• Title/Summary/Keyword: Task Knowledge

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Cross-Sectional Item Response Analysis of Geocognition Assessment for the Development of Plate Tectonics Learning Progressions: Rasch Model (판구조론의 학습발달과정 개발을 위한 지구적 인지과정 평가의 횡단적 문항 반응 분석: Rasch 모델)

  • Maeng, Seungho;Lee, Kiyoung
    • Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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    • v.35 no.1
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    • pp.37-52
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    • 2015
  • In this study, assessment items to examine geocognition on plate tectonics were developed and applied to middle and high school students and college students. Conceptual constructs on plate tectonics are Earth interior structure, specific geomorphology, and geologic phenomena at each plate boundary. Construct for geocognition included temporal reasoning, spatial reasoning, retrospective reasoning, and system thinking. Pictorial data in each item were all obtained from GeoMapApp. Students' responses to the items were analyzed and measured cross-sectionally by Rasch model, which distinguishes persons' ability levels based on their scores for all items and compared them with item difficulty. By Rasch model analysis, Wright maps for middle and high school students and college students were obtained and compared with each other. Differential Item Functioning analysis was also implemented to compare students' item responses across school grades. The results showed: 1) Geocognition on plate tectonics was an assessable construct for middle and high school students in current science curriculum, 2) The most distinguished geocognition factor was spatial reasoning based on cross sectional analysis across school grades, 3) Geocognition on plate tectonics could be developed towards more sophisticated level through scaffolding of relevant instruction and earth science content knowledge, and 4) Geocognition was not a general reasoning separated from a task content but a content-specific reasoning related to the content of an assessment item. We proposed several suggestions for learning progressions for plate tectonics and national curriculum development based on the results of the study.

Womans experience of Risk Situation on the High-Risk Pregnancy (여성의 고위험 임신에 대한 경험)

  • Kim, Kyung-Won;Lee, Kyung-Hye
    • Women's Health Nursing
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    • v.4 no.1
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    • pp.161-178
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    • 1998
  • In spite of the great progress of the theory and skill of the Nursing Care & Medical area in relation to pregnancy, nurses in clinics face up to many challenges in maternity nursing care areas. The reason is that the mobility and mortality of mothers was sharply decreased and the unknown high-risk diseases of pregnancy woman in the past is made public. That's why it is difficult to meet the pregnancy woman in natural process from pregnancy to delivery in recently. Admission rooms are filled with high-risk pregnancy women. As a matter of fact, we have done nursing care into the surface symptoms and diseases of high-risk pregnancy women so far. We have been indifferent to a long period hospitalization, separation from family, and conflict of repeated examination. Therefore, it is widely spread to understand the emotional conflict experienced by high-risk pregnancy women and to need for nursing intervention to bring up about emotional support and the ability of perception in psychological crisis. Although the pregnancy woman judged in high-risk should carry out normal task of pregnancy, she have to be confronted with secondary risk situation. The health of self & fetus threatened by the risk situation could be decreased through care plan, but psychological stress increases. Therefore, the pregnancy brings into non-control state. It is important to ask that what the hospitalized pregnancy women in high-risk think of themselves status. Because misunderstanding or serious anxiety of themselves status put into mother and fetus in danger. And adaptation mode makes all the difference. I would like to consider how nurses could deal with this high-risk circumstances in the position of pregnancy woman on the basis of the above fact. This study uses phenomenological method to suggest the basis material for nurses to do nursing intervention in view of pregnancy woman. Because this method understands the nature of true life of pregnancy woman throughly. The phenomenological method is the sources to describe or explain affluently the process generated in confirmation areas and environment and is the application for readers to understand and recognize clinic reality and then apply this method to reasoning study place or other places. Specifically, the phenomenon study method, one of the phenomenological method, is applied. The use of that method is to describe and generalize the experience in environment exactly. The study of this study is as follows : Among 187 descriptive stamens from 8 study participants are classified into 42 theme cluster at the stage of the first analysis. Those theme is categorized into 8 sub-subjects such as anxiety of uncertainty, foreknowledge about risk circumstance, will power about overcome, unsettled feeling about hospital, relief, optimistic thought, family support, and indifferences. At the last stage of analysis, those things are categorized into 3 subjects. When high-risk pregnancy woman foretell the situation, they feel unsettlement about uncertainty and untrust feeling about hospital. But they are ease with family support and hospital support. On the other hand, they express indifferent 3-way structure response to the situation having will of overcome and exceeding optimistic thought. In those statements, the experience by pregnancy woman shows 3 respect subjects. 1. They are anxious of this situation and are in desperation and don't recognize their role to be carried out 2. They think of this situation as normal process of pregnancy and are not concerned that this can give themselves and fetus fatal damage. 3. The pregnancy women will never confront this situation. This study shows the pregnancy woman has anxiety and optimistic relief about the situation, and ignores and optimistic relief about the situation, and ignores many things. Therefore, nurses in clinic should give pregnancy woman knowledge and information about the high-risk and help them to deal with the situation spontaneously. High-risk pregnancy woman should have the care plan in respect of the right perception. And the nurse know that their support help out pregnancy woman overcome the crisis in this respect of the special nursing intervention.

