• Food Science and Preservation
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.779-787
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• 2015

We stored sweet pumpkins at $8^{\circ}C$, $12^{\circ}C$, $12^{\circ}C$ plasma curing and room temperature (control) for 180 days. During this time, the quality characteristics were analyzed within the different groups. No spoiling occurred in either of the storage conditions for up to 120 days, and the marketability was good. After 120 days, spoiling sharply increased by over 70% in the control group, while in the $12^{\circ}C$ group it decreased to 20~60%. Conversely, spoiling was completely absent in the $8^{\circ}C$ and $12^{\circ}C$ plasma curing groups during the overall 180 days of storage. The lowest moisture content was found in the $8^{\circ}C$ group and the quality of the pumpkins was excellent during the entire storage period. The color of pulp was better in the $12^{\circ}C$ and $12^{\circ}C$ plasma curing groups, with best results were found in the latest. Both the $8^{\circ}C$ and $12^{\circ}C$ plasma curing groups maintained their dark green surface colors, while both the $12^{\circ}C$ and control groups turned from green to yellow. All groups showed a reduction in their initial hardness, with the $8^{\circ}C$ group staying the hardest. Soluble solid and mealiness was increased to the storage during 90 days while decreased, that were long to maintain the mealiness texture in the $8^{\circ}C$ storage pumpkin. The overall acceptability from sensory evaluation was higher in the $12^{\circ}C$ plasma curing group, when compared to those of the $8^{\circ}C$, $12^{\circ}C$ and control groups storage conditions.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.219-230
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• 2010

Digital content makes big changes to our daily lives while bringing opportunities and challenges for companies. Creative firms integrate pictures, texts, videos, audios, and data by digitalization to develop new products or services and create digital experiences to promote their brands. Most articles on digital content contribute to the basic concept or development of marketing it in literature. Actually, compared with traditional value chains for common products or services, the digital content industry seems to have more potential value. Because quite a bit of digital content is free to the consumer, price is not necessarily perceived as an indicator of the quality or value of information (Rowley 2008). It becomes evident that a current theme in digital content is the issue of "value," and research on customers' perceived value of digital content is a necessity. This article argues that experiential value has an advantage in customers' evaluations of digital content. Two different but related contributions to the understanding of "value" of digital content are made here. First, based on the comparison of digital content with products and services, the article proposes two key characteristics that make experiential strategy available for digital content: intangibility and near-zero reproduction cost. On top of that, based on the discussion of the gap between company's idealized value and customer's perceived value, this article emphasizes that digital content prices and pricing of digital content is different from products and services. As a result of intangibility, prices may not reflect customer value. Moreover, the cost of digital content in the development stage may be very high while reproduction costs shrink dramatically. Moreover, because of the value gap mentioned before, the pricing polices vary for different digital contents. For example, flat price policy is generally used for movies and music (Magiera 2001; Netherby 2002), while for continuous demand, digital content such as online games and anti-virus programs involves a more complicated matter of utility and competitive price levels. Digital content companies have to explore various kinds of strategies to overcome this gap. Rethinking marketing solutions such as advertisements, images, and word-of-mouth and their effect on customers' perceived value becomes essential. China's digital content industry is becoming more and more globalized and drawing special attention from different countries and regions that have respective competitive advantages. The 2008-2009 Annual Report on the Development of China's Digital Content Industry (CCIDConsulting 2009) indicates that, with the driven power of domestic demand and governmental policy support, the country's digital content industry maintained a fast growth of some 30 percent in 2008, obviously indicating the initial stage of industry expansion. In China, anti-virus programs and other software programs which need to be updated use a quarter-based pricing policy. Customers can download a trial version for free and use it for six months or a year. If they want to use it longer, continuous payment is needed. They examine the excellence of the digital content during this trial period and decide whether to pay for continued usage. For China’s music and movie industries, as a result of initial development, experiential strategy has not been much applied, even though firms in other countries find the trial experience and explore important strategies(such as customers listening to music for several seconds for free before downloading it). For the above reasons, anti-virus program may be a representative for digital content industry in China and an exploratory study of the advantage of experiential value in customer's perceived value of digital content is done in the anti-virus market of China. In order to enhance the reliability of the survey data, this study focused on people who were experienced users of anti-virus programs. The empirical results revealed that experiential value has a positive effect on customers' perceived value of digital content. In other words, because digital content is intangible and the reproduction costs are nearly zero, customers' evaluations are based heavily on their experience. Moreover, image and word-of-mouth do not have a positive effect on perceived value, only on experiential value. That is to say, a digital content value chain is different from that of a general product or service. Experiential value has a notable advantage and mediates the effect of image and word-of-mouth on perceived value. The results of this study help provide an understanding of why free digital content downloads exist in developing countries. Customers can perceive the value of digital content only by using and experiencing it. This is also why such governments support the development of digital content. Other developing countries whose digital content business is also in the beginning stage can make use of the suggestions here. Moreover, based on the advantage of experiential strategy, companies should make more of an effort to invest in customers' experience. As a result of the characteristics and value gap of digital content, customers perceive more value in the intangible digital content only by experiencing what they really want. Moreover, because of the near-zero reproduction costs, companies can perhaps use experiential strategy to enhance customer understanding of digital content.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.27-36
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• 2016

