• Title/Summary/Keyword: Physical Cause

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Awareness of Risk Factors for Cancer among Omani adults- A Community Based Study

  • Al-Azri, Mohammed;AL-Rasbi, Khadija;Al-Hinai, Mustafa;Davidson, Robin;Al-Maniri, Abdullah
    • Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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    • v.15 no.13
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    • pp.5401-5406
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    • 2014
  • Background: Cancer is the leading cause of mortality around the world. However, the majority of cancers occur as a result of modifiable risk factors; hence public awareness of cancer risk factors is crucial to reduce the incidence. The objective of this study was to identify the level of public awareness of cancer risk factors among the adult Omani population. Materials and Methods: A community based survey using the Cancer Awareness Measure (CAM) questionnaire was conducted in three areas of Oman to measure public awareness of cancer risk factors. Omani adults aged 18 years and above were invited to participate in the study. SPPSS (ver.20) was used to analyse the data. Results: A total of 384 participated from 500 invited individuals (response rate =77%). The majority of respondents agreed that smoking cigarettes (320, 83.3%), passive smoking (279, 72.7%) and excessive drinking of alcohol (265, 69%) are risks factors for cancer. However, fewer respondents agreed that eating less fruit and vegetables (83, 21.6%), eating more red or processed meat (116, 30.2%), being overweight (BMI> 25) (123, 32%), doing less physical exercise (119, 31%), being over 70 years old (72, 18.8%), having a close relative with cancer (134, 34.9%), infection with human papilloma virus (HPV) (117, 30.5%) and getting frequent sunburn during childhood (149, 38.8%) are risk factors for cancer. A significant association was found between participant responses and their educational level. The higher the educational level, the more likely that respondents identified cancer risk factors including smoking (p<0.0005), passive smoking (p= 0.007), excessive drinking of alcohol (p<0.0005), eating less fruit and vegetables (p= 0.001) and infection with HPV (p<0.0005). Conclusions: The majority of respondents in this study in Oman were not aware of the common risk factors for cancer. It may be possible to reduce the incidence of cancers in Oman by developing strategies to educate the public about these risk factors.

A Study on the Management and Living Environment of the Group-homes for the Elderly -Focusing on Jeonju and Kwangju- (노인그룹홈의 운영과 생활환경에 관한 연구 -전주시와 광주시를 중심으로-)

  • Ahn, Kyung-Ohn
    • Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.841-855
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    • 2009
  • The main objective of this study is to examine the situations of group-homes for the elderly and clarify the problems of them. This study investigates the present conditions of welfare facilities and supply conditions. 4 group-homes were surveyed in Jeonju and Kwangju cities. Data was collected through various ways including the survey conducted by facility operators, the measurement of living space, and photo-takings. The major results of this study are as follows: 1) With the introduction of nursing care insurance in 2008, the increase of the demand and supply to group-home will be expected, due to less cost for recuperation. The care of elderly in homelike atmosphere is effective to the elderly suffering from dementia. Therefore, it is proper that the supply of group-homes for dementia will be needed. 2) Group-homes for the elderly are being supplied under the standards of welfare facilities in the present. Separate supply standards, however, are needed because they are not suitable for small scale group-homes. 3) To supply Group-homes for the elderly on a one-unit basis would cause various problems such as economical unreality, personnel distribution and so on. It is necessary to supply more than two units for more efficient management. 4) The management of group-homes for the elderly is financially unstable because the operating funds heavily depend on the users or people who are connected with the facilities through private networks. Therefore, additional support is needed to settle the financial problem. It would be helpful to build the public networking that provides information about the group-home for the elderly for the public. 5) In case of the increase in the supply of the group-home in a residential area, it could be helpful to promote the group-home to the public. 6) The operators state that the main problems of group homes for the elderly lie in financial difficulties and the shortage of professionals and volunteers. The financial, personnel, and material support for personnel and the supervision of management are required for the transparency and effectiveness of the facility management. In addition, the closer network and cooperation system with the community is required. 7) The present living environments for group-homes for the elderly leave much room for improvement, considering the physical condition of the elderly. The more careful selections in the color, shape, material, and equipment of the facilities should be made for the convenience of the elderly users.

The Effects of Stimulus-background Contrast, Background Texture Density and Screen Disparity of Stimulus on Crosstalk Perception (자극과 배경의 대비, 배경 텍스쳐 밀도, 자극의 화면 시차가 크로스톡 지각에 미치는 영향)

  • Park, JongJin;Li, Hyung-Chul O.;Kim, ShinWoo
    • Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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    • v.18 no.2
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    • pp.225-236
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    • 2013
  • 3D contents could cause unique 3D visual fatigue. Screen disparity, image blurring, and crosstalk are known to be the three major factors responsible for the fatigue. Among these, screen disparity and image blurring are content factors, that is, one can directly manipulate contents themselves to handle visual fatigue caused by these two factors. On the other hand, because crosstalk is closely tied to physical characteristics of 3D display, it is difficult or even impossible to reduce crosstalk-driven visual fatigue unless one replaces 3D display itself (for example, from active to passive display). However, the effects of crosstalk on 3D visual fatigue depends on visual stimulus features (that is, contents), and thus it is possible to manipulate stimulus features in order to handle visual fatigue caused by crosstalk. Hence, this research tested the effects of visual stimulus features on crosstalk (which then causes 3D visual fatigue). Using relative depth discrimination task, we tested the effects of stimulus-background contrast, background texture density, and screen disparity on the degree of perceived crosstalk. The results showed that crosstalk decreases with presence of background texture and with less degree of screen disparity.

