• Clinical and Experimental Reproductive Medicine
• /
• v.51 no.2
• /
• pp.135-141
• /
• 2024

Objective: Recently, oral antioxidants in combined forms have been used to treat men with idiopathic infertility. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of treatment with vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, zinc, arginine, L-carnitine, and coenzyme Q10 on sperm quality parameters, DNA integrity, reproductive hormones, and pregnancy rates in men with infertility and idiopathic oligoasthenoteratozoospermia (OAT). Methods: A prospective study was conducted on 420 men with infertility and idiopathic OAT who took an oral supplement of antioxidant SP-Power tablets twice daily for 6 months. Semen quality, reproductive hormones, and the DNA fragmentation index (DFI) were evaluated at baseline and at 3 and 6 months after supplementation, using the World Health Organization 2021 guidelines. Results: No significant difference was observed in volume or the percentage of typical morphology during treatment. A significant improvement in sperm concentration was observed after supplementation (8.67±1.41, 12.17±1.91, and 19.01±0.86 at baseline, 3, and 6 months respectively, p<0.01). The total motility, progressive motility, and total motile sperm count also increased significantly (p<0.01), whereas the DFI decreased after 6 months. There was an increase in normal FSH levels and testosterone levels after 6 months of supplementation of antioxidant SP-Power but these differences were not statistically significant (p=not significant and p=0.06, respectively). Conclusion: Supplementation with SP-Power tablets improved sperm quality parameters, sperm DFI, some reproductive hormones, and pregnancy rates in men with infertility and idiopathic OAT, which could be attributed to the supplement's synergistic antioxidant action. Further studies are needed to determine the effects of supplementation on oxidative stress markers.

• Journal of Service Research and Studies
• /
• v.14 no.3
• /
• pp.102-130
• /
• 2024

The accelerated pace of change in the business environment and the advent of new information and communication technologies since the onset of the pandemic have had a profound impact on the way in which work is conducted. These developments are also affecting the nature of secretarial roles, with the adoption of digital workplaces rendering online-based work that transcends physical time and space the norm. The role of the secretary is also undergoing a transformation, with the capacity to utilize digital technology and communicate in person emerging as crucial competencies. The objective of this study is to provide an exploratory account of the evolving work environment and the newly required competencies of secretaries in the digital workplace. The research methodology comprised in-depth interviews with current assistants, the objective of which was to explore the cultural, spatial, technological, and workplace changes and the new competencies required. The study revealed that the role of secretaries in the digital workplace is undergoing a significant transformation. This is characterised by a decline in traditional face-to-face work, an increased reliance on digital platforms, and the digitisation of information management. The competencies deemed essential for success in this evolving environment include digital literacy, proficiency in text-based communication, the ability to maintain a consistent attitude towards online and offline work, and the capacity to adapt to new situations. The findings of this study contribute to the academic understanding of the digital workplace for secretaries and provide a useful basis for the development of practical secretarial education and career development programs. Furthermore, this study aims to provide a more comprehensive examination of secretarial work in the digital workplace and to identify areas where secretaries may require additional support.

• Journal of Industrial Convergence
• /
• v.22 no.10
• /
• pp.21-28
• /
• 2024

Personal Mobility devices pose a significant safety risk to users depending on road conditions. With the recent surge in usage, the number of accidents has also increased, highlighting the need for a preventative system. This study aims to design and develop a warning system to enhance the safety of drivers by detecting road obstacles. To achieve this, a dataset is constructed using images of road obstacles, and the YOLOv5 model is trained. The system is based on the Raspberry Pi 4B, which processes video frames captured by a camera in real-time and triggers an LED warning when an obstacle is detected. The Flask framework is used to monitor the obstacle detection status in real time. Additionally, a GPS sensor is utilized to collect the user's location and speed data, and an auditory warning is triggered via a buzzer if the set speed is exceeded. In the future, this system could be expanded to transmit detected road obstacles and GPS information to a server, providing users with real-time road safety information. The results of this study can serve as essential technology for developing such a system.

