• Title/Summary/Keyword: Location-based Services

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Assessment of Site Environmental Factors on the Structure of Forest Vegetation in Naejang-san National Park Using Canonical Correlation Analysis (정준상관분석을 통한 내장산국립공원 산림식생구조의 입지환경 평가)

  • Kim, Tae-Geun;Cho, Young-Hwan;Oh, Jang-Geun
    • Korean Journal of Ecology and Environment
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    • v.46 no.4
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    • pp.561-569
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    • 2013
  • This study examines locational environment factors that may affect the vegetation structure in the forests of Naejang National Park. To that end, we selected LAI (Leaf Area Index), diameter at breast height, and tree height as structural variables as well as altitude above sea level, gradient, slope direction, soil moisture, topographic location, and amount of solar radiation as locational environment factors, using the method of canonical correlation analysis in order to find out correlation between them. As to the simple correlation between the locational environment factors and structural variables, the correlation coefficient was relatively low (0.6). The values of LAI, measured along the ridge with higher altitudes, decreased as the soil moisture and solar radiation increased. However, LAI increased as the gradient increased and the slope direction faced the north (farther from the east). In respect of the diameter at breast height, the diameter decreased as the altitude and gradient increased. But the diameter increased as the moisture and solar radiation increased. The tree height decreased as the moisture increased and the site was closer to the ridge. These various correlations show a variety of locational environment factors in the national park, implying that the structural variables are affected by complex locational environment factors. This study conducted a canonical correlation analysis on locational environment factors which may affect the vegetation structure, and the result showed that LAI increased and tree height & diameter at breast height decreased as the solar radiation & moisture decreased and altitude increased. Although more factors that may affect vegetation structure (e.g. climate) should be taken into account, this study is significant in that the vegetation structure, which can adapt to more unfavorable conditions in terms of solar radiation, moisture, and higher altitudes, could be inferred in a statistical way. The results of this study, especially the locational environment factors based on DEM, can be used for assessing diversity of vegetation structure in a forest and for monitoring the structure in a national park on a regular basis so as to establish more effective maintenance plans of a park.

The way to make training data for deep learning model to recognize keywords in product catalog image at E-commerce (온라인 쇼핑몰에서 상품 설명 이미지 내의 키워드 인식을 위한 딥러닝 훈련 데이터 자동 생성 방안)

  • Kim, Kitae;Oh, Wonseok;Lim, Geunwon;Cha, Eunwoo;Shin, Minyoung;Kim, Jongwoo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.1
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    • pp.1-23
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    • 2018
  • From the 21st century, various high-quality services have come up with the growth of the internet or 'Information and Communication Technologies'. Especially, the scale of E-commerce industry in which Amazon and E-bay are standing out is exploding in a large way. As E-commerce grows, Customers could get what they want to buy easily while comparing various products because more products have been registered at online shopping malls. However, a problem has arisen with the growth of E-commerce. As too many products have been registered, it has become difficult for customers to search what they really need in the flood of products. When customers search for desired products with a generalized keyword, too many products have come out as a result. On the contrary, few products have been searched if customers type in details of products because concrete product-attributes have been registered rarely. In this situation, recognizing texts in images automatically with a machine can be a solution. Because bulk of product details are written in catalogs as image format, most of product information are not searched with text inputs in the current text-based searching system. It means if information in images can be converted to text format, customers can search products with product-details, which make them shop more conveniently. There are various existing OCR(Optical Character Recognition) programs which can recognize texts in images. But existing OCR programs are hard to be applied to catalog because they have problems in recognizing texts in certain circumstances, like texts are not big enough or fonts are not consistent. Therefore, this research suggests the way to recognize keywords in catalog with the Deep Learning algorithm which is state of the art in image-recognition area from 2010s. Single Shot Multibox Detector(SSD), which is a credited model for object-detection performance, can be used with structures re-designed to take into account the difference of text from object. But there is an issue that SSD model needs a lot of labeled-train data to be trained, because of the characteristic of deep learning algorithms, that it should be trained by supervised-learning. To collect data, we can try labelling location and classification information to texts in catalog manually. But if data are collected manually, many problems would come up. Some keywords would be missed because human can make mistakes while labelling train data. And it becomes too time-consuming to collect train data considering the scale of data needed or costly if a lot of workers are hired to shorten the time. Furthermore, if some specific keywords are needed to be trained, searching images that have the words would be difficult, as well. To solve the data issue, this research developed a program which create train data automatically. This program can make images which have various keywords and pictures like catalog and save location-information of keywords at the same time. With this program, not only data can be collected efficiently, but also the performance of SSD model becomes better. The SSD model recorded 81.99% of recognition rate with 20,000 data created by the program. Moreover, this research had an efficiency test of SSD model according to data differences to analyze what feature of data exert influence upon the performance of recognizing texts in images. As a result, it is figured out that the number of labeled keywords, the addition of overlapped keyword label, the existence of keywords that is not labeled, the spaces among keywords and the differences of background images are related to the performance of SSD model. This test can lead performance improvement of SSD model or other text-recognizing machine based on deep learning algorithm with high-quality data. SSD model which is re-designed to recognize texts in images and the program developed for creating train data are expected to contribute to improvement of searching system in E-commerce. Suppliers can put less time to register keywords for products and customers can search products with product-details which is written on the catalog.