A comprehensive review of microplastics: Sources, pathways, and implications (미세 플라스틱의 종합적 고찰: 근원, 경로 및 시사점)

  • Yano, K.A.V.;Reyes, N.J.D.G.;Geronimo, F.K.F.;Jeon, M.S.;Kim, Y.;Kim, L.H.
    • Journal of Wetlands Research
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    • v.22 no.2
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    • pp.153-160
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    • 2020
  • Most studies defined microplastic (MP) as plastic particles less than 5 mm. The ubiquity of MP is raising awareness due to its potential risk to humans and the environment. MP can cause harmful effects to humans and living organisms. This paper review aimed to provide a better understanding of the sources, pathways, and impacts of MP in the environment. MP can be classified as primary and secondary in nature. Moreover, microplastic can also be classified as based on its physical and chemical characteristics. Stormwater and wastewater are important pathways of introducing MP in large water bodies. As compared to stormwater, the concentrations of MP in wastewater were relatively lower since wastewater treatment processes can contribute to the removal of MP. In terms of polymer distribution, wastewater contains a wider array of polymer varieties than stormwater runoff. The most common types of polymer found in wastewater and stormwater runoff were polypropylene (PP), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polystyrene (PS), polyethylene (PE) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The continuous discharge and the increasing number of MP in the environment can pose greater hazards and harmful effects on humans and other living organisms. Despite the growing number of publications in relation to MP, further studies are needed to define concrete regulations and management strategies for mitigating the detrimental effects of MP in the environment.

Comparison and Analysis of Name-Based Routing Protocols for Information-Centric Network (정보 중심 네트워크를 위한 이름 기반 라우팅 프로토콜의 비교 및 분석)

  • Kim, Jung-Jae;Ryu, Min-Woo;Cha, Si-Ho;Cho, Kuk-Huyn
    • Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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    • v.14 no.4
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    • pp.1969-1975
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    • 2013
  • ICN (Information-Centric Network) is a next generation Internet communication technology for converting existing Internet communication paradigm to information-based communication paradigm to efficiently use a large amount of information that exists on the Internet. Therefore, unlike existing Internet communication technologies focused on the process of communication using the host address, ICN focuses on the purpose of communication for each information by defining the information of everything that exists on the Internet. For this purpose, ICN uses NbR (Name-based Routing) methods that assign a name to each piece of information, all routers participating in ICN have the physical storage so that they are able to share information with each other. NbR methods on ICN are divided into one-phase routing and two-phase routing depending on how to reach at the storage of each router. However, currently proposed NbR methods cause many problems because they do not reflect the unique characteristics of ICN. Therefore, this paper looked at various NbR issues from caching, access time, distribution, mobility, scaliability, and dissemination of information for an efficient NbR method, and analyzed existing methods proposed for ICN. This paper also proposed a research direction to study the efficient NbR for ICN based on the analysis information.

A Policy of Page Management Using Double Cache for NAND Flash Memory File System (NAND 플래시 메모리 파일 시스템을 위한 더블 캐시를 활용한 페이지 관리 정책)

  • Park, Myung-Kyu;Kim, Sung-Jo
    • Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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    • v.36 no.5
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    • pp.412-421
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    • 2009
  • Due to the physical characteristics of NAND flash memory, overwrite operations are not permitted at the same location, and therefore erase operations are required prior to rewriting. These extra operations cause performance degradation of NAND flash memory file system. Since it also has an upper limit to the number of erase operations for a specific location, frequent erases should reduce the lifetime of NAND flash memory. These problems can be resolved by delaying write operations in order to improve I/O performance: however, it will lower the cache hit ratio. This paper proposes a policy of page management using double cache for NAND flash memory file system. Double cache consists of Real cache and Ghost cache to analyze page reference patterns. This policy attempts to delay write operations in Ghost cache to maintain the hit ratio in Real cache. It can also improve write performance by reducing the search time for dirty pages, since Ghost cache consists of Dirty and Clean list. We find that the hit ratio and I/O performance of our policy are improved by 20.57% and 20.59% in average, respectively, when comparing them with the existing policies. The number of write operations is also reduced by 30.75% in average, compared with of the existing policies.

