketplace (B2B 마켓플레이스에서 신뢰의 선행요인과 몰입에 미치는 영향)

  • Oh, Sang-Hyun;Kim, Sang-Hyeon
    • Journal of Distribution Research
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    • v.13 no.1
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    • pp.1-33
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    • 2008
  • As the interest in the business-to-business(B2B) electronic commerce is increasing, many companies are participating in the B2B e-Marketplaces. The e-Marketplace is defined as the virtual market that many players take part in to transact. The e-Marketplace has an influenced on the manner in which organizational buyers and sellers interact. As a result, it is important to develop an understanding of the behaviors of firms that use these electronic marketplaces. The purpose of this study is to develop a comprehensive model for trust and commitment of B2B e-Marketplace and empirically to examine their structural relationships. Drawing from trust and commitment theory in the interorganizational relationship and B2B electronic commerce context, this study identifies network externality, interactivity, justice, quality of information sharing, institutional assurance as the determinants of trust and commitment of e-Marketplace. The proposed model hypothesized that (1) trust is a function of network externality, interactivity, justice, quality of information sharing, institutional assurance, (2) attitudinal and behavioral commitment is a function of trust, (3) behavioral commitment is a function of attitudinal commitment. The proposed model is tested using organizational-level survey data from 187 buying organizations that conduct business in MRO e-Marketplaces. The data were tested by reliability test, correlation analysis, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and covariance structure analysis. The results indicate that (1) trust is influenced by network externality, interactivity, justice, institutional assurance, (2) attitudinal commitment and behavioral commitment is influenced by trust (3) behavioral commitment is influenced by attitudinal commitment. Also, the empirical results confirmed that trust play a strong, central role in determinging e-Marketplace commitment. The key theoretical contribution of this research is that it begins to extend interorganizational information system literature in areas such as B2B Internet e-Marketplace. Managerially, this study contributes tn the understanding of the role of B2B e-Markeplace providers in Internet situation. And Limitations of this study and guidelines for future researches are also discussed.

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A Study on the Improvement for Medical Service Using Video Promotion Materials for PET/CT Scans (PET/CT 검사에서 동영상 홍보물을 통한 의료서비스 향상에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Woo Hyun;Kim, Jung Seon;Ko, Hyun Soo;Sung, Ji Hye;Lee, Jeoung Eun
    • The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.30-35
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    • 2013
  • Purpose: One of the current services, providing information to the patients and their guardians by using promotion materials induces positive responses and contributes to the improvement of the hospital reliability. Therefore, the objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of audio visual materials, one of the means of promotion, as a way to give accurate medical information to resolve patient's curiosity about purpose and procedure of their examination and deplete complains about waiting which attributes negative effect to service quality assessment. Materials and Methods: 60 patients(mean age $53.97{\pm}12.24$, male : female = 26 : 34) who had $^{18}F-FDG PET/CT$ scan from July 2012 to August 2012 in Seoul Asan Medical Center were referred to the study. All of the patients having PET/CT scan were asked to watch an informative video material before the injection of radiopharmaceutical ($^{18}F-FDG$) and to fill in a questionnaire. Results: As a result of analyzing the contents of questionnaire, 52% of 60 patients had PET/CT scan for the first time and 72.4% of the patients read the PET/CT guidebook offered from their outpatient department or inpatient wards before their scan. After we searched the level of previous knowledge of the purpose and method of PET/CT scan, the patients answered 25.1% "know well", 34% "not sure", 40.9% "don't know" respectively. And 84.7% of the patients answered that watching the PET/CT guide video before the injection helps understanding what exam they were having and 15.3% of the patients did not. For the question asking ever the patients have experienced using our homepage or smart phone QR code to see the guide video before they visit out PET center, only 3.3% of them answered "yes". Lastly, the patients answered 60.1% "yes", 31.4% "so so" and 8.5% "no" respectively for the question asking whether watching the video makes the patients to fill the waiting time short. Conclusion: It is found that understanding of objective and method of the PET/CT scan and level of satisfaction was improved after the patients watched the guide video whether they had PET/CT scan before and read the PET/CT guidebook or not. Also, watching the video was effective for the reduction of perceptible waiting time. But while displaying the PET/CT guide video is useful for providing information about the scan and shortening the waiting time as one of the medical service, utilization of service was actually very poor because of the passive promotion and indifference of the patients about their examination. Therefore, from now on, it is necessary to construct the healthcare system which can be offered to more patients through the active promotion.