An Analytical Approach Using Topic Mining for Improving the Service Quality of Hotels (호텔 산업의 서비스 품질 향상을 위한 토픽 마이닝 기반 분석 방법)

  • Moon, Hyun Sil;Sung, David;Kim, Jae Kyeong
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.25 no.1
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    • pp.21-41
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    • 2019
  • Thanks to the rapid development of information technologies, the data available on Internet have grown rapidly. In this era of big data, many studies have attempted to offer insights and express the effects of data analysis. In the tourism and hospitality industry, many firms and studies in the era of big data have paid attention to online reviews on social media because of their large influence over customers. As tourism is an information-intensive industry, the effect of these information networks on social media platforms is more remarkable compared to any other types of media. However, there are some limitations to the improvements in service quality that can be made based on opinions on social media platforms. Users on social media platforms represent their opinions as text, images, and so on. Raw data sets from these reviews are unstructured. Moreover, these data sets are too big to extract new information and hidden knowledge by human competences. To use them for business intelligence and analytics applications, proper big data techniques like Natural Language Processing and data mining techniques are needed. This study suggests an analytical approach to directly yield insights from these reviews to improve the service quality of hotels. Our proposed approach consists of topic mining to extract topics contained in the reviews and the decision tree modeling to explain the relationship between topics and ratings. Topic mining refers to a method for finding a group of words from a collection of documents that represents a document. Among several topic mining methods, we adopted the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, which is considered as the most universal algorithm. However, LDA is not enough to find insights that can improve service quality because it cannot find the relationship between topics and ratings. To overcome this limitation, we also use the Classification and Regression Tree method, which is a kind of decision tree technique. Through the CART method, we can find what topics are related to positive or negative ratings of a hotel and visualize the results. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the representation of an analytical approach for the improvement of hotel service quality from unstructured review data sets. Through experiments for four hotels in Hong Kong, we can find the strengths and weaknesses of services for each hotel and suggest improvements to aid in customer satisfaction. Especially from positive reviews, we find what these hotels should maintain for service quality. For example, compared with the other hotels, a hotel has a good location and room condition which are extracted from positive reviews for it. In contrast, we also find what they should modify in their services from negative reviews. For example, a hotel should improve room condition related to soundproof. These results mean that our approach is useful in finding some insights for the service quality of hotels. That is, from the enormous size of review data, our approach can provide practical suggestions for hotel managers to improve their service quality. In the past, studies for improving service quality relied on surveys or interviews of customers. However, these methods are often costly and time consuming and the results may be biased by biased sampling or untrustworthy answers. The proposed approach directly obtains honest feedback from customers' online reviews and draws some insights through a type of big data analysis. So it will be a more useful tool to overcome the limitations of surveys or interviews. Moreover, our approach easily obtains the service quality information of other hotels or services in the tourism industry because it needs only open online reviews and ratings as input data. Furthermore, the performance of our approach will be better if other structured and unstructured data sources are added.

