• Korea Trade Review
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• v.43 no.5
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• pp.203-232
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• 2018

Gobizkorea is an online B2B matching platform operated by the Small & Medium Business Corporation. Gobizkorea provides an opportunity for resource-poor SMEs to promote their products and exploit new market opportunities at low cost. The successful operation of Gobizkorea will contribute to the increased exports of Korean SMEs. Accordingly, the present study examined determinants of foreign buyer loyalty toward Gobizkorea.com focusing on country image, e-service quality, and satisfaction. One hundred two survey questionnaires were collected from U.S. buyers registered with Gobizkorea.com. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis confirmed three dimensions of e-service quality including information & efficiency, reliability & privacy, and prompt communication & delivery. The path analysis results showed that the country image of Korea significantly and positively affected these three dimensions of e-service quality. Information & efficiency and reliability & privacy positively influenced buyer satisfaction. Reliability & privacy and satisfaction had a positive impact on buyer loyalty. This study enhances the understanding of the foreign buyers use of the domestic e-market platform by examining of determinants of U.S. buyer loyalty toward Gobizkorea.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.1-26
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• 2018

This study estimates the technical efficiency and total factor productivity(TFP) of and analyzes the relationship between TFP and exports for Korean manufacturing companies from 2000 to 2016. Specially, TFP is decomposed into Technical Change(TC), Technical Efficiency Change (TEC), and Sale Effect(SE), and compared between large and small enterprises. First, in the case of technical efficiency, the Korean economy has been very vulnerable to external shocks, such as the sharp decline following the 2008 financial crisis. The efficiency of the electronics, automobile, and machinery sectors is low and needs to be improved. In addition, the technological efficiency of large enterprises is higher than that of SMEs in most manufacturing sub-sectors except for non-ferrous metals. In the case of TFP, most changes are due to TC, and the effective combination of labor, capital and the effect of scale have little effect, suggesting that improvement of internal structure is urgent. In addition, volatility due to the impact of the financial crisis in 2008 was much larger in SMEs than in large companies, so external economic impacts are more greater for SMEs than large enterprises. The relationship between TFP decomposition factors and exports shows that TC has a positive effect only on exports of SMEs. Therefore, in order to increase exports, in the case of SMEs, R&D support to promote technological development is needed. In the case of large companies, it is necessary to establish differentiated strategies for each export market, competitor company, and item to link efficiency and scale effect of exports.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.141-152
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• 2023

Objective: We performed a meta-analysis of epidemiological results for the association between occupational exposure as a firefighter and cancer as part of the broader evidence synthesis work of the IARC Monographs program. Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted to identify cohort studies of firefighters followed for cancer incidence and mortality. Studies were evaluated for the influence of key biases on results. Random-effects meta-analysis models were used to estimate the association between ever-employment and duration of employment as a firefighter and risk of 12 selected cancers. The impact of bias was explored in sensitivity analyses. Results: Among the 16 included cancer incidence studies, the estimated meta-rate ratio, 95% confidence interval (CI), and heterogeneity statistic (I²) for ever-employment as a career firefighter compared mostly to general populations were 1.58 (1.14-2.20, 8%) for mesothelioma, 1.16 (1.08-1.26, 0%) for bladder cancer, 1.21 (1.12-1.32, 81%) for prostate cancer, 1.37 (1.03-1.82, 56%) for testicular cancer, 1.19 (1.07-1.32, 37%) for colon cancer, 1.36 (1.15-1.62, 83%) for melanoma, 1.12 (1.01-1.25, 0%) for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, 1.28 (1.02-1.61, 40%) for thyroid cancer, and 1.09 (0.92-1.29, 55%) for kidney cancer. Ever-employment as a firefighter was not positively associated with lung, nervous system, or stomach cancer. Results for mesothelioma and bladder cancer exhibited low heterogeneity and were largely robust across sensitivity analyses. Conclusions: There is epidemiological evidence to support a causal relationship between occupational exposure as a firefighter and certain cancers. Challenges persist in the body of evidence related to the quality of exposure assessment, confounding, and medical surveillance bias.