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A study on the employment preparation cost and attitude of college student for Job-seeking (국내 대학생의 취업태도 및 취업준비 비용에 관한 연구)

  • Chung, Bhum-Suk;Jeong, Hwa-Min
    • Management & Information Systems Review
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    • v.33 no.4
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    • pp.1-19
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    • 2014
  • This Study focuses on the university students' job attitude and cost of employment preparation. Nowadays, many university and college students spend a big money improving their employment preparation such as studying on foreign language, getting various kinds of certificates and tooth correction, clothing etc. for employment interview. This study investigated the cost of employment preparation and Job attitude of the 484 students of universities and colleges, the analysis of the collected data was conducted with SPSS 12.0 program by using frequency analysis, factor analysis, reliability assessment, correlation test, t-test, one way ANOVA. The university students paid more costs of employment preparation such as a language training abroad, a private training, and clothing than the college students. Also, Allied social science students paid more costs of the language training abroad, and clothing than allied computer science and allied design students. The female students paid more money than male students for tooth correction. The costs of language training abroad, private training and clothing are affected the students' socioeconomic background of a home. Regarding the job attitude of students, the university students are feeling more positive than the college students of the employment efficacy and cognition of the education environment. As result, the differences in the cost of employment preparation by the university type, faculty major course, their sex, and socioeconomic background of a home. The student's employment-efficacy and cognition of the education environment are also differences between the university and the college students. So, to improve the job attitude, developing their ability for employment preparation, educational programs should be arranged in school and continuous researches are needed.

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An Investigation on Expanding Co-occurrence Criteria in Association Rule Mining (연관규칙 마이닝에서의 동시성 기준 확장에 대한 연구)

  • Kim, Mi-Sung;Kim, Nam-Gyu;Ahn, Jae-Hyeon
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.1
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    • pp.23-38
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    • 2012
  • There is a large difference between purchasing patterns in an online shopping mall and in an offline market. This difference may be caused mainly by the difference in accessibility of online and offline markets. It means that an interval between the initial purchasing decision and its realization appears to be relatively short in an online shopping mall, because a customer can make an order immediately. Because of the short interval between a purchasing decision and its realization, an online shopping mall transaction usually contains fewer items than that of an offline market. In an offline market, customers usually keep some items in mind and buy them all at once a few days after deciding to buy them, instead of buying each item individually and immediately. On the contrary, more than 70% of online shopping mall transactions contain only one item. This statistic implies that traditional data mining techniques cannot be directly applied to online market analysis, because hardly any association rules can survive with an acceptable level of Support because of too many Null Transactions. Most market basket analyses on online shopping mall transactions, therefore, have been performed by expanding the co-occurrence criteria of traditional association rule mining. While the traditional co-occurrence criteria defines items purchased in one transaction as concurrently purchased items, the expanded co-occurrence criteria regards items purchased by a customer during some predefined period (e.g., a day) as concurrently purchased items. In studies using expanded co-occurrence criteria, however, the criteria has been defined arbitrarily by researchers without any theoretical grounds or agreement. The lack of clear grounds of adopting a certain co-occurrence criteria degrades the reliability of the analytical results. Moreover, it is hard to derive new meaningful findings by combining the outcomes of previous individual studies. In this paper, we attempt to compare expanded co-occurrence criteria and propose a guideline for selecting an appropriate one. First of all, we compare the accuracy of association rules discovered according to various co-occurrence criteria. By doing this experiment we expect that we can provide a guideline for selecting appropriate co-occurrence criteria that corresponds to the purpose of the analysis. Additionally, we will perform similar experiments with several groups of customers that are segmented by each customer's average duration between orders. By this experiment, we attempt to discover the relationship between the optimal co-occurrence criteria and the customer's average duration between orders. Finally, by a series of experiments, we expect that we can provide basic guidelines for developing customized recommendation systems. Our experiments use a real dataset acquired from one of the largest internet shopping malls in Korea. We use 66,278 transactions of 3,847 customers conducted during the last two years. Overall results show that the accuracy of association rules of frequent shoppers (whose average duration between orders is relatively short) is higher than that of causal shoppers. In addition we discover that with frequent shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears very high when the co-occurrence criteria of the training set corresponds to the validation set (i.e., target set). It implies that the co-occurrence criteria of frequent shoppers should be set according to the application purpose period. For example, an analyzer should use a day as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to offer a coupon valid only for a day to potential customers who will use the coupon. On the contrary, an analyzer should use a month as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to publish a coupon book that can be used for a month. In the case of causal shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears to not be affected by the period of the application purposes. The accuracy of the causal shoppers' association rules becomes higher when the longer co-occurrence criterion has been adopted. It implies that an analyzer has to set the co-occurrence criterion for as long as possible, regardless of the application purpose period.