APPLICATION OF FUZZY SET THEORY IN SAFEGUARDS

  • Fattah, A.;Nishiwaki, Y.
    • Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
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    • 1993.06a
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    • pp.1051-1054
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    • 1993
  • The International Atomic Energy Agency's Statute in Article III.A.5 allows it“to establish and administer safeguards designed to ensure that special fissionable and other materials, services, equipment, facilities and information made available by the Agency or at its request or under its supervision or control are not used in such a way as to further any military purpose; and to apply safeguards, at the request of the parties, to any bilateral or multilateral arrangement, or at the request of a State, to any of that State's activities in the field of atomic energy”. Safeguards are essentially a technical means of verifying the fulfilment of political obligations undertaken by States and given a legal force in international agreements relating to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The main political objectives are: to assure the international community that States are complying with their non-proliferation and other peaceful undertakings; and to deter (a) the diversion of afeguarded nuclear materials to the production of nuclear explosives or for military purposes and (b) the misuse of safeguarded facilities with the aim of producing unsafeguarded nuclear material. It is clear that no international safeguards system can physically prevent diversion. The IAEA safeguards system is basically a verification measure designed to provide assurance in those cases in which diversion has not occurred. Verification is accomplished by two basic means: material accountancy and containment and surveillance measures. Nuclear material accountancy is the fundamental IAEA safeguards mechanism, while containment and surveillance serve as important complementary measures. Material accountancy refers to a collection of measurements and other determinations which enable the State and the Agency to maintain a current picture of the location and movement of nuclear material into and out of material balance areas, i. e. areas where all material entering or leaving is measurab e. A containment measure is one that is designed by taking advantage of structural characteristics, such as containers, tanks or pipes, etc. To establish the physical integrity of an area or item by preventing the undetected movement of nuclear material or equipment. Such measures involve the application of tamper-indicating or surveillance devices. Surveillance refers to both human and instrumental observation aimed at indicating the movement of nuclear material. The verification process consists of three over-lapping elements: (a) Provision by the State of information such as - design information describing nuclear installations; - accounting reports listing nuclear material inventories, receipts and shipments; - documents amplifying and clarifying reports, as applicable; - notification of international transfers of nuclear material. (b) Collection by the IAEA of information through inspection activities such as - verification of design information - examination of records and repo ts - measurement of nuclear material - examination of containment and surveillance measures - follow-up activities in case of unusual findings. (c) Evaluation of the information provided by the State and of that collected by inspectors to determine the completeness, accuracy and validity of the information provided by the State and to resolve any anomalies and discrepancies. To design an effective verification system, one must identify possible ways and means by which nuclear material could be diverted from peaceful uses, including means to conceal such diversions. These theoretical ways and means, which have become known as diversion strategies, are used as one of the basic inputs for the development of safeguards procedures, equipment and instrumentation. For analysis of implementation strategy purposes, it is assumed that non-compliance cannot be excluded a priori and that consequently there is a low but non-zero probability that a diversion could be attempted in all safeguards ituations. An important element of diversion strategies is the identification of various possible diversion paths; the amount, type and location of nuclear material involved, the physical route and conversion of the material that may take place, rate of removal and concealment methods, as appropriate. With regard to the physical route and conversion of nuclear material the following main categories may be considered: - unreported removal of nuclear material from an installation or during transit - unreported introduction of nuclear material into an installation - unreported transfer of nuclear material from one material balance area to another - unreported production of nuclear material, e. g. enrichment of uranium or production of plutonium - undeclared uses of the material within the installation. With respect to the amount of nuclear material that might be diverted in a given time (the diversion rate), the continuum between the following two limiting cases is cons dered: - one significant quantity or more in a short time, often known as abrupt diversion; and - one significant quantity or more per year, for example, by accumulation of smaller amounts each time to add up to a significant quantity over a period of one year, often called protracted diversion. Concealment methods may include: - restriction of access of inspectors - falsification of records, reports and other material balance areas - replacement of nuclear material, e. g. use of dummy objects - falsification of measurements or of their evaluation - interference with IAEA installed equipment.As a result of diversion and its concealment or other actions, anomalies will occur. All reasonable diversion routes, scenarios/strategies and concealment methods have to be taken into account in designing safeguards implementation strategies so as to provide sufficient opportunities for the IAEA to observe such anomalies. The safeguards approach for each facility will make a different use of these procedures, equipment and instrumentation according to the various diversion strategies which could be applicable to that facility and according to the detection and inspection goals which are applied. Postulated pathways sets of scenarios comprise those elements of diversion strategies which might be carried out at a facility or across a State's fuel cycle with declared or undeclared activities. All such factors, however, contain a degree of fuzziness that need a human judgment to make the ultimate conclusion that all material is being used for peaceful purposes. Safeguards has been traditionally based on verification of declared material and facilities using material accountancy as a fundamental measure. The strength of material accountancy is based on the fact that it allows to detect any diversion independent of the diversion route taken. Material accountancy detects a diversion after it actually happened and thus is powerless to physically prevent it and can only deter by the risk of early detection any contemplation by State authorities to carry out a diversion. Recently the IAEA has been faced with new challenges. To deal with these, various measures are being reconsidered to strengthen the safeguards system such as enhanced assessment of the completeness of the State's initial declaration of nuclear material and installations under its jurisdiction enhanced monitoring and analysis of open information and analysis of open information that may indicate inconsistencies with the State's safeguards obligations. Precise information vital for such enhanced assessments and analyses is normally not available or, if available, difficult and expensive collection of information would be necessary. Above all, realistic appraisal of truth needs sound human judgment.

