• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.201-230
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• 2007

Recently, the growth of e-Learning systems and its related information technology has presented a unique challenge for both schools and industry. It would make an extremely phenomenal paradigm shift in the educational method and practice. Methods of assessing the quality of e-teaming services and contents are critical issue in both practice and research. Moreover, many researchers are interested in what qualify factors more affect to the Performance of e-Learning service. Nevertheless, service quality is a construct that is difficult to define and measure. e-Learning services are composed of many factors, and they are more complicated than the traditional education services because they we performed on the distance basis and the many platforms of IT infrastructure. The purposes of our research are to classify the e-Learning service dimension and identify their factors, to develop the measurement of the factors, and finally to test empirically their relationship between the service factors and e-Learning service performance. For the development of the service factors we considered SERVQUAL model and SERVPERF model which were developed in the service marketing area. The SERVQUAL model was more fitted to the e-Learning services than the latter. From that we derived several factors that fit to our research domain, ie, tangibles, access, reliability, credibility, security, responsiveness, assurance, empathy. We combined three factors of them(reliability, credibility, security) into a factor, system stability for the semantic simplicity, and divided responsiveness factor into system operator responsiveness and teacher responsiveness as the entity based dimension classification. In the e-Learning services research, Most researcher are mentioned the quality factors of contents, so we added to two contents quality factors, ie, contents production method and richness of contents itself. We examined the relationship between the service quality factors and e-Learning performance(student satisfaction and service reuse intention). As result three quality factors(contents production method, teacher responsiveness, empathy) significantly affected student satisfaction. To the other performance variable, ie, service reuse intention, the teacher related quality factors(such as teacher responsiveness, assurance, empathy) affected only. In conclusion, even in the on-line distance teaming, the teacher's role md earnestness is as important as ever.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.34 no.6 s.119
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• pp.1-9
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• 2007

Land use types within a watershed closely are related with the water quality characteristics of receiving water bodies. Despite of a numerous studies suggesting a strong relationship between water quality and land use, there have been increasing concerns about the geographical variation and a lack of spatial integration in that relationship, which are essential to implementing these findings into land use planning and management. In the meantime, edges mediate the material flux between adjacent systems. This mediating effect of edges is strongly related to the complexity of their shapes. Land use activities within a watershed have a direct impact on the water quality of adjacent aquatic systems, and hydrological processes carry residuals from watershed into adjacent aquatic ecosystems through the edges. Therefore, the geometry of reservoirs theoretically affects the relationship between land uses in the watershed and the quality of receiving bodies of water. In this light, this study integrates the geo-spatial dimensions of land uses in the watershed using GIS and landscape indices in order to explore the relationship between land uses and water quality. Water quality characteristics, land uses and geometry of 133 randomly sampled reservoirs were correlated, based on buffer zones and types of reservoirs. The findings showed that land uses, particularly urban land uses, significantly affect water quality characteristics including BOD, COD, TN and TP, and geometry of reservoirs reduces the concentration of pollutant and nutrients in reservoirs. One of results indicates that the relationship between land use and water quality and effects of spatial dimension may vary with types of reservoirs and pollutants. These results suggest that lakeshore areas are important, particularly for TN reduction and call for a caution to land use activities nearby shoreline areas for sustaining better water quality.

• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.94-112
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• 2019

