• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.53-84
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• 2013

With rapid development of ICT (Information and Communications Technology), new services by the convergence of mobile network and application technology began to appear. Today, smart phone with new ICT convergence network capabilities is exceedingly popular and very useful as a new tool for the development of business opportunities. Previous studies based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) suggested critical factors, which should be considered for acquiring new customers and maintaining existing users in smart phone market. However, they had a limitation to focus on technology acceptance, not value based approach. Prior studies on customer's adoption of electronic utilities like smart phone product showed that the antecedents such as the perceived benefit and the perceived sacrifice could explain the causality between what is perceived and what is acquired over diverse contexts. So, this research conceptualizes perceived value as a trade-off between perceived benefit and perceived sacrifice, and we need to research the perceived value to grasp user's continuous intention to use of smart phone. The purpose of this study is to investigate the structured relationship between benefit (quality, usefulness, playfulness) and sacrifice (technicality, cost, security risk) of smart phone users, perceived value, and continuous intention to use. In addition, this study intends to analyze the differences between two subgroups of smart phone users by the degree of personal innovativeness. Personal innovativeness could help us to understand the moderating effect between how perceptions are formed and continuous intention to use smart phone. This study conducted survey through e-mail, direct mail, and interview with smart phone users. Empirical analysis based on 330 respondents was conducted in order to test the hypotheses. First, the result of hypotheses testing showed that perceived usefulness among three factors of perceived benefit has the highest positive impact on perceived value, and then followed by perceived playfulness and perceived quality. Second, the result of hypotheses testing showed that perceived cost among three factors of perceived sacrifice has significantly negative impact on perceived value, however, technicality and security risk have no significant impact on perceived value. Also, the result of hypotheses testing showed that perceived value has significant direct impact on continuous intention to use of smart phone. In this regard, marketing managers of smart phone company should pay more attention to improve task efficiency and performance of smart phone, including rate systems of smart phone. Additionally, to test the moderating effect of personal innovativeness, this research conducted multi-group analysis by the degree of personal innovativeness of smart phone users. In a group with high level of innovativeness, perceived usefulness has the highest positive influence on perceived value than other factors. Instead, the analysis for a group with low level of innovativeness showed that perceived playfulness was the highest positive factor to influence perceived value than others. This result of the group with high level of innovativeness explains that innovators and early adopters are able to cope with higher level of cost and risk, and they expect to develop more positive intentions toward higher performance through the use of an innovation. Also, hedonic behavior in the case of the group with low level of innovativeness aims to provide self-fulfilling value to the users, in contrast to utilitarian perspective, which aims to provide instrumental value to the users. However, with regard to perceived sacrifice, both groups in general showed negative impact on perceived value. Also, the group with high level of innovativeness had less overall negative impact on perceived value compared to the group with low level of innovativeness across all factors. In both group with high level of innovativeness and with low level of innovativeness, perceived cost has the highest negative influence on perceived value than other factors. Instead, the analysis for a group with high level of innovativeness showed that perceived technicality was the positive factor to influence perceived value than others. However, the analysis for a group with low level of innovativeness showed that perceived security risk was the second high negative factor to influence perceived value than others. Unlike previous studies, this study focuses on influencing factors on continuous intention to use of smart phone, rather than considering initial purchase and adoption of smart phone. First, perceived value, which was used to identify user's adoption behavior, has a mediating effect among perceived benefit, perceived sacrifice, and continuous intention to use smart phone. Second, perceived usefulness has the highest positive influence on perceived value, while perceived cost has significant negative influence on perceived value. Third, perceived value, like prior studies, has high level of positive influence on continuous intention to use smart phone. Fourth, in multi-group analysis by the degree of personal innovativeness of smart phone users, perceived usefulness, in a group with high level of innovativeness, has the highest positive