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Implementation of An Automatic Authentication System Based on Patient's Situations and Its Performance Evaluation (환자상황 기반의 자동인증시스템 구축 및 성능평가)

  • Ham, Gyu-Sung;Joo, Su-Chong
    • Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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    • v.21 no.4
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    • pp.25-34
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    • 2020
  • In the current medical information system, a system environment is constructed in which Biometric data generated by using IoT or medical equipment connected to a patient can be stored in a medical information server and monitored at the same time. Also, the patient's biometric data, medical information, and personal information after simple authentication using only the ID / PW via the mobile terminal of the medical staff are easily accessible. However, the method of accessing these medical information needs to be improved in the dimension of protecting patient's personal information, and provides a quick authentication system for first aid. In this paper, we implemented an automatic authentication system based on the patient's situation and evaluated its performance. Patient's situation was graded into normal and emergency situation, and the situation of the patient was determined in real time using incoming patient biometric data from the ward. If the patient's situation is an emergency, an emergency message including an emergency code is send to the mobile terminal of the medical staff, and they attempted automatic authentication to access the upper medical information of the patient. Automatic authentication is a combination of user authentication(ID/PW, emergency code) and mobile terminal authentication(medical staff's role, working hours, work location). After user authentication, mobile terminal authentication is proceeded automatically without additional intervention by medical staff. After completing all authentications, medical staffs get authorization according to the role of medical staffs and patient's situations, and can access to the patient's graded medical information and personal information through the mobile terminal. We protected the patient's medical information through limited medical information access by the medical staff according to the patient's situation, and provided an automatic authentication without additional intervention in an emergency situation. We performed performance evaluation to verify the performance of the implemented automatic authentication system.

A study on the developing and implementation of the Cyber University (가상대학 구현에 관한 연구)

  • Choi, Sung;Yoo, Gab-Sang
    • Proceedings of the Technology Innovation Conference
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    • 1998.06a
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    • pp.116-127
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    • 1998
  • The Necessity of Cyber University. Within the rapidly changing environment of global economics, the environment of higher education in the universities, also, has been, encountering various changes. Popularization on higher education related to 1lifetime education system, putting emphasis on the productivity of education services and the acquisition of competitiveness through the market of open education, the breakdown of the ivory tower and the Multiversitization of universities, importance of obtaining information in the universities, and cooperation between domestic and oversea universities, industry and educational system must be acquired. Therefore, in order to adequately cope wi th these kinds of rapid changes in the education environment, operating Cyber University by utilizing various information technologies and its fixations such as Internet, E-mail, CD-ROMs, Interact ive Video Networks (Video Conferencing, Video on Demand), TV, Cable etc., which has no time or location limitation, is needed. Using informal ion and telecommunication technologies, especially the Internet is expected to Or ing about many changes in the social, economics and educational area. Among the many changes scholars have predicted, the development and fixations of Distant Learning or Cyber University was the most dominant factor. In the case of U. S. A., Cyber University has already been established and in under operation by the Federate Governments of 13 states. Any other universities (around 500 universities has been opened until1 now), with the help of the government and private citizens have been able to partly operate the Cyber University and is planning on enlarging step-by-step in the future. It could be seen not only as U. S. A. trying to elevate its higher education through their leading information technologies, but also could be seen as their objective in putting efforts on subordinating the culture of the education worldwide. UTRA University in U. S. A., for example, is already exporting its class lectures to China, and Indonesia regions. Influenced by the Cyber University current in the U.S., the Universities in Korea is willing .to arrange various forms of Cyber Universities. In line with this, at JUNAM National University, internet based Cyber University, which has set about its work on July of 1997, is in the state of operating about 100 Cyber Universities. Also, in the case of Hanam University, the Distant Learning classes are at its final stage of being established; this is a link in the rapid speed project of setting an example by the Korean Government. In addition, the department of education has selected 5 universities, including Seoul Cyber Design University for experimentation and is in the stage of strategic operation. Over 100 universities in Korea are speeding up its preparation for operating Cyber University. This form of Distant Learning goes beyond the walls of universities and is in the trend of being diffused in business areas or in various training programs of financial organizations and more. Here, in the hope that this material would some what be of help to other Universities which are preparing for Cyber University, I would 1ike to introduce some general concepts of the components forming Cyber University and Open Education System which has been established by JUNAM University. System of Cyber University could be seen as a general solution offered by tile computer technologies for the management on the students, Lectures On Demand, real hour based and satellite classes, media product ion lab for the production of the multimedia Contents, electronic library, the Groupware enabling exchange of information between students and professors. Arranging general concepts of components in the aspect of Cyber University and Open Education, it would be expressed in the form of the establishment of Cyber University and the service of Open Education as can be seen in the diagram below.