• Journal of Industrial Convergence
• /
• v.22 no.10
• /
• pp.125-132
• /
• 2024

This study was conducted to examine the effects of self-directed practice of core nursing skills using an immersive virtual reality (VR) program based on a head-mounted display (HMD) on nursing students' Learning flow, practice satisfaction, and self-efficacy. The study employed a quasi-experimental design with a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design. Among 42 second-year nursing students at a university in City B, 21 students in the experimental group participated in self-directed practice using the HMD-based VR program, while 21 students in the control group engaged in traditional self-directed practice using models. Data were collected through self-reported questionnaires and analyzed using Chi-square tests and independent t-tests. The results showed that practice satisfaction in the experimental group increased by 0.41 points, while it decreased by 0.11 points in the control group, demonstrating a significantly higher satisfaction in the experimental group compared to the control group (t=2.18, p=.035). However, no significant differences were found in class engagement and self-efficacy between the two groups. Therefore, self-directed practice using the HMD-based VR program could be considered a viable alternative to traditional practice using models. This study aims to provide foundational data for the future development of virtual reality programs for nursing practice education.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
• /
• v.66 no.5
• /
• pp.51-65
• /
• 2024

With the advancement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) technology, aerial spraying has been rapidly increasing in the agricultural field. Drones offer many advantages compared to traditional applicators, but they pose challenges such as spray drift risk and spray uniformity. To address these issues, it is essential to understand the characteristics of complex airflow generated by drones and its consequences for the spray performance. This study aims to identify the air velocity distribution of drone downwash and the resulting spray deposition distribution on the ground, ultimately proposing optimized spraying widths and criteria. Experiments were conducted using two agricultural drones with different propeller arrangements under various flight and measurement conditions. The results showed that during hovering, the downward airflow affected the area within a distance of the radius of the blade (R) from the center of the drone. When the drone was flying, the downward airflow was effective up to a distance of 2R. Droplet deposition was concentrated at the center of the drone during hovering. However, during flying, the droplet deposition was more evenly distributed up to the distance of R. The drone downwash and droplet deposition were significantly different during flying compared to the hovering state. At an effective spray width of 3R, the coefficient of variation (CV) was generally less than 16%, indicating a significant improvement in spray uniformity. These findings help optimize effective spraying techniques in drone-based applications.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
• /
• v.113 no.3
• /
• pp.382-392
• /
• 2024

This study aimed to identify differences in soil properties and geological characteristics between slow-moving landslide prone areas and areas without landslide (control areas) in the Republic of Korea. During this 3-year field surveys (2019-2021), 11 soil and geological parameters were measured at 300 sites, i.e., 107 slow-moving landslide prone areas and 193 control areas. T-tests were conducted to identify differences in field-observed parameters between the two areas, followed by χ²-tests and density plots considering distribution patterns of the sample groups. We identified statistically significant differences between the areas in terms of soil internal friction angle, weathered rock thickness, bedrock thickness, and number of major geological anomaly zones. In conclusion, slow-moving landslide prone areas exhibited significant differences in geological characteristics, such as stratum thickness and presence of anomaly zones, compared with the control areas. To better understand the relationship between the geological characteristics identified in this study and the occurrence of slow-moving landslides, further field data collection and systematic analyses are warranted.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
• /
• v.28 no.5
• /
• pp.30-37
• /
• 2024