influence on perceived value than other factors. Instead, perceived playfulness, in a group with low level of innovativeness, has the highest positive factor to influence perceived value than others. This result shows that early adopters intend to adopt smart phone as a tool to make their job useful, instead market followers intend to adopt smart phone as a tool to make their time enjoyable. In terms of marketing strategy for smart phone company, marketing managers should pay more attention to identify their customers' lifetime value by the phase of smart phone adoption, as well as to understand their behavior intention to accept the risk and uncertainty positively. The academic contribution of this study primarily is to employ the VAM (Value-based Adoption Model) as a conceptual foundation, compared to TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) used widely by previous studies. VAM is useful for understanding continuous intention to use smart phone in comparison with TAM as a new IT utility by individual adoption. Perceived value dominantly influences continuous intention to use smart phone. The results of this study justify our research model adoption on each antecedent of perceived value as a benefit and a sacrifice component. While TAM could be widely used in user acceptance of new technology, it has a limitation to explain the new IT adoption like smart phone, because of customer behavior intention to choose the value of the object. In terms of theoretical approach, this study provides theoretical contribution to the development, design, and marketing of smart phone. The practical contribution of this study is to suggest useful decision alternatives concerned to marketing strategy formulation for acquiring and retaining long-term customers related to smart phone business. Since potential customers are interested in both benefit and sacrifice when evaluating the value of smart phone, marketing managers in smart phone company has to put more effort into creating customer's value of low sacrifice and high benefit so that customers will continuously have higher adoption on smart phone. Especially, this study shows that innovators and early adopters with high level of innovativeness have higher adoption than market followers with low level of innovativeness, in terms of perceived usefulness and perceived cost. To formulate marketing strategy for smart phone diffusion, marketing managers have to pay more attention to identify not only their customers' benefit and sacrifice components but also their customers' lifetime value to adopt smart phone.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.63-82
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• 2016

Individuals gather information online to resolve problems in their daily lives and make various decisions about the purchase of products or services. With the revolutionary development of information technology, Web 2.0 has allowed more people to easily generate and use online reviews such that the volume of information is rapidly increasing, and the usefulness and significance of analyzing the unstructured data have also increased. This paper presents an analysis on the lexical features of expert product reviews to determine their influence on consumers' purchasing decisions. The focus was on how unstructured data can be organized and used in diverse contexts through text mining. In addition, diverse lexical features of expert reviews of contents provided by a third-party review site were extracted and defined. Expert reviews are defined as evaluations by people who have expert knowledge about specific products or services in newspapers or magazines; this type of review is also called a critic review. Consumers who purchased products before the widespread use of the Internet were able to access expert reviews through newspapers or magazines; thus, they were not able to access many of them. Recently, however, major media also now provide online services so that people can more easily and affordably access expert reviews compared to the past. The reason why diverse reviews from experts in several fields are important is that there is an information asymmetry where some information is not shared among consumers and sellers. The information asymmetry can be resolved with information provided by third parties with expertise to consumers. Then, consumers can read expert reviews and make purchasing decisions by considering the abundant information on products or services. Therefore, expert reviews play an important role in consumers' purchasing decisions and the performance of companies across diverse industries. If the influence of qualitative data such as reviews or assessment after the purchase of products can be separately identified from the quantitative data resources, such as the actual quality of products or price, it is possible to identify which aspects of product reviews hamper or promote product sales. Previous studies have focused on the characteristics of the experts themselves, such as the expertise and credibility of sources regarding expert reviews; however, these studies did not suggest the influence of the linguistic features of experts' product reviews on consumers' overall evaluation. However, this study focused on experts' recommendations and evaluations to reveal the lexical features of expert reviews and whether such features influence consumers' overall