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A Hybrid Recommender System based on Collaborative Filtering with Selective Use of Overall and Multicriteria Ratings (종합 평점과 다기준 평점을 선택적으로 활용하는 협업필터링 기반 하이브리드 추천 시스템)

  • Ku, Min Jung;Ahn, Hyunchul
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.2
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    • pp.85-109
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    • 2018
  • Recommender system recommends the items expected to be purchased by a customer in the future according to his or her previous purchase behaviors. It has been served as a tool for realizing one-to-one personalization for an e-commerce service company. Traditional recommender systems, especially the recommender systems based on collaborative filtering (CF), which is the most popular recommendation algorithm in both academy and industry, are designed to generate the items list for recommendation by using 'overall rating' - a single criterion. However, it has critical limitations in understanding the customers' preferences in detail. Recently, to mitigate these limitations, some leading e-commerce companies have begun to get feedback from their customers in a form of 'multicritera ratings'. Multicriteria ratings enable the companies to understand their customers' preferences from the multidimensional viewpoints. Moreover, it is easy to handle and analyze the multidimensional ratings because they are quantitative. But, the recommendation using multicritera ratings also has limitation that it may omit detail information on a user's preference because it only considers three-to-five predetermined criteria in most cases. Under this background, this study proposes a novel hybrid recommendation system, which selectively uses the results from 'traditional CF' and 'CF using multicriteria ratings'. Our proposed system is based on the premise that some people have holistic preference scheme, whereas others have composite preference scheme. Thus, our system is designed to use traditional CF using overall rating for the users with holistic preference, and to use CF using multicriteria ratings for the users with composite preference. To validate the usefulness of the proposed system, we applied it to a real-world dataset regarding the recommendation for POI (point-of-interests). Providing personalized POI recommendation is getting more attentions as the popularity of the location-based services such as Yelp and Foursquare increases. The dataset was collected from university students via a Web-based online survey system. Using the survey system, we collected the overall ratings as well as the ratings for each criterion for 48 POIs that are located near K university in Seoul, South Korea. The criteria include 'food or taste', 'price' and 'service or mood'. As a result, we obtain 2,878 valid ratings from 112 users. Among 48 items, 38 items (80%) are used as training dataset, and the remaining 10 items (20%) are used as validation dataset. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system (i.e. hybrid selective model), we compared its performance to the performances of two comparison models - the traditional CF and the CF with multicriteria ratings. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using two metrics - average MAE(mean absolute error) and precision-in-top-N. Precision-in-top-N represents the percentage of truly high overall ratings among those that the model predicted would be the N most relevant items for each user. The experimental system was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The experimental results showed that our proposed system (avg. MAE = 0.584) outperformed traditional CF (avg. MAE = 0.591) as well as multicriteria CF (avg. AVE = 0.608). We also found that multicriteria CF showed worse performance compared to traditional CF in our data set, which is contradictory to the results in the most previous studies. This result supports the premise of our study that people have two different types of preference schemes - holistic and composite. Besides MAE, the proposed system outperformed all the comparison models in precision-in-top-3, precision-in-top-5, and precision-in-top-7. The results from the paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system outperformed traditional CF with 10% statistical significance level, and multicriteria CF with 1% statistical significance level from the perspective of average MAE. The proposed system sheds light on how to understand and utilize user's preference schemes in recommender systems domain.