Venture companies, which can commercialize various kinds of new ideas and creating added value, are amid of great attention. Since most of venture companies in initial development stages cannot finance its capital sufficiently all by their own, investments from outside investors are key factor to their survival. However, they have lots of difficulties in financing from outside investors because of their typical uncertain but favorable investment characteristics. Moreover, even though they had successfully financed from outsiders, problems related to their stakeholders, such as interrupting in management and types of investments, cause contrary results to firms. Therefore there are various kinds of systems for startups like angels, venture capitals and governmental supports. Even so, investments and supports for venture companies are still not sufficient. 'Accelerator', which is a brand-new investment type started from Silicon Valley in United States during the mid 2000, is growing attention these-days. It mainly supports startups financially in the initial development stages, however, it also supports the firms by providing mentoring, education and networking services. On the other hand, difference between existing investment types and performance of the investment is still in controversy. Therefore this study compared investment behavior between accelerator and venture capital. As a result, we found that the difference in investment behavior of accelerators and venture capital.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.211-231
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• 2005

It is important for marketers to understand both individual resistance and group resistance in order to successfully bring innovations into global markets. We suggest that consumers resist innovations as individuals and as members of a group and that they do this in different ways at different stages of decision-making. The individual resistance begins with forms of initial resistance, develops into emergent resistance and mature or belated resistance at the individual level. In addition, personal moral standards can influence decision making in relation to the adoption of innovations. Individual resistance is sometimes accompanied by or evolves into group resistance. We introduce a framework for thinking about consumer resistance to innovations that sees it as a consequence of social identity, which has functions for the individual, the group to which one belongs, and other individuals and groups. Consumers with membership in a certain group try to increase their self-esteem through the process of social comparison. The more consumers strongly identify with and bond with a certain group, the more in-group solidarity and out-group hostility will occur. Out-group hostility gives group members strong resistance toward products and services related to the out-group. Individual resistance and group resistance are threats to marketers and dampen performance. By considering the existence of resistance to innovations and seeking strategies to overcome it, marketers can transform these threat into new opportunities. A better understanding of consumer resistance can complement research on the adoption of innovations and help in the development of a universal model of consumer behavior.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.19-32
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• 2007

This paper present a new face recognition method based on LVQ neural net to construct a real time face recognition system. The previous researches which used PCA, LDA combined neural net usually need much time in training neural net. The supervised LVQ neural net needs much less time in training and can maximize the separability between the classes. In this paper, the proposed method transforms the input face image by PCA and LDA sequentially into low-dimension feature vectors and recognizes the face through LVQ neural net. In order to make the system robust to external light variation, light compensation is performed on the detected face by max-min normalization method as preprocessing. PCA and LDA transformations are applied to the normalized face image to produce low-level feature vectors of the image. In order to determine the initial centers of LVQ and speed up the convergency of the LVQ neural net, the K-Means clustering algorithm is adopted. Subsequently, the class representative vectors can be produced by LVQ2 training using initial center vectors. The face recognition is achieved by using the euclidean distance measure between the center vector of classes and the feature vector of input image. From the experiments, we can prove that the proposed method is more effective in the recognition ratio for the cases of still images from ORL database and sequential images rather than using conventional PCA of a hybrid method with PCA and LDA.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.562-567
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• 2009

As a key mechanism of the human emotion interaction, Facial Expression is a powerful tools in HRI(Human Robot Interface) such as Human Computer Interface. By using a facial expression, we can bring out various reaction correspond to emotional state of user in HCI(Human Computer Interaction). Also it can infer that suitable services to supply user from service agents such as intelligent robot. In this article, We addresses the issue of expressive face modeling using an advanced active appearance model for facial emotion recognition. We consider the six universal emotional categories that are defined by Ekman. In human face, emotions are most widely represented with eyes and mouth expression. If we want to recognize the human's emotion from this facial image, we need to extract feature points such as Action Unit(AU) of Ekman. Active Appearance Model (AAM) is one of the commonly used methods for facial feature extraction and it can be applied to construct AU. Regarding the traditional AAM depends on the setting of the initial parameters of the model and this paper introduces a facial emotion recognizing method based on which is combined Advanced AAM with Bayesian Network. Firstly, we obtain the reconstructive parameters of the new gray-scale image by sample-based learning and use them to reconstruct the shape and texture of the new image and calculate the initial parameters of the AAM by the reconstructed facial model. Then reduce the distance error between the model and the target contour by adjusting the parameters of the model. Finally get the model which is matched with the facial feature outline after several iterations and use them to recognize the facial emotion by using Bayesian Network.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.111-121
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• 2019

