• Health Policy and Management
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.98-120
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to elicit preference for drug listing decision criteria and to estimate the ICER threshold in South Korea using the discrete choice experiment (DCE) method. To collect the data, a DCE survey was administered to a subject sample either educated in the principle concepts of pharmacoeconomics or were decision makers within that field. Subjects chose between alternative drug profiles differing in four attributes: ICER, uncertainty, budget impact and severity of disease. The orthogonal and balanced designs were determined through computer algorithm to take the optimal set of drug profiles. The survey employed 15 hypothetical choice sets. A random effect probit model was used to analyze the relative importance of attributes and the probabilities of a recommendation response. Parameter estimates from the models indicated that three attributes (ICER, Impact, Severity of disease) influenced respondents' choice significantly(p${\pm}$0.001). In addition, each parameter displayed an expected sign. The Lower the ICER, the higher the probability of choosing that alternative. Respondents also preferred low levels of uncertainty and smaller impact on health service budget. They were also more likely to choose drugs for serious diseases rather than mild or moderate ones. Uncertainty however is not statistically significant. The ICER threshold, at which the probability of a recommendation was 0.5, was 29,000,000 KW/QALY in expert group and 46,500,000 KW/QALY in industry group. We also found that those in our sample were willing to accept high ICER to get medication for severe diseases. This study demonstrates that the cost-effectiveness, budget impact and severity of disease are the main reimbursement decision criteria in South Korea, and that DCE can be a useful tool in analyzing the decision making process where a variety of factors are considered and prioritized.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.158-165
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• 2018

Generally, container ships contain cargo holds with cell guides that serve to increase the container loading and unloading efficiency, minimize the space loss, and fix containers during the voyage. This paper describes a new quality management system for the cell guides of container ships (the so-called Trim Cell Guide system). The main functions of this system are the trimming of the point cloud obtained using a 3D scanner and an inspection simulation for cell guide quality. In other words, the raw point cloud of cell guides after construction is measured using a 3D scanner. Here, the raw point cloud contains a lot of noise and unnecessary information. Using the GUI interface supported by the system, the raw point cloud can be trimmed. The trimmed point cloud is used in a simulation for cell guide quality inspection. The RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) algorithm is used for the transverse section representation of a cell guide at a certain height and applied for the calculation of the intervals between the cell guides and container. When the container hits the cell guides during the inspection simulation, the container is rotated horizontally and checked again for a possible collision. It focuses on a system that can be simulated with the same inspection process as in a shipyard. For a practicality review, we compared the precision data gained from an inspection simulation with the measured data. As a result, it was confirmed that these values were within approximately ${\pm}2mm$.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.15-23
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• 2011

An interleaver rearranges a channel-encoded data in the symbol unit to spread burst errors occurred in channels into random errors. Thus, the interleaving process makes it difficult for a receiver, who does not have information of the interleaver parameters used in the transmitter, to de-interleave an unknown interleaved signal. Recently, various researches on the reconstruction of an unknown interleaved signal have been studied in many places of literature by estimating the interleaver parameters. They, however, have been mainly focused on the estimation of the block interleaver parameters required to reconstruct the de-interleaver. In this paper, as an extension of the previous researches, we estimate the convolutional interleaver parameters, e.g., the number of shift registers, a shift register depth, and a codeword length, required to de-interleave the unknown data stream, and propose the de-interleaving procedure by reconstructing the de-interleaver.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.27 no.9
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• pp.865-871
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• 2016

This work presents a radar signal interferer to be used for evaluating the mutual interference among automotive radars. The developed interfering signal generator is composed of a reference signal generator and a 77 GHz transmitter. Reference signal generator is made up of commercial chips and board, it can generate various modulated signal such as triangular wave, sawtooth wave and random frequency hopping. The transmitter generates 77 GHz band signal by multiplying modulated reference signal frequency 28 times. Transmitter was fabricated using 65 nm CMOS process, it can operate horn antenna by built in on-chip waveguide feeder. The transmitter exhibited 7.31~8.06 dBm output power over a frequency lock range of 75.6~77 GHz.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.92-99
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• 1993

The purpose of this study was to investigate and analyze the conception of elementary school students on evaporation and condensation, and then to verify the types of the conception. Forty-eight children from six elementary schools were sampled by stratified random sampling in Seoul and other provinces. They responded to the questionaire and the interview. This study was carried out according to the process of the basic study, the preliminary study, and the main study. The materials collected were classified and analyzed according to the types of children's ideas. The findings of this study were as follows. 1. The vocabulary used to describe the evaporation phenomena varied according to the situations, and the scientific term "evaporation" was more frequently used by the older groups. 2. Most children answered that the last location of water were air/sky/cloud. Air/cloud which represents the scientific conception of the location of water were mentioned by children of all ages. The higher the grade of the children were, the more scientific conception the children mentioned, however. 3. Most children referred to the heat as the factor of evaporation. Wind, on the other hand was mentioned by less than 10% of lower graders, and by about 30% of higher graders. 4. The result of asking children whether they thought it was possible to get the evaporated water back showed that about 70% of lower graders denied the possibility of the water being reversible. About 60% of higher graders. however, recognized that the water will be returned as rain or condensation. This increase may be associated with formal teaching of water cycle. 5. In the ideas of evaporation and condensation, some of the children have supernatural ideas and animism, which are most younger chilren's characteristics.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.43 no.8 s.210
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• pp.55-68
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of negative life events on mental health and to explore possible main and moderating effects of spousal support on mental health with a focus on gender differences. The data for this study were taken from a nationwide random sample of 1,504 married men and women ranging in age from 30 to 59 through structured questionnaires. The data were analyzed using the SPSS WIN program which was used to calculate frequency, mean, 1-test, multiple regressions. The main results were as follows: First, by examining mental health of Korean men and women, women were more likely than men to experience higher levels of depression. Second, there was no gender difference in the sum of experience of negative life events, therefore the date of this study did not support the differential exposure hypothesis. In addition, men perceived more support from their spouses than women. Third, results show that especially the event concerning with job/financial problems has negative impacts on mental health of both men and women, and vulnerability to undesirable life events was not found. Fourth, spousal support is associated with better mental health regardless of gender, and it reduces the harmful effects of life events concerning with job/financial area for both men and women. Also, spousal support reduces the magnitude of the harmful effects of life events concerning with health of men. This study focused on the impact of negative life events and the couple process. It was possible to explore the strength of social support provided from spouse of most importance to the individuals. These results affirm the importance of supportive relationships between couples as a buffer, mitigating harmful effects of negative life events on mental health.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.299-303
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• 2012