The valuation of infrastructure assets is typically conducted using the straight-line method, which employs the depreciated replacement cost as a basis. However, this approach has the limitation of failing to accurately reflect the actual value of the facility. In light of these considerations, the performance-based depreciation (PBD) method has been proposed as a means of evaluating the asset value of bridges on the basis of their performance, although it is not designed to take account of the environmental characteristics of individual bridges. This study proposes a hazard-performance based depreciation (HPBD) method that considers the risk level of individual bridges in the PBD method proposed in previous studies. The applicability of the proposed method was evaluated on more than 8,000 bridges. The risk factors for deterioration of bridges were selected, the hazard level of individual bridges was evaluated, and weights based on the hazard level were applied to the PBD method. The evaluation resulted in a present value comparable to that of the PBD method and a relatively high future value. It is postulated that the HPBD method, which considers the risk characteristics of individual bridges, can be used for a more reasonable evaluation and decision-making process.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
• /
• v.26 no.5
• /
• pp.519-532
• /
• 2024

Anomaly detection for the penetration rate of tunnel boring machines (TBMs) is crucial for effective risk management in TBM tunnel projects. However, previous machine learning models for predicting the penetration rate have struggled with imbalanced data between normal and abnormal penetration rates. This study aims to enhance the performance of machine learning-based anomaly detection for the penetration rate by utilizing a data augmentation technique to address this data imbalance. Initially, six input features were selected through correlation analysis. The lowest and highest 10% of the penetration rates were designated as abnormal classes, while the remaining penetration rates were categorized as a normal class. Two prediction models were developed, each trained on an original training set and an oversampled training set constructed using SMOTE (synthetic minority oversampling technique): an XGB (extreme gradient boosting) model and an XGB-SMOTE model. The prediction results showed that the XGB model performed poorly for the abnormal classes, despite performing well for the normal class. In contrast, the XGB-SMOTE model consistently exhibited superior performance across all classes. These findings can be attributed to the data augmentation for the abnormal penetration rates using SMOTE, which enhances the model's ability to learn patterns between geological and operational factors that contribute to abnormal penetration rates. Consequently, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of employing data augmentation to manage imbalanced data in anomaly detection for TBM penetration rates.

• Asia Marketing Journal
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.65-96
• /
• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.20 no.2
• /
• pp.63-86
• /
• 2010