evaluations and purchasing decisions. Real expert product reviews were analyzed based on the suggested methodology, and five lexical features of expert reviews were ultimately determined. Specifically, the "review depth" (i.e., degree of detail of the expert's product analysis), and "lack of assurance" (i.e., degree of confidence that the expert has in the evaluation) have statistically significant effects on consumers' product evaluations. In contrast, the "positive polarity" (i.e., the degree of positivity of an expert's evaluations) has an insignificant effect, while the "negative polarity" (i.e., the degree of negativity of an expert's evaluations) has a significant negative effect on consumers' product evaluations. Finally, the "social orientation" (i.e., the degree of how many social expressions experts include in their reviews) does not have a significant effect on consumers' product evaluations. In summary, the lexical properties of the product reviews were defined according to each relevant factor. Then, the influence of each linguistic factor of expert reviews on the consumers' final evaluations was tested. In addition, a test was performed on whether each linguistic factor influencing consumers' product evaluations differs depending on the lexical features. The results of these analyses should provide guidelines on how individuals process massive volumes of unstructured data depending on lexical features in various contexts and how companies can use this mechanism from their perspective. This paper provides several theoretical and practical contributions, such as the proposal of a new methodology and its application to real data.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2016

Owing to the extensive use of Web media and the development of the IT industry, a large amount of data has been generated, shared, and stored. Nowadays, various types of unstructured data such as image, sound, video, and text are distributed through Web media. Therefore, many attempts have been made in recent years to discover new value through an analysis of these unstructured data. Among these types of unstructured data, text is recognized as the most representative method for users to express and share their opinions on the Web. In this sense, demand for obtaining new insights through text analysis is steadily increasing. Accordingly, text mining is increasingly being used for different purposes in various fields. In particular, issue tracking is being widely studied not only in the academic world but also in industries because it can be used to extract various issues from text such as news, (SocialNetworkServices) to analyze the trends of these issues. Conventionally, issue tracking is used to identify major issues sustained over a long period of time through topic modeling and to analyze the detailed distribution of documents involved in each issue. However, because conventional issue tracking assumes that the content composing each issue does not change throughout the entire tracking period, it cannot represent the dynamic mutation process of detailed issues that can be created, merged, divided, and deleted between these periods. Moreover, because only keywords that appear consistently throughout the entire period can be derived as issue keywords, concrete issue keywords such as "nuclear test" and "separated families" may be concealed by more general issue keywords such as "North Korea" in an analysis over a long period of time. This implies that many meaningful but short-lived issues cannot be discovered by conventional issue tracking. Note that detailed keywords are preferable to general keywords because the former can be clues for providing actionable strategies. To overcome these limitations, we performed an independent analysis on the documents of each detailed period. We generated an issue flow diagram based on the similarity of each issue between two consecutive periods. The issue transition pattern among categories was analyzed by using the category information of each document. In this study, we then applied the proposed methodology to a real case of 53,739 news articles. We derived an issue flow diagram from the articles. We then proposed the following useful application scenarios for the issue flow diagram presented in the experiment section. First, we can identify an issue that actively appears during a certain period and promptly disappears in the next period. Second, the preceding and following issues of a particular issue can be easily discovered from the issue flow diagram. This implies that our methodology can be used to discover the association between inter-period issues. Finally, an interesting pattern of one-way and two-way transitions was discovered by analyzing the transition patterns of issues through category analysis. Thus, we discovered that a pair of mutually similar categories induces two-way transitions. In contrast, one-way transitions can be recognized as an indicator that issues in a certain category tend to be influenced by other issues in another category. For practical application of the proposed methodology, high-quality word and stop word dictionaries need to be constructed. In addition, not only the number of documents but also additional meta-information such as the read counts, written time, and comments of documents should be analyzed. A rigorous performance evaluation or validation of the proposed methodology should be performed in future works.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.337-348