Variation of Hospital Costs and Product Heterogeneity

  • Shin, Young-Soo
    • Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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    • v.11 no.1
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    • pp.123-127
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    • 1978
  • The major objective of this research is to identify those hospital characteristics that best explain cost variation among hospitals and to formulate linear models that can predict hospital costs. Specific emphasis is placed on hospital output, that is, the identification of diagnosis related patient groups (DRGs) which are medically meaningful and demonstrate similar patterns of hospital resource consumption. A casemix index is developed based on the DRGs identified. Considering the common problems encountered in previous hospital cost research, the following study requirements are estab-lished for fulfilling the objectives of this research: 1. Selection of hospitals that exercise similar medical and fiscal practices. 2. Identification of an appropriate data collection mechanism in which demographic and medical characteristics of individual patients as well as accurate and comparable cost information can be derived. 3. Development of a patient classification system in which all the patients treated in hospitals are able to be split into mutually exclusive categories with consistent and stable patterns of resource consumption. 4. Development of a cost finding mechanism through which patient groups' costs can be made comparable across hospitals. A data set of Medicare patients prepared by the Social Security Administration was selected for the study analysis. The data set contained 27,229 record abstracts of Medicare patients discharged from all but one short-term general hospital in Connecticut during the period from January 1, 1971, to December 31, 1972. Each record abstract contained demographic and diagnostic information, as well as charges for specific medical services received. The 'AUT-OGRP System' was used to generate 198 DRGs in which the entire range of Medicare patients were split into mutually exclusive categories, each of which shows a consistent and stable pattern of resource consumption. The 'Departmental Method' was used to generate cost information for the groups of Medicare patients that would be comparable across hospitals. To fulfill the study objectives, an extensive analysis was conducted in the following areas: 1. Analysis of DRGs: in which the level of resource use of each DRG was determined, the length of stay or death rate of each DRG in relation to resource use was characterized, and underlying patterns of the relationships among DRG costs were explained. 2. Exploration of resource use profiles of hospitals; in which the magnitude of differences in the resource uses or death rates incurred in the treatment of Medicare patients among the study hospitals was explored. 3. Casemix analysis; in which four types of casemix-related indices were generated, and the significance of these indices in the explanation of hospital costs was examined. 4. Formulation of linear models to predict hospital costs of Medicare patients; in which nine independent variables (i. e., casemix index, hospital size, complexity of service, teaching activity, location, casemix-adjusted death. rate index, occupancy rate, and casemix-adjusted length of stay index) were used for determining factors in hospital costs. Results from the study analysis indicated that: 1. The system of 198 DRGs for Medicare patient classification was demonstrated not only as a strong tool for determining the pattern of hospital resource utilization of Medicare patients, but also for categorizing patients by their severity of illness. 2. The wei틴fed mean total case cost (TOTC) of the study hospitals for Medicare patients during the study years was $11,27.02 with a standard deviation of $117.20. The hospital with the highest average TOTC ($1538.15) was 2.08 times more expensive than the hospital with the lowest average TOTC ($743.45). The weighted mean per diem total cost (DTOC) of the study hospitals for Medicare patients during the sutdy years was $107.98 with a standard deviation of $15.18. The hospital with the highest average DTOC ($147.23) was 1.87 times more expensive than the hospital with the lowest average DTOC ($78.49). 3. The linear models for each of the six types of hospital costs were formulated using the casemix index and the eight other hospital variables as the determinants. These models explained variance to the extent of 68.7 percent of total case cost (TOTC), 63.5 percent of room and board cost (RMC), 66.2 percent of total ancillary service cost (TANC), 66.3 percent of per diem total cost (DTOC), 56.9 percent of per diem room and board cost (DRMC), and 65.5 percent of per diem ancillary service cost (DTANC). The casemix index alone explained approximately one half of interhospital cost variation: 59.1 percent for TOTC and 44.3 percent for DTOC. Thsee results demonstrate that the casemix index is the most importand determinant of interhospital cost variation Future research and policy implications in regard to the results of this study is envisioned in the following three areas: 1. Utilization of casemix related indices in the Medicare data systems. 2. Refinement of data for hospital cost evaluation. 3. Development of a system for reimbursement and cost control in hospitals.