Analyzing the discriminative characteristic of cover letters using text mining focused on Air Force applicants (텍스트 마이닝을 이용한 공군 부사관 지원자 자기소개서의 차별적 특성 분석)

  • Kwon, Hyeok;Kim, Wooju
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.27 no.3
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    • pp.75-94
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    • 2021
  • The low birth rate and shortened military service period are causing concerns about selecting excellent military officers. The Republic of Korea entered a low birth rate society in 1984 and an aged society in 2018 respectively, and is expected to be in a super-aged society in 2025. In addition, the troop-oriented military is changed as a state-of-the-art weapons-oriented military, and the reduction of the military service period was implemented in 2018 to ease the burden of military service for young people and play a role in the society early. Some observe that the application rate for military officers is falling due to a decrease of manpower resources and a preference for shortened mandatory military service over military officers. This requires further consideration of the policy of securing excellent military officers. Most of the related studies have used social scientists' methodologies, but this study applies the methodology of text mining suitable for large-scale documents analysis. This study extracts words of discriminative characteristics from the Republic of Korea Air Force Non-Commissioned Officer Applicant cover letters and analyzes the polarity of pass and fail. It consists of three steps in total. First, the application is divided into general and technical fields, and the words characterized in the cover letter are ordered according to the difference in the frequency ratio of each field. The greater the difference in the proportion of each application field, the field character is defined as 'more discriminative'. Based on this, we extract the top 50 words representing discriminative characteristics in general fields and the top 50 words representing discriminative characteristics in technology fields. Second, the number of appropriate topics in the overall cover letter is calculated through the LDA. It uses perplexity score and coherence score. Based on the appropriate number of topics, we then use LDA to generate topic and probability, and estimate which topic words of discriminative characteristic belong to. Subsequently, the keyword indicators of questions used to set the labeling candidate index, and the most appropriate index indicator is set as the label for the topic when considering the topic-specific word distribution. Third, using L-LDA, which sets the cover letter and label as pass and fail, we generate topics and probabilities for each field of pass and fail labels. Furthermore, we extract only words of discriminative characteristics that give labeled topics among generated topics and probabilities by pass and fail labels. Next, we extract the difference between the probability on the pass label and the probability on the fail label by word of the labeled discriminative characteristic. A positive figure can be seen as having the polarity of pass, and a negative figure can be seen as having the polarity of fail. This study is the first research to reflect the characteristics of cover letters of Republic of Korea Air Force non-commissioned officer applicants, not in the private sector. Moreover, these methodologies can apply text mining techniques for multiple documents, rather survey or interview methods, to reduce analysis time and increase reliability for the entire population. For this reason, the methodology proposed in the study is also applicable to other forms of multiple documents in the field of military personnel. This study shows that L-LDA is more suitable than LDA to extract discriminative characteristics of Republic of Korea Air Force Noncommissioned cover letters. Furthermore, this study proposes a methodology that uses a combination of LDA and L-LDA. Therefore, through the analysis of the results of the acquisition of non-commissioned Republic of Korea Air Force officers, we would like to provide information available for acquisition and promotional policies and propose a methodology available for research in the field of military manpower acquisition.