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• 2012

The Yellow Sea Ecoregion Conservation Project is a joint international project which is carried out under the purposes of conserving the habitats in the Yellow Sea Ecoregion and biodiversity from various threats that damage ecosystems, informing the importance and value of the Yellow Sea Ecoregion, and promoting the understanding and interests of Korea, China and Japan. Subsequent to the Yellow Sea Ecoregion Planning Programme which had been performed during the period from 2002 to 2006, the Yellow Sea Ecoregion Support Project has been performed over 7 years in total from 2007 to 2014. Panasonic is sponsoring the financing of the project, and the organizations in charge of the project by country are Korea Institute of Ocean Science & Technology for Korea and World Wide Fund for Nature branches for China and Japan. While the Yellow Sea Ecoregion Planning Programme was focused on the biological assessment and the selection of potential priority area by scientific review, the Yellow Sea Ecoregion Support Project is oriented toward practical activities targeting more diversified stakeholder. Especially, this project plans to support direct conservation activities in the region and participation and cooperation from local residents. The project plan is comprised of 3 phases. During the first period from 2008 to 2009, small grant projects were operated targeting 16 institutions of Korea and China, and for the second period from 2010 to 2012, one place each was selected as demonstration site for habitat conservation in Korea and China respectively and supported for three years to introduce the conservation method based on international standards such as the management of marine protected areas, ecosystem-based management and community-based management and simultaneously to develop habitat conservation activities suitable for national and regional characteristics. During the period from 2013 to 2014 which is the last phase, the project plans to distribute the performance of small grant projects and demonstration site activities through a series of forums among stakeholder. Through the activities described above, the recognition of general public on the conservation of the Yellow Sea Ecoregion was changed positively, and community-based management began to be reflected in the policies for the marine protected areas of central and local government.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.43 no.5
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• pp.65-73
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to compare the Mean Radiant Temperature(MRT) under two landscaping shade membranes, white and black, with those of natural outdoor spaces at summer midday. An additional perforated black shading net was applied and compared for the consideration of the practical application. The average MRT at the height of 2.4m, 10cm below the membranes of black, white, and perforated black were $49.1^{\circ}C$, $41.6^{\circ}C$ and $36.8^{\circ}C$ respectively, while that of open sky was $41.8^{\circ}C$. This indicates that a closer position to the darker membrane caused a higher MRT. At the height of 1.1m and 1.7m, the difference of MRT between the black and the white membranes was slight, while the value of white was unexpectedly higher than the black. The MRT of black perforated net showed the lowest value at every height. The black membrane absorbed more solar radiation than the white, which caused the greater release of long wave radiation and higher temperature near the membrane itself. In spite of the higher albedo of the white membrane, the higher solar radiation transmittance rate of which seemed to cause the slightly higher MRT than the black at the hight of 1.1m and 1.7m. In summary, the performance of the black membrane was slightly better than the white in terms of the air conditioning of the human related space around the height of 1.1m and 1.7m, when the shading membranes were at 2.5m height.

• Journal of Korea Spatial Information System Society
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• v.6 no.1 s.11
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• pp.73-85
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• 2004

Recently, as the growth of the wireless Internet, PDA and HPC, the focus of research and development related with GIS(Geographic Information System) has been changed to the Real-Time Mobile GIS to service LBS. To offer LBS efficiently, there must be the Real-Time GIS platform that can deal with dynamic status of moving objects and a location index which can deal with the characteristics of location data. Location data can use the same data type(e.g., point) of GIS, but the management of location data is very different. Therefore, in this paper, we studied the Real-Time Mobile GIS using the HBR-tree to manage mass of location data efficiently. The Real-Time Mobile GIS which is developed in this paper consists of the HBR-tree and the Real-Time GIS Platform HBR-tree. we proposed in this paper, is a combined index type of the R-tree and the spatial hash Although location data are updated frequently, update operations are done within the same hash table in the HBR-tree, so it costs less than other tree-based indexes Since the HBR-tree uses the same search mechanism of the R-tree, it is possible to search location data quickly. The Real-Time GIS platform consists of a Real-Time GIS engine that is extended from a main memory database system. a middleware which can transfer spatial, aspatial data to clients and receive location data from clients, and a mobile client which operates on the mobile devices. Especially, this paper described the performance evaluation conducted with practical tests if the HBR-tree and the Real-Time GIS engine respectively.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.86-97