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An Analysis on the Survey of the Cultural Heritage Committee (문화재위원회 설문조사 분석)

  • Kim, Hong-real
    • Korean Journal of Heritage: History & Science
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    • v.37
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    • pp.405-444
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    • 2004
  • The Cultural Heritage Committee is an advisory committee established under the Cultural Heritage Administration with the aim of carrying out examination and deliberation on preservation, management and use of cultural heritage. The Cultural Heritage Administration is the highest administrative organization in terms of Korean cultural heritage. It was founded to produce and execute policies on cultural heritage, an important task that requires a high level of specialized knowledge, skills and academic expertise. It involves in-depth investigation and consultation of experts in the field of cultural heritage. An organization consisting of distinguished experts, the Cultural Heritage Committee plays an important role in policymaking on cultural heritage of Korea. The Korean government established the Bureau of Cultural Heritage in October 1961, and enacted provisions (as a presidential decree) on the organization on March 27, 1962, according to the Cultural Heritage Act established on January 10 of the same year. The Cultural Heritage Committee was opened as a deliberation committee according to the law, on which currently 90 members serve in 8 subcommittees. The term of office of a committees member is two years. The deliberation of the committee, which covers the entire range of cultural heritage, including their designation and cancellation, is normally concluded by the deliberation and decision of each subcommittee. This study aims to analyze of the survey of the Cultural Heritage Committee as the highest organ for the deliberation of policies on the matters of cultural heritage. The subject of the analysis in this study is a questionnaire survey that was conducted between Oct. 20 and Nov. 29, 2003, of 116 former and current members of the committee.

KB-BERT: Training and Application of Korean Pre-trained Language Model in Financial Domain (KB-BERT: 금융 특화 한국어 사전학습 언어모델과 그 응용)

  • Kim, Donggyu;Lee, Dongwook;Park, Jangwon;Oh, Sungwoo;Kwon, Sungjun;Lee, Inyong;Choi, Dongwon
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.28 no.2
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    • pp.191-206
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    • 2022
  • Recently, it is a de-facto approach to utilize a pre-trained language model(PLM) to achieve the state-of-the-art performance for various natural language tasks(called downstream tasks) such as sentiment analysis and question answering. However, similar to any other machine learning method, PLM tends to depend on the data distribution seen during the training phase and shows worse performance on the unseen (Out-of-Distribution) domain. Due to the aforementioned reason, there have been many efforts to develop domain-specified PLM for various fields such as medical and legal industries. In this paper, we discuss the training of a finance domain-specified PLM for the Korean language and its applications. Our finance domain-specified PLM, KB-BERT, is trained on a carefully curated financial corpus that includes domain-specific documents such as financial reports. We provide extensive performance evaluation results on three natural language tasks, topic classification, sentiment analysis, and question answering. Compared to the state-of-the-art Korean PLM models such as KoELECTRA and KLUE-RoBERTa, KB-BERT shows comparable performance on general datasets based on common corpora like Wikipedia and news articles. Moreover, KB-BERT outperforms compared models on finance domain datasets that require finance-specific knowledge to solve given problems.

Records Management and Archives in Korea : Its Development and Prospects (한국 기록관리행정의 변천과 전망)