A Method of Detecting the Aggressive Driving of Elderly Driver (노인 운전자의 공격적인 운전 상태 검출 기법)

  • Koh, Dong-Woo;Kang, Hang-Bong
    • KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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    • v.6 no.11
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    • pp.537-542
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    • 2017
  • Aggressive driving is a major cause of car accidents. Previous studies have mainly analyzed young driver's aggressive driving tendency, yet they were only done through pure clustering or classification technique of machine learning. However, since elderly people have different driving habits due to their fragile physical conditions, it is necessary to develop a new method such as enhancing the characteristics of driving data to properly analyze aggressive driving of elderly drivers. In this study, acceleration data collected from a smartphone of a driving vehicle is analyzed by a newly proposed ECA(Enhanced Clustering method for Acceleration data) technique, coupled with a conventional clustering technique (K-means Clustering, Expectation-maximization algorithm). ECA selects high-intensity data among the data of the cluster group detected through K-means and EM in all of the subjects' data and models the characteristic data through the scaled value. Using this method, the aggressive driving data of all youth and elderly experiment participants were collected, unlike the pure clustering method. We further found that the K-means clustering has higher detection efficiency than EM method. Also, the results of K-means clustering demonstrate that a young driver has a driving strength 1.29 times higher than that of an elderly driver. In conclusion, the proposed method of our research is able to detect aggressive driving maneuvers from data of the elderly having low operating intensity. The proposed method is able to construct a customized safe driving system for the elderly driver. In the future, it will be possible to detect abnormal driving conditions and to use the collected data for early warning to drivers.

Photochromic lens for patients with photophobia and estimation of clinical trial efficacy (광시증 환자를 위해 개발된 광변색렌즈와 임상 효과 평가)

  • Ha, Jin-Wook;Yu, Dong-Sik
    • Journal of Korean Ophthalmic Optics Society
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    • v.10 no.1
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    • pp.27-34
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    • 2005
  • Photochromic lens is the color changing lens from colorlessness to colorness when exposed to UV light. It can protect eyes from UV-B light which cause the cataract and can be used as sunglass in the summer since it can cut off 70~80% of sun light. Surface coating technique was used to develop lens which has 70% light transmittance and of which fading time of color change is within 5 min. Various color lenses were developed so that these had various color such as blue, green, brown, violet, yellow and red etc. Lens has an excellent physical properties, 100% adhesion and 4~5H hardness. The chemical and the scratch resistance of this lens were the greatest and the thermal stability was also higher. The clinical trial of developed lens were applied to 65 patients who had photophobia by various reasons at ophthalmology of Soonchunhyang University Hospital. Results showed that glaring was significantly reduced and the visual health were remarkably improved. Especially, anti-glaring effect in the night was great for the patient who had the LASIK operation. Protection of UV-B and blue light also can prevent the patient from cataract and the yellowish crystalline lens at old ages. Through the result of clinical. trial, we know that photochromic lens could be a new technique for both cure and precaution of photophobia.

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Numerical Modeling of Tide Asymmetry in the Southeast Coastal Zone of Yellow Sea (서해남부해역의 조석 비대칭에 대한 수치모의)

  • Jung, Tae-Sung
    • Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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    • v.23 no.6
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    • pp.429-441
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    • 2011
  • In the southeast coastal zone of Yellow Sea, the tide characteristics showing ebb-dominant tide and tidal flow were confirmed by analysis of observed tide and tidal currents. Physical factors generating asymmetric tide were reviewed. Influence of bottom shear stress, tidal flat, and nonlinear terms in shallow water equations was investigated by two-dimensional tide modeling. The model results gave good agreements with observed tides, but the amplitude of simulated $M_4$ tide was less than that of observed tide. The tidal flats existing in the study area widely have great effect on the generation of nonlinear tide. The M4 tide is mainly generated near the tidal flats. The deletion of tidal flats prevents the production of the M4 tide. We can conclude that the wide tidal flats is a primary cause of tide asymmetry in the study area.

Characteristics of Cyanobacterial Occurrence and Concentration Distribution of Cyanotoxins in Hoeya Reservoir (회야호의 남조류 발생 특성과 남조류 독소의 농도분포특성)

  • Choi, Young Ah;Han, Nan Sook;Lim, Eun Gyoung;Kim, Young Min;Choun, Chang Jae;Lee, Byoung Ho
    • Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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    • v.35 no.12
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    • pp.943-952
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    • 2013
  • Algae blooms have soared recently in the lakes across the nation due to eutrophication. Blue-green algae cause unpleasant scene, produce taste and odor problem, and hinder processes in drinking water treatment. Algae toxicity monitoring has been strengthened, because the damages of wild lives and livestocks by algal toxins have been reported. Investigation on the characteristics of cyanobacterial occurrence and concentration distribution of Cyanotoxins in Hoeya reservoir have been conducted. Physical and chemical influences of water environment on cyanobacterial occurrences have also been studied. Movements of four species of Microcystin and five species of Anatoxin-a among Cyanotoxins were observed by LC-MS/MS analysis. Microcystis spp. among the cyanobacteria have mainly dominated in the Hoeya reservoir during the investigating period. The density of cyanobacteria were positively correlated with temperature and pH of water. Highest concentrations of Microcystin-LR and Microcystin-RR were $0.424{\mu}g/L$ and $0.117{\mu}g/L$ at the sampling points. Total concentration of Cyanotoxins in water coming into the water treatment plant was $0.182{\mu}g/L$, and they were not detected in treated water.