A Study on the Influence of Workers' Aspiration for Academic Needs on Participation in University Education (근로자의 학업욕구 열망이 대학교육 참여에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구)

  • Lee, Ji-Hun;Mun, Bok-Hyun
    • Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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    • v.15 no.3
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    • pp.231-241
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    • 2021
  • This study intended to present strategies and implications for attracting new students and customized education to university officials through research on the participation of workers' academic aspirations in university education. Thus, variables were derived by analyzing prior data, and causal settings between variables and questionnaires were developed. Subject to the survey, 331 workers interested in participating in university education were collected through interpersonal interviews. The collected data were dataized, and reliability and feasibility verification and frequency analysis were conducted. Finally, we validate the fit of the structural equation model and the causal relationship for each concept. Therefore, the results of the validation show the following implications. First, university officials should be motivated by a mentor and mentee system with experienced people who have switched to a suitable vocational group through university education. It will also be necessary to develop and disseminate programs so that they can continue to develop themselves for the future. To this end, it will be necessary to help them understand their aptitude and strengths through consultation with experts. Second, university officials should strengthen public relations so that prospective students can know the cases and information of the job transformation of the admitted workers through recommendations. It will also be necessary to develop university education programs that can self-develop, accept various ideas through "public contest", and provide accurate information about university education to workers through re-processing. Third, university officials should provide workers with a program that allows them to catch two rabbits: job transformation and self-improvement through university education. In other words, it is necessary to stimulate the motivation of workers by providing various information such as visiting advanced overseas companies, obtaining various certificates, moving between departments of blue-collar and white-collar, and transfer opportunities. Fourth, university officials should actively promote university education programs related to this by participating in university education and receiving systematic education and the flow of social environment. Finally, university officials will need to consult and promote workers so that they can self-develop when they participate in college education, and they will have to figure out what they need for self-development through demand surveys and analysis.

How Enduring Product Involvement and Perceived Risk Affect Consumers' Online Merchant Selection Process: The 'Required Trust Level' Perspective (지속적 관여도 및 인지된 위험이 소비자의 온라인 상인선택 프로세스에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구: 요구신뢰 수준 개념을 중심으로)