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• 1978

The mobile medical service has been operated for many years by a number of medical schools and hospitals as a most convenient means of medical service delivery to the people residing in such area where the geographical and socioeconomic conditions are not good enough to enjoy modern medical care. Despite of official appraisal showing off simply with numbers of outpatients treated and medical persons participated, however, as well recognized, the capability (in respect of budget, equipment and time) of those mobile medical teams is so limitted that it often discourages the recipients as well as medical participants themselves. In the midst of rising need to secure medical service of good quality to all parts of the country, and of developing concept of primary health care system, authors evaluated the effectiveness of and problems associated with mobile medical servies program through the community diagnosis of a village (Opo-myun, Kwangju-gun) to obtain the information which may be halpful for future improvement. 1. Owing to the nationwide Sae-Maul movement powerfully practiced during last several years, living environment of farm villages generally and remarkably improved including houses, water supply and wastes disposal etc. Neverthless, due to limitations in budget time and lack of knowledge (probably the most important), these improvements tend to keep up appearances only and are far from the goal which may being practical benefit in promoting the health of the community. 2. As a result of intensive population policy led by the government since 1962, there has been considerable advances in understanding and the rate of practicing family planning through out the villages and yet, one should see many things, especially education, to be done. Fifty eight per cent of mothers have not received prenatal check and the care for most (72%) delivery was offered by laymen at home. 3. Approximately seven per cent of the population was reported to have chronic illness but since only a few (practically none) of the people has had physical check up by doctors, the actual prevalence of chronic diseases may reach many times of the reported. The same fact was observed also in prevalence of tuberculosis; the patients registered at local health center totaled 31 comprising only 0.51% while the numbers in two neighboring villages (designated as demonstration area of tuberculosis control and mass examination was done recently) were 3.5 and 4.0% respectively. Prevalence rate of all dieseses and injuries expereinced during one month (July, 1977) was 15.8%. Only one tenth of those patients received treatment by physicians and one fifth was not treated at all. The situation was worse as for the chronic patients; 84% of all cases either have never been treated or discontinued therapy, and the main reasons were known to be financial difficulty and ignorance or indifference. 4. Among the patients treated by our mobile clinic, one third was chronic cases and 45% of all patients, by the opinion of doctors attended, were those who may be treated by specially trained nurses or other paramedics (objects of primary care). Besides, 20% of the cases required professional managements of level beyond the mobile team's capability and in this sense one may conclude that the effectiveness (performance) of present mobile medical team is quite limitted. According to above findings, the authors would like to suggest following for mobile medical service and overall medicare program for the people living in remote country side. 1. Establishment of primary health care system secured with effective communication and evacuation (between villages and local medical center) measures. 2. Nationwide enforcement of medical insurance system. 3. Simple outpatient care which now constitutes the main part of the most mobile medical services should largely be yielded up to primary health care unit of the village and the mobile team itself should be assigned on new and more urgent missions such as mass screening health examination of the villagers, health education with modern and effective audiovisual aids, professional training and consultant services for the primary health care organization.

• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.111-130
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• 2002