  • Nam, Hyo-Chai
    • Journal of Korean Society of Archives and Records Management
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    • v.1 no.1
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    • pp.19-35
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    • 2001
  • After almost one century of discontinuity in the archival tradition of Chosun dynasty, Korea entered the new age of records and archival management by legislating and executing the basic laws (The Records and Archives Management of Public Agencies Ad of 1999). Annals of Chosun dynasty recorded major historical facts of the five hundred years of national affairs. The Annals are major accomplishment in human history and rare in the world. It was possible because the Annals were composed of collected, selected and complied records of primary sources written and compiled by generations of historians, As important public records are needed to be preserved in original forms in modern archives, we had to develop and establish a modern archival system to appraise and select important national records for archival preservation. However, the colonialization of Korea deprived us of the opportunity to do the task, and our fine archival tradition was not succeeded. A centralized archival system began to develop since the establishment of GARS under the Ministry of Government Administration in 1969. GARS built a modem repository in Pusan in 1984 succeeding to the tradition of History Archives of Chosun dynasty. In 1998, GARS moved its headquarter to Taejon Government Complex and acquired state-of-the-art audio visual archives preservation facilities. From 1996, GARS introduced an automated archival management system to remedy the manual registration and management system complementing the preservation microfilming. Digitization of the holdings was the key project to provided the digital images of archives to users. To do this, the GARS purchased new computer/server systems and developed application softwares. Parallel to this direction, GARS drastically renovated its manpower composition toward a high level of professionalization by recruiting more archivists with historical and library science backgrounds. Conservators and computer system operators were also recruited. The new archival laws has been in effect from January 1, 2000. The new laws made following new changes in the field of records and archival administration in Korea. First, the laws regulate the records and archives of all public agencies including the Legislature, the Judiciary, the Administration, the constitutional institutions, Army, Navy, Air Force, and National Intelligence Service. A nation-wide unified records and archives management system became available. Second, public archives and records centers are to be established according to the level of the agency; a central archives at national level, special archives for the National Assembly and the Judiciary, local government archives for metropolitan cities and provinces, records center or special records center for administrative agencies. A records manager will be responsible for the records management of each administrative divisions. Third, the records in the public agencies are registered in the computer system as they are produced. Therefore, the records are traceable and will be searched or retrieved easily through internet or computer network. Fourth, qualified records managers and archivists who are professionally trained in the field of records management and archival science will be assigned mandatorily to guarantee the professional management of records and archives. Fifth, the illegal treatment of public records and archives constitutes a punishable crime. In the future, the public records find archival management will develop along with Korean government's 'Electronic Government Project.' Following changes are in prospect. First, public agencies will digitize paper records, audio-visual records, and publications as well as electronic documents, thus promoting administrative efficiency and productivity. Second, the National Assembly already established its Special Archives. The judiciary and the National Intelligence Service will follow it. More archives will be established at city and provincial levels. Third, the more our society develop into a knowledge-based information society, the more the records management function will become one of the important national government functions. As more universities, academic associations, and civil societies participate in promoting archival awareness and in establishing archival science, and more people realize the importance of the records and archives management up to the level of national public campaign, the records and archival management in Korea will develop significantly distinguishable from present practice.

A Study on the Influence of IT Education Service Quality on Educational Satisfaction, Work Application Intention, and Recommendation Intention: Focusing on the Moderating Effects of Learner Position and Participation Motivation (IT교육 서비스품질이 교육만족도, 현업적용의도 및 추천의도에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구: 학습자 직위 및 참여동기의 조절효과를 중심으로)

  • Kang, Ryeo-Eun;Yang, Sung-Byung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.23 no.4
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    • pp.169-196
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    • 2017
  • The fourth industrial revolution represents a revolutionary change in the business environment and its ecosystem, which is a fusion of Information Technology (IT) and other industries. In line with these recent changes, the Ministry of Employment and Labor of South Korea announced 'the Fourth Industrial Revolution Leader Training Program,' which includes five key support areas such as (1) smart manufacturing, (2) Internet of Things (IoT), (3) big data including Artificial Intelligence (AI), (4) information security, and (5) bio innovation. Based on this program, we can get a glimpse of the South Korean government's efforts and willingness to emit leading human resource with advanced IT knowledge in various fusion technology-related and newly emerging industries. On the other hand, in order to nurture excellent IT manpower in preparation for the fourth industrial revolution, the role of educational institutions capable of providing high quality IT education services is most of importance. However, these days, most IT educational institutions have had difficulties in providing customized IT education services that meet the needs of consumers (i.e., learners), without breaking away from the traditional framework of providing supplier-oriented education services. From previous studies, it has been found that the provision of customized education services centered on learners leads to high satisfaction of learners, and that higher satisfaction increases not only task performance and the possibility of business application but also learners' recommendation intention. However, since research has not yet been conducted in a comprehensive way that consider both antecedent and consequent factors of the learner's satisfaction, more empirical research on this is highly desirable. With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, a rising interest in various convergence technologies utilizing information technology (IT) has brought with the growing realization of the important role played by IT-related education services. However, research on the role of IT education service quality in the context of IT education is relatively scarce in spite of the fact that research on general education service quality and satisfaction has been actively conducted in various contexts. In this study, therefore, the five dimensions of IT education service quality (i.e., tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy) are derived from the context of IT education, based on the SERVPERF model and related previous studies. In addition, the effects of these detailed IT education service quality factors on learners' educational satisfaction and their work application/recommendation intentions are examined. Furthermore, the moderating roles of learner position (i.e., practitioner group vs. manager group) and participation motivation (i.e., voluntary participation vs. involuntary participation) in relationships between IT education service quality factors and learners' educational satisfaction, work application intention, and recommendation intention are also investigated. In an analysis using the structural equation model (SEM) technique based on a questionnaire given to 203 participants of IT education programs in an 'M' IT educational institution in Seoul, South Korea, tangibles, reliability, and assurance were found to have a significant effect on educational satisfaction. This educational satisfaction was found to have a significant effect on both work application intention and recommendation intention. Moreover, it was discovered that learner position and participation motivation have a partial moderating impact on the relationship between IT education service quality factors and educational satisfaction. This study holds academic implications in that it is one of the first studies to apply the SERVPERF model (rather than the SERVQUAL model, which has been widely adopted by prior studies) is to demonstrate the influence of IT education service quality on learners' educational satisfaction, work application intention, and recommendation intention in an IT education environment. The results of this study are expected to provide practical guidance for IT education service providers who wish to enhance learners' educational satisfaction and service management efficiency.