• Korean Journal of Ichthyology
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.262-269
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• 2022

A distribution survey was conducted from 2018 to 2020 to evaluate the distribution status, habitat characteristics, and extinction threat of the short ninespine stickleback Pungitius kaibarae (Gasterosteidae). Literature reports of P. kaibarae distribution have been sorted by each period, 1980~1996, 1997~2005, and 2007~2017, and the samples were collected in 32, 43, and 64 stations for each period. Among the 75 streams and 193 sampling sites investigated during the study period, 1,400 P. kaibarae individuals were collected from 26 streams at 39 sites. The main habitat of P. kaibarae was downstream or brackish water zones with a low altitude, slow water velocity, and many aquatic plants. The main reasons for the decline in population size were assumed to be drought and flood, river work for flood restoration and river maintenance, bridges construction, and predation by the exotic fish species Micropterus salmoides. Previous evidence reported a 42.6% reduction in occupancy within 10 years, a decline in habitat quality, and the spread and impact of the exotic fish species Micropterus salmoides. Therefore, P. kaibarae is now considered a Vulnerable (VU A2ace) species based on the IUCN Red List categories and criteria. Therefore, P. kaibarae should be redesignated as an endangered species by the Ministry of Environment and systematically managed.

• Economic Analysis
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.1-24
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• 2019

This study examines the labor market performance of graduates who had student loans. Compared to earlier studies, we extended analyses to all jobs that were experienced for more than 18 months after graduation. First, we found that students who had student loans earned 2.81% less at their first job compared to their counterparts without student loans. Second, the wage gap decreased over time, a reduction of 0.66%p due to labor market turnovers. Third, when we compared cumulated labor income, however, the amount for borrowers were continuously higher. This is because the job searching period of a borrower was shorter, despite relatively lower wages at the first job, and borrowers also made more frequent job turnovers, accompanying relatively more wage increases. These results suggest that the negative effects of college loans on earnings, reported in previous studies, may have exaggerated the negative impact to some extent of having loans. However, when we look at the quality of jobs beyond simply wages, the proportion of borrowers working at large companies as regular workers was consistently low. Given that job conditions at the earlier stages of one's career may lead to gaps over time, our findings call for more systematic investigations into the effects that student loans have on long-term labor performance.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.463-479
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• 2012

The implicit association test (IAT) measures implicit attitudes of participants and is regarded as an effective method for expecting future behaviors. Based on the IAT, this study aimed to answer the question, whether implicit attitudes of an individual about creativity have any kinds of impact on global perception, which might be important for a creative process. In the experiment, participants were presented words, which were associated with one of four categories, while one attitude category (creativity /practicality) and one evaluative category (good/bad) were always paired together either on the left side or on the right side of the computer screen. After completing the IAT test, participants were led to fill out a questionnaire to assess explicit attitudes toward creativity and practicality. Then they conducted the navon task, in which they had to find one of two letters, 'F' or 'H', which were presented either as a local form or as a global form. Finally, the participants had to write down as many untypical functions of an object as possible. The results showed that not the scores of explicit attitude scores but the IAT scores correlated with the reaction time of global perception. The global perception was faster in the participants with the low IAT scores than the local perception. Compared to this, the global perception benefits disappeared in the participants with the high IAT scores. Additionally, more creative ideas about the functions of the object were listed in the group with the lower IAT scores. Implications of the role of implicit attitudes about creative processes are discussed.

• The Sea:JOURNAL OF THE KOREAN SOCIETY OF OCEANOGRAPHY
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.121-132
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• 2023

Marine heatwaves (MHWs), referring to anomalously high sea surface temperatures, have drawn significant attention from marine scientists due to their broad impacts on the surface marine ecosystem, fisheries, weather patterns, and various human activities. In this study, we examined the impact of the distribution of Changjiang diluted water (CDW), a significant factor causing oceanic property changes in the East China Sea (ECS) during the summer, on MHWs. The surface salinity distribution in the ECS indicates that from June to August, the eastern extension of the CDW influences areas as far as Jeju Island and the Korea Strait. In September, however, the CDW tends to reside in the Changjiang estuary. Through the Empirical Orthogonal Function analysis of the cumulative intensity of MHWs during the summer, we extracted the loading vector of the first mode and its principal component time series to conduct a correlation analysis with the distribution of the CDW. The results revealed a strong negative spatial correlation between areas of the CDW and regions with high cumulative intensity of MHWs, indicating that the reinforcement of stratification due to low-salinity water can increase the intensity and duration of MHWs. This study suggests that the CDW may still influence the spatial distribution of MHWs in the region, highlighting the importance of oceanic environmental factors in the occurrence of MHWs in the waters surrounding the Korean Peninsula.