Inbreeding is the mating of relatives that produce progeny having more homozygous alleles than non-inbred animals. Inbreeding increases numbers of recessive alleles, which is often associated with decreased performance known as inbreeding depression. The magnitude of inbreeding depression depends on the level of inbreeding in the animal. Level of inbreeding is expressed by the inbreeding coefficient. One breeding goal in livestock is uniform productivity while maintaining acceptable inbreeding levels, especially keeping inbreeding less than 20%. However, in closed herds without the introduction of new genetic sources high levels of inbreeding over time are unavoidable. One method that increases selection response and minimizes inbreeding is selection of individuals by weighting estimated breeding values with average relationships among individuals. Optimum genetic contribution theory (OGC) uses relationships among individuals as weighting factors. The algorithm is as follows: i) Identify the individual having the best EBV; ii) Calculate average relationships ($\bar{r_j}$) between selected and candidates; iii) Select the individual having the best EBV adjusted for average relationships using the weighting factor k, $EBV^*=EBV_j(1-k\bar{{r}_j})$ Repeat process until the number of individuals selected equals number required. The objective of this study was to compare simulated results based on OGC selection under different conditions over 30 generations. Individuals (n = 110) were generated for the base population with pseudo random numbers of N~ (0, 3), ten were assumed male, and the remainder female. Each male was mated to ten females, and every female was assumed to have 5 progeny resulting in 500 individuals in the following generation. Results showed the OGC algorithm effectively controlled inbreeding and maintained consistent increases in selection response. Difference in breeding values between selection with OGC algorithm and by EBV only was 8%, however, rate of inbreeding was controlled by 47% after 20 generation. These results indicate that the OGC algorithm can be used effectively in long-term selection programs.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.3269-3274
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• 2013

Background: The aim was to determine the lifestyle behaviors and the practices for early diagnosis of cancer of cancer patients. Materials and Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional design was used for this study. The sample consisted of 222 patients with a diagnosis of cancer (non-random sample method). Ethical permission was obtained of the Non-interventional Research Ethics Committee of our Institution. Values of p<0.05 were accepted as statistically significant. Results: It was observed that 54.4% of the patients had never performed breast self-examination, 60.8% had never had a mammography, and 71.2% had never had a Pap smear. Sixty-six point two percent of patients had never had screening for colon cancer within the past ten years. GIS cancers were higher in smokers and ex-smokers (p=0.005), in drinkers and in ex-drinkers (p=0.000). The breast cancer rate was higher in obese people (p=0.019). Conclusions: The results of this study provide information on the healthy lifestyle behavior of cancer patients before their diagnosis, and their use of early diagnosis practices. The important aspect of this study is to extend cancer patients' period of life after the diagnosis and treatment process, to make them conscious of risky lifestyle and nutritional behavior so that they can maintain a high quality of life, and to start initiatives in this direction that would ensure changes in behavior.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.11 no.8
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• pp.1072-1081
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• 2008

We can categorize the network address allocation mechanism into two types. One is to assign a unique network address using the address allocation server and the other is to make a random address by itself and process the DAD(Duplicate Address Detection) procedure. In this paper we suggest a new address allocation mechanism based on the signal strength for the PLC-based home network. As the combined mechanism of two types this mechanism allocates a unique address for the new node from one of the existing nodes with the simple equation and with the priority based on the signal strength from the new node to the existing nodes. We can use this mechanism for the self-healing function when the packet from the source node may not be delivered to the destination node directly. We developed the simulator for our mechanism using the C# programming and verified the network address assigned uniquely based on the signal strength.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.450-463
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• 2018

Sound based machine fault diagnosis is the process consisting of detecting automatically the damages that affect the machines by analyzing the sounds they produce during their operating time. The collected sounds being inevitably corrupted by random disturbance, the most important part of the diagnosis consists of discovering the hidden elements inside the data that can reveal the faulty patterns. This paper presents a novel feature extraction methodology that combines various digital signal processing and pattern recognition methods for the analysis of the sounds produced by the drills. Using the Fourier analysis, the magnitude spectrum of the sounds are extracted, converted into two-dimensional vectors and uniformly normalized in such a way that they can be represented as 8-bit grayscale images. Histogram equalization is then performed over the obtained images in order to adjust their very poor contrast. The obtained contrast enhanced images will be used as the features of our diagnosis system. Finally, principal component analysis is performed over the image features for reducing their dimensions and a nonlinear classifier is adopted to produce the final response. Unlike the conventional features, the results demonstrate that the proposed feature extraction method manages to capture the hidden health patterns of the sound.