Summative Evaluation of 1993, 1994 Discussion Contest of Scientific Investigation (제 1, 2회 학생 과학 공동탐구 토론대회의 종합적 평가)

  • Kim, Eun-Sook;Yoon, Hye-Gyoung
    • Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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    • v.16 no.4
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    • pp.376-388
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    • 1996
  • The first and the second "Discussion Contest of Scientific Investigation" was evaluated in this study. This contest was a part of 'Korean Youth Science Festival' held in 1993 and 1994. The evaluation was based on the data collected from the middle school students of final teams, their teachers, a large number of middle school students and college students who were audience of the final competition. Questionnaires, interviews, reports of final teams, and video tape of final competition were used to collect data. The study focussed on three research questions. The first was about the preparation and the research process of students of final teams. The second was about the format and the proceeding of the Contest. The third was whether participating the Contest was useful experience for the students and the teachers of the final teams. The first area, the preparation and the research process of students, were investigated in three aspects. One was the level of cooperation, participation, support and the role of teachers. The second was the information search and experiment, and the third was the report writing. The students of the final teams from both years, had positive opinion about the cooperation, students' active involvement, and support from family and school. Students considered their teachers to be a guide or a counsellor, showing their level of active participation. On the other hand, the interview of 1993 participants showed that there were times that teachers took strong leading role. Therefore one can conclude that students took active roles most of the time while the room for improvement still exists. To search the information they need during the period of the preparation, student visited various places such as libraries, bookstores, universities, and research institutes. Their search was not limited to reading the books, although the books were primary source of information. Students also learned how to organize the information they found and considered leaning of organizing skill useful and fun. Variety of experiments was an important part of preparation and students had positive opinion about it. Understanding related theory was considered most difficult and important, while designing and building proper equipments was considered difficult but not important. This reflects the students' school experience where the equipments were all set in advance and students were asked to confirm the theories presented in the previous class hours. About the reports recording the research process, students recognize the importance and the necessity of the report but had difficulty in writing it. Their reports showed tendency to list everything they did without clear connection to the problem to be solved. Most of the reports did not record the references and some of them confused report writing with story telling. Therefore most of them need training in writing the reports. It is also desirable to describe the process of student learning when theory or mathematics that are beyond the level of middle school curriculum were used because it is part of their investigation. The second area of evaluation was about the format and the proceeding of the Contest, the problems given to students, and the process of student discussion. The format of the Contests, which consisted of four parts, presentation, refutation, debate and review, received good evaluation from students because it made students think more and gave more difficult time but was meaningful and helped to remember longer time according to students. On the other hand, students said the time given to each part of the contest was too short. The problems given to students were short and open ended to stimulate students' imagination and to offer various possible routes to the solution. This type of problem was very unfamiliar and gave a lot of difficulty to students. Student had positive opinion about the research process they experienced but did not recognize the fact that such a process was possible because of the oneness of the task. The level of the problems was rated as too difficult by teachers and college students but as appropriate by the middle school students in audience and participating students. This suggests that it is possible for student to convert the problems to be challengeable and intellectually satisfactory appropriate for their level of understanding even when the problems were difficult for middle school students. During the process of student discussion, a few problems were observed. Some problems were related to the technics of the discussion, such as inappropriate behavior for the role he/she was taking, mismatching answers to the questions. Some problems were related to thinking. For example, students thinking was off balanced toward deductive reasoning, and reasoning based on experimental data was weak. The last area of evaluation was the effect of the Contest. It was measured through the change of the attitude toward science and science classes, and willingness to attend the next Contest. According to the result of the questionnaire, no meaningful change in attitude was observed. However, through the interview several students were observed to have significant positive change in attitude while no student with negative change was observed. Most of the students participated in Contest said they would participate again or recommend their friend to participate. Most of the teachers agreed that the Contest should continue and they would recommend their colleagues or students to participate. As described above, the "Discussion Contest of Scientific Investigation", which was developed and tried as a new science contest, had positive response from participating students and teachers, and the audience. Two among the list of results especially demonstrated that the goal of the Contest, "active and cooperative science learning experience", was reached. One is the fact that students recognized the experience of cooperation, discussion, information search, variety of experiments to be fun and valuable. The other is the fact that the students recognized the format of the contest consisting of presentation, refutation, discussion and review, required more thinking and was challenging, but was more meaningful. Despite a few problems such as, unfamiliarity with the technics of discussion, weakness in inductive and/or experiment based reasoning, and difficulty in report writing, The Contest demonstrated the possibility of new science learning environment and science contest by offering the chance to challenge open tasks by utilizing student science knowledge and ability to inquire and to discuss rationally and critically with other students.