Objective: The objective of this study was to compare the quality of life (QOL) of patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) between patients receiving hemodialysis (HD) and patients receiving continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) and to compare personal characteristic factors relating to the quality of life in patients with ESRD. Method: This study used a descriptive research design. The sample was recruited using purposive sampling that included 76 ESRD patients receiving either HD or CAPD at a dialysis clinic in Phraphutthabat Hospital, Saraburi Province, Thailand. Data was collected using the Quality of Life Questionnaire for Chronic Kidney Disease ($KDQOL-SF^{TM}$) version 1.3. Independent t-test and ANOVA procedures were used to analyze study data. Results: The results revealed that the HD patients had a moderate level of QOL. The highest scoring dimension of QOL was the encouragement of staff at the dialysis unit and patient satisfaction with the treatment (${\bar{X}}=100$, SD=.00), followed by social support (${\bar{X}}=89.29$, SD =16.88) and cognitive function (${\bar{X}}=88.57$, SD=11.82). On the other hand, the lowest scoring QOL dimension was physical problems (${\bar{X}}=50$, SD=51.89), and pain (${\bar{X}}=50$, SD=39.03), followed by work status (${\bar{X}}=53.57$, SD=45.84) and burden from kidney disease (${\bar{X}}=58.48$, SD=31.07). The CAPD patients also had a moderate QOL. The highest scoring QOL dimension was the encouragement of staff in the renal unit and patient satisfaction with the treatment (${\bar{X}}=100$, SD=.00), followed by social support (${\bar{X}}=95.61$, SD=14.20) and cognitive function (${\bar{X}}=88.83$, SD=13.52). The worst scoring QOL dimensions were work status (${\bar{X}}=44.44$, SD=42.72), general health (${\bar{X}}=53.61$, SD=39.05), and pain (${\bar{X}}=62.70$, SD=41.14). The difference overall and in each dimension of QOL in ESRD patients who were treated with HD and CAPD was not statistically significantly different. The QOL was not significantly different among patients with different personal characteristics except for income and duration of treatment; in those cases, the difference in QOL was statistically significant (p=.05). Conclusion: The overall QOL and life expectancy of patients with ESRD treated with HD and CAPD are not affected by gender, age, marital status, education, occupation, or type of health coverage. QOL was not significantly different, except for patients with different incomes and duration of renal replacement therapy, whose QOL was significantly different. The QOL of patients receiving dialysis should be studied to develop a QOL program for patients with chronic kidney disease who receive dialysis.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.151-165
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to develop systematic methods for evaluating the suitability of a seat and build an empirical model for predicting the suitability of a seat. The following research schemes were pursued to achieve the objectives - Development of suitable chair dimensions - Analysis scheme for decomposing the human-product interface system - Development of model for evaluating suitability. As a result, we uncovered six dominant suitability dimensions for the design of a comfortable seat that is related to the physical dimension of a body, Here, six suitability dimensions were identified as the dimensions that represent the human sensitivity and psychological feeling on comfortable seats. Also, 43 human-interface elements (HIE's) such as seat height, seat width, seat depth, tilting angle, seat surface etc. were investigated. HIE was generally defined as the physical characteristic of manufacturing goods, and it had close related to the body dimension of a user and environment that it was used.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2006.04a
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• pp.836-840
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• 2006

Design optimization of layered plates bonding process is conducted to achieve high product quality by considering uncertainties in a manufacturing process. During the cooling process of the sequential sub-processes, different thermal expansion coefficients lead to residual stress and displacement. thus resulting in defects on the surface of the adherent. So robust process optimization is performed to minimize the residual stress mean and variation of the assembly while constraining the distortion as well as the instantaneous maximum stress to the allowable limits. In robust process optimization, the dimension reduction (DR) method is employed to quantify both reliability and quality of the layered plate bonding. Using this method. the average and standard deviation is estimated. Response surface is constructed using the statistical data obtained by the DRM for robust objectives and constraints. from which the optimum solution is obtained.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.117-125
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• 2001

Polyacetal resin is usually used to make molds, but it is difficult to achieve dimension accuracy during molding. Therefore it is usually necessary to cut the polyacetal resin after a molding process. Polyacetal resin is easily machining by standard machine tool. Acetal is also a thermal stable material which can be totted without coolant Another concern about the use of polyacetal resin is that it absorbs water easily, which also results in problems with dimension accuracy Therefore, in this study, the cutting resistance of water-absorbed polyacetal resin and its surface roughness after cutting in order to achieve the highest degree of accuracy in the cutting of polyacetal resin were investigated. Also, The Robust Design method uses a mathematical tool called orthogonal arrays to study a large number of decision variables with a small number of experiments. It also uses a new measure of quality, called signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio, to predict the quality from the customer's perspective. Thus, we have taken Taguchi's parameter design approach, specifically orthogonal array, and determined the optimal levels of the selected variables through analysis of the experimental results using S/N ratio.