This study performed a structural questionnaire survey and non-structural interview of the ladies apparel manufacturers in Daegu on the qualification for the employees, skills required for job performance, job training, automatic manufacturing systems, and the use of computer. The results are as follows. 1. Almost all of the apparel manufacturing systems were Pair System, except one Line System in one company. In terms of outsourcing, most of the manufacturers answered “yes,” and in 1998 the outsourcing process was sewing, but in the year 2002, outsourcing has been increased :12 manufacturers(57.1%) outsourcing most of the processes except patterning, 3(14.3%) outsourcing the finish of sewing. 2. The workforce of 1998 and that of 2002 shows a significant difference(P＜. 01) between office work and management. The number of office workers has decreased from 15 down to 5.3 people. On the other hand, that of the management has slightly increased from 5.3 to 9.2 people. The number of the manual workers has decreased from 32.2 to 28.7 people. And the number of tailoring and patterning workers has slightly decreased, but the number has increased in sewing from 3.7 to 7.0 people. 3. The wage of an employee shows a significant difference between a sewing assistant(P＜. 01) and a production manager(P＜. 05), and the wage of a sewing assistant, in particular, has slightly raised from ￦905,000 to ￦1,054,000. 4. The qualifications required of employees are “cooperative human relations”(30.8％), “diligence,” and “ability for job analysis”(26.9％), and “positive thinking” (15.4％) in 1998, and “ability for job analysis”(38.5％), “cooperative human relations”(34.6％), and “positive thinking” (15.4％) in 2002. The areas for job openings are significantly different(P＜. 01) depending on the year. Job openings in the design section has increased from 1(3.8％) to 16 manufacturers (61.5％), and decreased in tailoring section from 22(84.6％) to 2 manufacturers(7.7％). Job openings in the sewing section have increased form 2(7.7％) to 6 manufacturers (23.1％). In terms of sex of the employees, there is a significant difference(P＜. 001). 19 companies(73.1％) wanted “male” in 1998, but 8 companies(30.8％) answered that they want “female” and 17 companies(65.4％) answered that “it does not matter.” About the educational background, there was a significant difference between the years. The number of the companies that want junior college graduates with an associate degree has increased(15 companies(57.7％). There was a significant difference(P＜. 05) in major of the employee. The number of the companies that want fashion majors has increased from 5(19.2％) to 20(76.9％). 5. In terms of job skills required, there was no significant difference. In 1998, “production skills” (46.2％) and “ability for job analysis” (26.9％) were required, and in 2002, “ability for job analysis” (42.3％) and “emotional skills” (26.9％). 6. In regard to training for job skills, “fashion professional training” has slightly decreased from 65.4％ in 1998 to 46.2％ in 2002, however, “training for job analysis” has slightly increased from 30.8％ in 1998 to 46.2％ in 2002, which indicates the fact that “fashion professional training” and “ability for job analysis” have been emphasized. 7. The number of the manufacturers purchased apparel CAD has increased from 1(3.8％) to 3(11.5％), and the number of the manufacturers that have no plan for purchase has increased from 16(61.5％) in 1998 to 15(57.7％), still taking up a big proportion. 8. About the use of computers in manufacturing, there is a significant difference(P＜. 05). The number of the manufacturers using computer has increased from 5(19.2％) to 15(57.7％) and that of the manufacturers which do not use computers has decreased from 17(57.7％) to 8(30.8％). 9. In the interviews with the owners of the manufacturers, they pointed that schools should give more weight on practical training courses, the invitation of experts in the specific field, complex production systems, training courses for sewing, field trip courses, and furthering specialty education, personality and vocational education.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.7-24
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• 1977

This paper is the forth and fifth one of the study on balanced type oscillating mole drainer. In the light of the results from previous reports about the model tests, some design criteria were established and a prototype machine was set up for experimental purpose. Motion characteristics and functionof the each parts of the machine were checked and analyzed. After that, performance tests of the prototype machine were carried out in thefield. Obtained results are summarized as follows ; 1. Ten centimeter of the bullet diameter was determined so as to be able to attach it to the tractors with capacity of 30 PS to 40 PS. 2. To maintain the balance between the moments of the front shank and rear shank, the oscillating amplitude of the rear bullet was determined to be larger than that of the front bullet. At the same time , the oscillating direction of the rear bullet was designed with the inclines of ten to thirty degrees. 3. An octagonal dynamo transduced was developed for measuring the compressive force of the upper link is measuring the draft force of the machine. Acceptable linear relationship between forces and strain responses from O.D.T. was obtained. 4. Analysing the balancing mechanism of the acting part of the machine , it was found that the total draft force of the machine was equal to the difference between the sum of the draft force produced from the right and left side bending moments of the lower drawber and the compressive force on the upper link. 5. There are acceptable linear relationship between the strain and twisting moment by driving shaft, and between strain and shank moment. Above results enable us to carry out the field experiment with prototype machine. 