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Transfer Learning using Multiple ConvNet Layers Activation Features with Principal Component Analysis for Image Classification (전이학습 기반 다중 컨볼류션 신경망 레이어의 활성화 특징과 주성분 분석을 이용한 이미지 분류 방법)

  • Byambajav, Batkhuu;Alikhanov, Jumabek;Fang, Yang;Ko, Seunghyun;Jo, Geun Sik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.1
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    • pp.205-225
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    • 2018
  • Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) is one class of the powerful Deep Neural Network that can analyze and learn hierarchies of visual features. Originally, first neural network (Neocognitron) was introduced in the 80s. At that time, the neural network was not broadly used in both industry and academic field by cause of large-scale dataset shortage and low computational power. However, after a few decades later in 2012, Krizhevsky made a breakthrough on ILSVRC-12 visual recognition competition using Convolutional Neural Network. That breakthrough revived people interest in the neural network. The success of Convolutional Neural Network is achieved with two main factors. First of them is the emergence of advanced hardware (GPUs) for sufficient parallel computation. Second is the availability of large-scale datasets such as ImageNet (ILSVRC) dataset for training. Unfortunately, many new domains are bottlenecked by these factors. For most domains, it is difficult and requires lots of effort to gather large-scale dataset to train a ConvNet. Moreover, even if we have a large-scale dataset, training ConvNet from scratch is required expensive resource and time-consuming. These two obstacles can be solved by using transfer learning. Transfer learning is a method for transferring the knowledge from a source domain to new domain. There are two major Transfer learning cases. First one is ConvNet as fixed feature extractor, and the second one is Fine-tune the ConvNet on a new dataset. In the first case, using pre-trained ConvNet (such as on ImageNet) to compute feed-forward activations of the image into the ConvNet and extract activation features from specific layers. In the second case, replacing and retraining the ConvNet classifier on the new dataset, then fine-tune the weights of the pre-trained network with the backpropagation. In this paper, we focus on using multiple ConvNet layers as a fixed feature extractor only. However, applying features with high dimensional complexity that is directly extracted from multiple ConvNet layers is still a challenging problem. We observe that features extracted from multiple ConvNet layers address the different characteristics of the image which means better representation could be obtained by finding the optimal combination of multiple ConvNet layers. Based on that observation, we propose to employ multiple ConvNet layer representations for transfer learning instead of a single ConvNet layer representation. Overall, our primary pipeline has three steps. Firstly, images from target task are given as input to ConvNet, then that image will be feed-forwarded into pre-trained AlexNet, and the activation features from three fully connected convolutional layers are extracted. Secondly, activation features of three ConvNet layers are concatenated to obtain multiple ConvNet layers representation because it will gain more information about an image. When three fully connected layer features concatenated, the occurring image representation would have 9192 (4096+4096+1000) dimension features. However, features extracted from multiple ConvNet layers are redundant and noisy since they are extracted from the same ConvNet. Thus, a third step, we will use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to select salient features before the training phase. When salient features are obtained, the classifier can classify image more accurately, and the performance of transfer learning can be improved. To evaluate proposed method, experiments are conducted in three standard datasets (Caltech-256, VOC07, and SUN397) to compare multiple ConvNet layer representations against single ConvNet layer representation by using PCA for feature selection and dimension reduction. Our experiments demonstrated the importance of feature selection for multiple ConvNet layer representation. Moreover, our proposed approach achieved 75.6% accuracy compared to 73.9% accuracy achieved by FC7 layer on the Caltech-256 dataset, 73.1% accuracy compared to 69.2% accuracy achieved by FC8 layer on the VOC07 dataset, 52.2% accuracy compared to 48.7% accuracy achieved by FC7 layer on the SUN397 dataset. We also showed that our proposed approach achieved superior performance, 2.8%, 2.1% and 3.1% accuracy improvement on Caltech-256, VOC07, and SUN397 dataset respectively compare to existing work.