  • Hong, Il-Yoo B.;Lee, Jung-Min;Cho, Hwi-Hyung
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.22 no.1
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    • pp.29-52
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    • 2012
  • Consumers differ in the way they make a purchase. An audio mania would willingly make a bold, yet serious, decision to buy a top-of-the-line home theater system, while he is not interested in replacing his two-decade-old shabby car. On the contrary, an automobile enthusiast wouldn't mind spending forty thousand dollars to buy a new Jaguar convertible, yet cares little about his junky component system. It is product involvement that helps us explain such differences among individuals in the purchase style. Product involvement refers to the extent to which a product is perceived to be important to a consumer (Zaichkowsky, 2001). Product involvement is an important factor that strongly influences consumer's purchase decision-making process, and thus has been of prime interest to consumer behavior researchers. Furthermore, researchers found that involvement is closely related to perceived risk (Dholakia, 2001). While abundant research exists addressing how product involvement relates to overall perceived risk, little attention has been paid to the relationship between involvement and different types of perceived risk in an electronic commerce setting. Given that perceived risk can be a substantial barrier to the online purchase (Jarvenpaa, 2000), research addressing such an issue will offer useful implications on what specific types of perceived risk an online firm should focus on mitigating if it is to increase sales to a fullest potential. Meanwhile, past research has focused on such consumer responses as information search and dissemination as a consequence of involvement, neglecting other behavioral responses like online merchant selection. For one example, will a consumer seriously considering the purchase of a pricey Guzzi bag perceive a great degree of risk associated with online buying and therefore choose to buy it from a digital storefront rather than from an online marketplace to mitigate risk? Will a consumer require greater trust on the part of the online merchant when the perceived risk of online buying is rather high? We intend to find answers to these research questions through an empirical study. This paper explores the impact of enduring product involvement and perceived risks on required trust level, and further on online merchant choice. For the purpose of the research, five types or components of perceived risk are taken into consideration, including financial, performance, delivery, psychological, and social risks. A research model has been built around the constructs under consideration, and 12 hypotheses have been developed based on the research model to examine the relationships between enduring involvement and five components of perceived risk, between five components of perceived risk and required trust level, between enduring involvement and required trust level, and finally between required trust level and preference toward an e-tailer. To attain our research objectives, we conducted an empirical analysis consisting of two phases of data collection: a pilot test and main survey. The pilot test was conducted using 25 college students to ensure that the questionnaire items are clear and straightforward. Then the main survey was conducted using 295 college students at a major university for nine days between December 13, 2010 and December 21, 2010. The measures employed to test the model included eight constructs: (1) enduring involvement, (2) financial risk, (3) performance risk, (4) delivery risk, (5) psychological risk, (6) social risk, (7) required trust level, (8) preference toward an e-tailer. The statistical package, SPSS 17.0, was used to test the internal consistency among the items within the individual measures. Based on the Cronbach's ${\alpha}$ coefficients of the individual measure, the reliability of all the variables is supported. Meanwhile, the Amos 18.0 package was employed to perform a confirmatory factor analysis designed to assess the unidimensionality of the measures. The goodness of fit for the measurement model was satisfied. Unidimensionality was tested using convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity. The statistical evidences proved that the three types of validity were all satisfied. Now the structured equation modeling technique was used to analyze the individual paths along the relationships among the research constructs. The results indicated that enduring involvement has significant positive relationships with all the five components of perceived risk, while only performance risk is significantly related to trust level required by consumers for purchase. It can be inferred from the findings that product performance problems are mostly likely to occur when a merchant behaves in an opportunistic manner. Positive relationships were also found between involvement and required trust level and between required trust level and online merchant choice. Enduring involvement is concerned with the pleasure a consumer derives from a product class and/or with the desire for knowledge for the product class, and thus is likely to motivate the consumer to look for ways of mitigating perceived risk by requiring a higher level of trust on the part of the online merchant. Likewise, a consumer requiring a high level of trust on the merchant will choose a digital storefront rather than an e-marketplace, since a digital storefront is believed to be trustworthier than an e-marketplace, as it fulfills orders by itself rather than acting as an intermediary. The findings of the present research provide both academic and practical implications. The first academic implication is that enduring product involvement is a strong motivator of consumer responses, especially the selection of a merchant, in the context of electronic shopping. Secondly, academicians are advised to pay attention to the finding that an individual component or type of perceived risk can be used as an important research construct, since it would allow one to pinpoint the specific types of risk that are influenced by antecedents or that influence consequents. Meanwhile, our research provides implications useful for online merchants (both online storefronts and e-marketplaces). Merchants may develop strategies to attract consumers by managing perceived performance risk involved in purchase decisions, since it was found to have significant positive relationship with the level of trust required by a consumer on the part of the merchant. One way to manage performance risk would be to thoroughly examine the product before shipping to ensure that it has no deficiencies or flaws. Secondly, digital storefronts are advised to focus on symbolic goods (e.g., cars, cell phones, fashion outfits, and handbags) in which consumers are relatively more involved than others, whereas e- marketplaces should put their emphasis on non-symbolic goods (e.g., drinks, books, MP3 players, and bike accessories).

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