Personalized services directly and indirectly acquire personal data, in part, to provide customers with higher-value services that are specifically context-relevant (such as place and time). Information technologies continue to mature and develop, providing greatly improved performance. Sensory networks and intelligent software can now obtain context data, and that is the cornerstone for providing personalized, context-specific services. Yet, the danger of overflowing personal information is increasing because the data retrieved by the sensors usually contains privacy information. Various technical characteristics of context-aware applications have more troubling implications for information privacy. In parallel with increasing use of context for service personalization, information privacy concerns have also increased such as an unrestricted availability of context information. Those privacy concerns are consistently regarded as a critical issue facing context-aware personalized service success. The entire field of information privacy is growing as an important area of research, with many new definitions and terminologies, because of a need for a better understanding of information privacy concepts. Especially, it requires that the factors of information privacy should be revised according to the characteristics of new technologies. However, previous information privacy factors of context-aware applications have at least two shortcomings. First, there has been little overview of the technology characteristics of context-aware computing. Existing studies have only focused on a small subset of the technical characteristics of context-aware computing. Therefore, there has not been a mutually exclusive set of factors that uniquely and completely describe information privacy on context-aware applications. Second, user survey has been widely used to identify factors of information privacy in most studies despite the limitation of users' knowledge and experiences about context-aware computing technology. To date, since context-aware services have not been widely deployed on a commercial scale yet, only very few people have prior experiences with context-aware personalized services. It is difficult to build users' knowledge about context-aware technology even by increasing their understanding in various ways: scenarios, pictures, flash animation, etc. Nevertheless, conducting a survey, assuming that the participants have sufficient experience or understanding about the technologies shown in the survey, may not be absolutely valid. Moreover, some surveys are based solely on simplifying and hence unrealistic assumptions (e.g., they only consider location information as a context data). A better understanding of information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services is highly needed. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to identify a generic set of factors for elemental information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services and to develop a rank-order list of information privacy concern factors. We consider overall technology characteristics to establish a mutually exclusive set of factors. A Delphi survey, a rigorous data collection method, was deployed to obtain a reliable opinion from the experts and to produce a rank-order list. It, therefore, lends itself well to obtaining a set of universal factors of information privacy concern and its priority. An international panel of researchers and practitioners who have the expertise in privacy and context-aware system fields were involved in our research. Delphi rounds formatting will faithfully follow the procedure for the Delphi study proposed by Okoli and Pawlowski. This will involve three general rounds: (1) brainstorming for important factors; (2) narrowing down the original list to the most important ones; and (3) ranking the list of important factors. For this round only, experts were treated as individuals, not panels. Adapted from Okoli and Pawlowski, we outlined the process of administrating the study. We performed three rounds. In the first and second rounds of the Delphi questionnaire, we gathered a set of exclusive factors for information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services. The respondents were asked to provide at least five main factors for the most appropriate understanding of the information privacy concern in the first round. To do so, some of the main factors found in the literature were presented to the participants. The second round of the questionnaire discussed the main factor provided in the first round, fleshed out with relevant sub-factors. Respondents were then requested to evaluate each sub factor's suitability against the corresponding main factors to determine the final sub-factors from the candidate factors. The sub-factors were found from the literature survey. Final factors selected by over 50% of experts. In the third round, a list of factors with corresponding questions was provided, and the respondents were requested to assess the importance of each main factor and its corresponding sub factors. Finally, we calculated the mean rank of each item to make a final result. While analyzing the data, we focused on group consensus rather than individual insistence. To do so, a concordance analysis, which measures the consistency of the experts' responses over successive rounds of the Delphi, was adopted during the survey process. As a result, experts reported that context data collection and high identifiable level of identical data are the most important factor in the main factors and sub factors, respectively. Additional important sub-factors included diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionalities, and embedded and disappeared sensor devices. The average score of each factor is very useful for future context-aware personalized service development in the view of the information privacy. The final factors have the following differences comparing to those proposed in other studies. First, the concern factors differ from existing studies, which are based on privacy issues that may occur during the lifecycle of acquired user information. However, our study helped to clarify these sometimes vague issues by determining which privacy concern issues are viable based on specific technical characteristics in context-aware personalized services. Since a context-aware service differs in its technical characteristics compared to other services, we selected specific characteristics that had a higher potential to increase user's privacy concerns. Secondly, this study considered privacy issues in terms of service delivery and display that were almost overlooked in existing studies by introducing IPOS as the factor division. Lastly, in each factor, it correlated the level of importance with professionals' opinions as to what extent users have privacy concerns. The reason that it did not select the traditional method questionnaire at that time is that context-aware personalized service considered the absolute lack in understanding and experience of users with new technology. For understanding users' privacy concerns, professionals in the Delphi questionnaire process selected context data collection, tracking and recording, and sensory network as the most important factors among technological characteristics of context-aware personalized services. In the creation of a context-aware personalized services, this study demonstrates the importance and relevance of determining an optimal methodology, and which technologies and in what sequence are needed, to acquire what types of users' context information. Most studies focus on which services and systems should be provided and developed by utilizing context information on the supposition, along with the development of context-aware technology. However, the results in this study show that, in terms of users' privacy, it is necessary to pay greater attention to the activities that acquire context information. To inspect the results in the evaluation of sub factor, additional studies would be necessary for approaches on reducing users' privacy concerns toward technological characteristics such as highly identifiable level of identical data, diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionality, embedded and disappearing sensor devices. The factor ranked the next highest level of importance after input is a context-aware service delivery that is related to output. The results show that delivery and display showing services to users in a context-aware personalized services toward the anywhere-anytime-any device concept have been regarded as even more important than in previous computing environment. Considering the concern factors to develop context aware personalized services will help to increase service success rate and hopefully user acceptance for those services. Our future work will be to adopt these factors for qualifying context aware service development projects such as u-city development projects in terms of service quality and hence user acceptance.