6. When the test machine was used in the field, it was possible to reduce the oscillating acceleration by forty percent in average as compared it with the single bullet mole drainer. 7. When the test machine was used under the oscillating condition, the dratt torce was reduced by 27 percent to 59 percent as compared it with the test machine under non-oscillating condition, while the draft force was increased by 7 percent to 20 percent as compared it with the mole drainer having oscillating single bullet. The reasoning behind this fact was considered as the resistance force due to the rear shank and bullet. 8. As the amplitude and frequency of the bullet were increased, the torque was increased accordingly. This tendency could be varied with the various characteristics of the given soils. And the larger frequency and amplitute, the more increasing oscil\ulcornerlating power but decreasing draft brce were needed, and draft force was increased as the velocity was increased.9. When the amplitude of the rear bullet was designed to be larger than that of the front bullet, the minimum value of the moment was lowered and oscillating acceleration was reduced. And when the oscillating direction of the rear bullet was declined back\ulcornerwards, oscillating acceleration was increased along with the increasing angle of decli\ulcornernation. When the test machine was operated in high speed, the difference between maximum moments and minimum ones became narrow. This varying magnitude of moments appeared on the moment oscillogram seems to be correlated to the oscillating acceleration and draft force. 10. From the analysis of variance, it was found that those factors such as frequency, amplitude, and operating velocity significantly affected in the oscillating acceleration, the draft resistance, the torque, the moment, and the total power required. And interaction between frequency and amplitude affected in the oscillating acceleration. 11. Within the given situation of this study, the most preferable operating conditions of the test machine were 7 Hz in oscillating frequency, 0.54 m/sec in operating velocity, and 39.1 mm in oscillating amplitude of front and rear bullets. However, it is necessary to select the proper frequency and magnitude of oscillation depending on the soil properties of the field in which the mole drainer is practiced by use of a bal1nced type oscillating mole drainer. 12. It is recommended that a comparative study of the mole drainers would be performed in the near future using two separate balanced oscillating bullet with the one which is operated by oscillating the movable bullet in a single cylinder or other balanced type which may be single oscillating bullet with spring, damper or balancing weight, and that of thing. To expand the applicability of the balanced type oscillating mole drainer in practical use, it is suggested to develop a new mechanism which perform mole drain with vinyl pipe or filling material such as rice hull.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.91-102
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• 2009

Purpose: To compare the accuracy and efficacy of EDR2 film, a 2D ionization chamber array (MatriXX) and an amorphous silicon electronic portal imaging device (EPID) in the pre-treatment QA of IMRT. Materials and Methods: Fluence patterns, shaped as a wedge with 10 steps (segments) by a multi-leaf collimator (MLC), of reference and test IMRT fields were measured using EDR2 film, the MatriXX, and EPID. Test fields were designed to simulate leaf positioning errors. The absolute dose at a point in each step of the reference fields was measured in a water phantom with an ionization chamber and was compared to the dose obtained with the use of EDR2 film, the MatriXX and EPID. For qualitative analysis, all measured fluence patterns of both reference and test fields were compared with calculated dose maps from a radiation treatment planning system (Pinnacle, Philips, USA) using profiles and $\gamma$ evaluation with 3%/3 mm and 2%/2 mm criteria. By measurement of the time to perform QA, we compared the workload of EDR2 film, the MatriXX and EPID. Results: The percent absolute dose difference between the measured and ionization chamber dose was within 1% for the EPID, 2% for the MatriXX and 3% for EDR2 film. The percentage of pixels with $\gamma$%>1 for the 3%/3 mm and 2%/2 mm criteria was within 2% for use of both EDR2 film and the EPID. However, differences for the use of the MatriXX were seen with a maximum difference as great as 5.94% with the 2%/2 mm criteria. For the test fields, EDR2 film and EPID could detect leaf-positioning errors on the order of -3 mm and -2 mm, respectively. However it was difficult to differentiate leaf-positioning errors with the MatriXX due to its poor resolution. The approximate time to perform QA was 110 minutes for the use of EDR2 film, 80 minutes for the use of the MatriXX and approximately 55 minutes for the use of the EPID. Conclusion: This study has evaluated the accuracy and efficacy of EDR2 film, the MatriXX and EPID in the pre-treatment verification of IMRT. EDR2 film and the EPID showed better performance for accuracy, while the use of the MatriXX significantly reduced measurement and analysis times. We propose practical and useful methods to establish an effective QA system in a clinical environment.