• Korean Business Review
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.193-221
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• 2006

Customer Contact, defined as "the extent of interpersonal interaction between customer and service provider", is recognized as an important contributor to the perception of service quality, which in turn brings positive impacts on customer satisfaction, customer retention and loyalty especially in service contexts. The major purposes of this study are to explore the dimensionality of customer contact construct, to access the influences of customer contact dimensions on service quality dimensions, and to evaluate the relative importance of customer contact dimensions on service quality. Data from 388 customers of hotels at youngdong area in Kangwon-do were analyzed with major findings and their implications for service companies including hotels are as follows. First of all, the results of factor analysis show that customer contact is constructed with two dimensions, namely communication time and contact proximity. Secondly, overall customer contact is found to have positive effects on customers' perception of overall service quality and each dimension of customer contact has significant effects on overall service quality. Third, contact proximity dimension has relatively more important contributors than communication time has on overall service quality and four dimensions of service quality.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.234-240
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• 2006

We study the dynamic burst assembly based on traffic prediction and offset and delay differentiation in optical burst switching network. To improve existing burst assembly mechanism and build an adaptive flexible optical burst switching network, an approach called quality of service (QoS) based adaptive dynamic assembly (QADA) is proposed in this paper. QADA method takes into account current arrival traffic in prediction time adequately and performs adaptive dynamic assembly in limited burst assembly time (BAT) range. By the simulation of burst length error, the QADA method is proved better than the existing method and can achieve the small enough predictive error for real scenarios. Then the different dynamic ranges of BAT for four traffic classes are introduced to make delay differentiation. According to the limitation of BAT range, the burst assembly is classified into one-dimension limit and two-dimension limit. We draw a comparison between one-dimension and two-dimension limit with different prediction time under QoS based offset time and find that the one-dimensional approach offers better network performance, while the two-dimensional approach provides strict inter-class differentiation. Furthermore, the final simulation results in our network condition show that QADA can execute adaptive flexible burst assembly with dynamic BAT and achieve a latency reduction, delay fairness, and offset time QoS guarantee for different traffic classes.

• The Journal of Natural Sciences
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• v.4
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• pp.191-220
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• 1991

A new texture segmentation-based image coding technique which performs segmentation based on roughness of textural regions and properties of the human visual system (HVS) is presented. This method solves the problems of a segmentation-based image coding technique with constant segments by proposing a methodology for segmenting an image texturally homogeneous regions with respect to the degree of roughness as perceived by the HVS. The fractal dimension is used to measure the roughness of the textural regions. The segmentation is accomplished by thresholding the fractal dimension so that textural regions are classified into three texture classes; perceived constant intensity, smooth texture, and rough texture. An image coding system with high compression and good image quality is achieved by developing an efficient coding technique for each segment boundary and each texture class. For the boundaries, a binary image representing all the boundaries is created. For regions belonging to perceived constant intensity, only the mean intensity values need to be transmitted. The smooth and rough texture regions are modeled first using polynomial functions, so only the coefficients characterizing the polynomial functions need to be transmitted. The bounda-ries, the means and the polynomial functions are then each encoded using an errorless coding scheme. Good quality reconstructed images are obtained with about 0.08 to 0.3 bit per pixel for three different types of imagery ; a head and shoulder image with little texture variation, a complex image with many edges, and a natural outdoor image with highly textured areas.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.1051-1058
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• 2011

The military communication equipment is required the high reliability for operating adequate functions under severe conditions. This reliability is the essential element for the quality of the product, for the uncontrolled factors, such as the clearance, damage of the material, the reduction of stiffness, which are the designer is unable to handle. In this paper, the uncertainty for the dimension was supposed to the probability model for the military communication equipment, and the average of the objective function was minimized for reducing design uncertainty. The reliability-based design optimization which was implemented the limit state function was formulated into the mathematical model, so the reliable optimized structure was implemented than the base-line design.