• Ecology and Resilient Infrastructure
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.107-115
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• 2023

High turbidity in source water can have adverse effects on water treatment plant operations and aquatic ecosystems, necessitating turbidity management. Consequently, research aimed at predicting river turbidity continues. This study developed a multi-class classification model for prediction of turbidity using LightGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine), a representative ensemble machine learning algorithm. The model utilized data that was classified into four classes ranging from 1 to 4 based on turbidity, from low to high. The number of input data points used for analysis varied among classes, with 945, 763, 95, and 25 data points for classes 1 to 4, respectively. The developed model exhibited precisions of 0.85, 0.71, 0.26, and 0.30, as well as recalls of 0.82, 0.76, 0.19, and 0.60 for classes 1 to 4, respectively. The model tended to perform less effectively in the minority classes due to the limited data available for these classes. To address data imbalance, the SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique) algorithm was applied, resulting in improved model performance. For classes 1 to 4, the Precision and Recall of the improved model were 0.88, 0.71, 0.26, 0.25 and 0.79, 0.76, 0.38, 0.60, respectively. This demonstrated that alleviating data imbalance led to a significant enhancement in Recall of the model. Furthermore, to analyze the impact of differences in input data composition addressing the input data imbalance, input data was constructed with various ratios for each class, and the model performances were compared. The results indicate that an appropriate composition ratio for model input data improves the performance of the machine learning model.

• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.307-327
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• 2023

To analyze the impact of word embedding on book titles, this study utilized word embedding models (Word2vec, GloVe, fastText) to generate embedding vectors from book titles. These vectors were then used as classification features for automatic classification. The classifier utilized the k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm, with the categories for automatic classification based on the DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) main class 300 assigned by libraries to books. In the automatic classification experiment applying word embeddings to book titles, the Skip-gram architectures of Word2vec and fastText showed better results in the automatic classification performance of the kNN classifier compared to the TF-IDF features. In the optimization of various hyperparameters across the three models, the Skip-gram architecture of the fastText model demonstrated overall good performance. Specifically, better performance was observed when using hierarchical softmax and larger embedding dimensions as hyperparameters in this model. From a performance perspective, fastText can generate embeddings for substrings or subwords using the n-gram method, which has been shown to increase recall. The Skip-gram architecture of the Word2vec model generally showed good performance at low dimensions(size 300) and with small sizes of negative sampling (3 or 5).

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.673-687
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• 2023

Exploratory data analysis is the process of observing and understanding data collected from various sources to identify their distributions and correlations through their structures and characterization. This process can be used to identify correlations among conditioning factors and select the most effective factors for analysis. This can help the assessment of landslide susceptibility, because landslides are usually triggered by multiple factors, and the impacts of these factors vary by region. This study compared two stages of exploratory data analysis to examine the impact of the data exploration procedure on the landslide prediction model's performance with respect to factor selection. Deep-learning-based landslide susceptibility analysis used either a combinations of selected factors or all 23 factors. During the data exploration phase, we used a Pearson correlation coefficient heat map and a histogram of random forest feature importance. We then assessed the accuracy of our deep-learning-based analysis of landslide susceptibility using a confusion matrix. Finally, a landslide susceptibility map was generated using the landslide susceptibility index derived from the proposed analysis. The analysis revealed that using all 23 factors resulted in low accuracy (55.90%), but using the 13 factors selected in one step of exploration improved the accuracy to 81.25%. This was further improved to 92.80% using only the nine conditioning factors selected during both steps of the data exploration. Therefore, exploratory data analysis selected the conditioning factors most suitable for landslide susceptibility analysis and thereby improving the performance of the analysis.