Recently, through the services that use drones at fire sites to deliver on-site and road conditions into the situation room and life-saving activities or the deliveries of first aid outfits at the accident scenes that are inaccessible to humans, there are more and more cases of dealing with emergency situations. Therefore, by studying the service design using drones in the initial stage of response to fires in dense residential areas, this study was intended to reify the service design area of the response stage, including the dispatch of fire sites and the fire suppression. To do this, through literature researches, research directions were explored by examining the concept and process review of service design, and by analyzing the application cases using service design. In order examine the validity of this study, a one-on-one interview was conducted to identify the use and problems of drones among incumbent firefighters, and identified the applicability of drones to fire sites by targeting drone experts. Field research was conducted to identify the location and distance of road conditions, site conditions, and 119 safety centers, by making Yongsan-gu, the most vulnerable area to fire in Seoul, as a research sample. And, among the methodologies of service design, Persona and Customer Journey Map were prepared and Insight was derived, by using virtual scenarios for the experience values and behavior analyses of the interested parties. Through these processes, this researcher intended to present the fire-response service design and help establish the direction of service design in the initial stages of fire in Korea.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.329-334
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• 2015

Purpose: This study was aimed at analyzing the characteristics and symptoms in home-based hospice-palliative care (HBHPC) patients registered at local public health centers. Methods: A retrospective study was performed; Data of 144 HBHPC patients registered at six public health centers in Pusan City were analyzed, including their initial visit records (registration cards, initial pain evaluation and symptom evaluation). Results: The average age of the patients was 67.7 years old. Among all, 46.2% of the patient lived alone, and 65% had middle school education or lower. The most popular (36.3%) religion was Buddhism, and 47.5% received medical assistance from the government. The most frequent diagnosis was lung cancer followed by stomach cancer and liver cancer in that order. Of all, 48.9% were functionally too weak to lead a daily life, 39.6% were under cancer treatment when registered at the public health center, and 84.5% were aware of the fact that they have reached the terminal phase. Moreover, 83.6% complained about pain, and the pain level was moderate or severe in 36.5% of them. Besides pain, fatigue was the most complained symptom (84.7%), and 49.3% of them rated their fatigue as moderate or severe. Conclusion: Most of the HBHPC patients were socio-economically underprivileged and complained about moderate or worse pain and symptoms. Therefore, it appears necessary to develop an integrated strategy that is tailored for each patient reflecting their characteristics.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.177-188
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• 2018

The scale of graph data has been increased rapidly because of the growth of mobile Internet applications and the proliferation of social network services. This brings upon the imminent necessity of efficient distributed and parallel graph processing approach since the size of these large-scale graphs are easily over a capacity of a single machine. Currently, there are two popular parallel graph processing approaches, vertex-centric graph processing and block centric processing. While a vertex-centric graph processing approach can easily be applied to the parallel processing system, a block-centric graph processing approach is proposed to compensate the drawbacks of the vertex-centric approach. In these systems, the initial quality of graph partition affects to the overall performance significantly. However, it is a very difficult problem to divide the graph into optimal states at the initial phase. Thus, several dynamic load balancing techniques have been studied that suggest the progressive partitioning during the graph processing time. In this paper, we present a load balancing algorithms for the block-centric graph processing approach where most of dynamic load balancing techniques are focused on vertex-centric systems. Our proposed algorithm focus on an improvement of the graph partition quality by dynamically reassigning blocks in runtime, and suggests block split strategy for escaping local optimum solution.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.99-107
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• 1991

Drug resistance of M. tuberculosis has been investigated with isolates from patients screened out of the sample population of the nationwide tuberculosis prevalence surveys or from the routine cultures. The results showed a close inverse relationship between prevalence of drug resistance and efficiency of the past or current treatment regimens of NTP. Individual drug resistance also showed a close relationship with the extent of use of the relevant drugs. Drug resistance was found in 38.0% of M. tuberculosis isolates from patients found in 1965 survey and remained unchanged until it increased upto 48.0% in 1980 survey. The resistance prevalence, however, dropped to 30.8% in 1985 and further to 25.3% in 1990 survey. Such decrease was fairly well coincided with a continuous increase of the treatment efficiency (from 60% in 1984 to 77% in 1989) in 1980s. Initial drug resistance also showed a similar trend, namely 26.2% in 1965, 23.9% in 1970, 20.1% in 1975, 30.6% in 1980, 17.4% in 1985, and 15.0% in 1990. The similar figures were observed in M. tuberculosis isolates from patients diagnosed in the routine services. Higher prevalence of initial drug resistance was observed among urban patients than rural patients and among young patients than old patients. These findings signify that a continuous survey on drug resistance permits to monitor efficiency of treatment programme of the country.