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Identification of Quantitative Trait Loci Associated with Anthracnose Resistance in Chili Pepper (Capsicum spp.) (고추 탄저병 저항성 관련 양적형질 유전자좌 분석)

  • Kim, Su;Kim, Ki-Taek;Kim, Dong-Hwi;Yang, Eun-Young;Cho, Myeong-Cheoul;Jamal, Arshad;Chae, Young;Pae, Do-Ham;Oh, Dae-Geun;Hwang, Ju-Kwang
    • Horticultural Science & Technology
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    • v.28 no.6
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    • pp.1014-1024
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    • 2010
  • Pepper ($Capsicum$ spp.) anthracnose caused by $Colletotrichum$ $acutatum$ is a destructive disease susceptible to areas where chili peppers are grown. $Capsicum$ $baccatum$ var. $pendulum$ (Cbp) is resistant to anthracnose and has actively been used for interspecific hybridization for the introgression of resistance gene(s) into cultivated chili peppers. The goals of this study were to determine the inheritance of resistance to anthracnose within $Capsicum$ $baccatum$ and to map quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for the anthracnose resistance. A genetic mapping population consisting of 126 $F_2$ plants derived from a cross between $Capsicum$ $baccatum$ var. $pendulum$ (resistant) and $Capsicum$ $baccatum$ 'Golden-aji' (susceptible) was used for linkage mapping. The linkage map was constructed with 52 SSRs, 175 AFLPs, and 100 SRAPs covering 1,896cM, with an average interval marker distance of 4.0cM. Based on this map, the number, location, and effect of QTLs for anthracnose resistance were studied using plants inoculated in the laboratory and field. A total of 19 quantitative trait loci (2 major QTLs and 16 minor QTLs) were detected. Two QTLs ($An8.1$, $An9.1$) showed 16.4% phenotypic variations for anthracnose resistance after wounding inoculation. In addition, five minor QTL loci ($An7.3$, $An7.4$, $An4.1$, $An3.1$, $An3.2$) showed a total of 60.73% phenotypic variations of anthracnose resistance in the field test. Several significant QTLs were also detected and their reproducibility was confirmed under different inoculation conditions. These QTLs are now being confirmed with different breeding populations. Markers tightly linked to the QTLs that are reliable under different environmental conditions will help to determine the success of marker-assisted selection for anthracnose -resistant breeding programs in chili pepper.

A Cross-Sectional Study on Job Training Course of the Dental Hygienists at the Public Health (sub)Centers (보건(지)소 치과위생사의 구강보건직무교육실태에 관한 단면적 조사연구)

  • Kim, Seung-Hee;Kim, Soon-Bog
    • Journal of dental hygiene science
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    • v.9 no.1
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    • pp.83-89
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    • 2009
  • About 380 dental hygienists who were working in public health centers in 2004 joined this study with questionnaires about the evaluation of job training programs regarding oral health care. The findings are as follows. 1. As for the general characteristics of subjects including location, age and career, the dental hygienists in Public Health Subcenters outnumbered the dental hygienists in Public Health Centers, as the former accounted for 61.1 and the latter 35.3 percent. And the dental hygienists in their 36~40s made up the largest age group. The group in their 11~15 years career revealed 48.4, over 16 years career 35.7, under 10 years career group 15.9 percent, respectively. 2. The portion of certification in the respondents was 28.9 percent, as compared to the 71.1percent of non-certification. The major reasons of non-certification were not-applying(44.6%), participation rejected (29.3%). 3. Freqently requested curriculums were school based oral health program(4.42, the highest by Linkert 5 point scale), followed by oral health education(4.41), public oral health services for the toddler and for the elderly(4.04), for the disabled(3.92), oral health planning evaluation(3.85) and oral health survey& investigation(3.69). The gap between Dental hygienists at Public Health Center and Public Health Subcenter was statistically significant different(p < 0.001) in oral health survey& investigation and oral health planning evaluation.

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