Problems in the Korean National Family Planning Program (한국가족계획사업(韓國家族計劃事業)의 문제점(問題點))

  • Hong, Jong-Kwan
    • Clinical and Experimental Reproductive Medicine
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    • v.2 no.2
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    • pp.27-36
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    • 1975
  • The success of the family planning program in Korea is reflected in the decrease in the growth rate from 3.0% in 1962 to 2.0% in 1971, and in the decrease in the fertility rate from 43/1,000 in 1960 to 29/1,000 in 1970. However, it would be erroneous to attribute these reductions entirely to the family planning program. Other socio-economic factors, such as the increasing age at marriage and the increasing use of induced abortions, definitely had an impact on the lowered growth and fertility rate. Despite the relative success of the program to data in meeting its goals, there is no room for complacency. Meeting the goal of a further reduction in the population growth rate to 1.3% by 1981 is a much more difficult task than any one faced in the past. Not only must fertility be lowered further, but the size of the target population itself will expand tremendously in the late seventies; due to the post-war baby boom of the 1950's reaching reproductive ages. Furthermore, it is doubtful that the age at marriage will continue to rise as in the past or that the incidence of induced abortion will continue to increase. Consequently, future reductions in fertility will be more dependent on the performance of the national family planning program, with less assistance from these non-program factors. This paper will describe various approaches to help to the solution of these current problems. 1. PRACTICE RATE IN FAMILY PLANNING In 1973, the attitude (approval) and knowledge rates were quite high; 94% and 98% respectively. But a large gap exists between that and the actual practice rate, which is only 3695. Two factors must be considered in attempting to close the KAP-gap. The first is to change social norms, which still favor a larger family, increasing the practice rate cannot be done very quickly. The second point to consider is that the family planning program has not yet reached all the eligible women. A 1973 study determineded that a large portion, 3096 in fact, of all eligible women do not want more children, but are not practicing family planning. Thus, future efforts to help close the KAP-gap must focus attention and services on this important large group of potential acceptors. 2. CONTINUATION RATES Dissatisfaction with the loop and pill has resulted in high discontinuation rates. For example, a 1973 survey revealed that within the first six months initial loop acceptance. nearly 50% were dropouts, and that within the first four months of inital pill acceptance. nearly 50% were dropouts. These discontinuation rates have risen over the past few years. The high rate of discontinuance obviously decreases the contraceptive effectiveness. and has resulted in many unwanted births which is directly related to the increase of induced abortions. In the future, the family planning program must emphasize the improved quality of initial and follow-up services. rather than more quantity, in order to insure higher continuation rates and thus more effective contraceptive protection. 3. INDUCED ABORTION As noted earlier. the use of induced abortions has been increase yearly. For example, in 1960, the average number of abortions was 0.6 abortions per women in the 15-44 age range. By 1970. that had increased to 2 abortions per women. In 1966. 13% of all women between 15-44 had experienced at least one abortion. By 1971, that figure jumped to 28%. In 1973 alone, the total number of abortions was 400,000. Besides the ever incre.sing number of induced abortions, another change has that those who use abortions have shifted since 1965 to include- not. only the middle class, but also rural and low-income women. In the future. in response to the demand for abortion services among rural and low-income w~men, the government must provide and support abortion services for these women as a part of the national family planning program. 4. TARGET SYSTIi:M Since 1962, the nationwide target system has been used to set a target for each method, and the target number of acceptors is then apportioned out to various sub-areas according to the number of eligible couples in each area. Because these targets are set without consideration for demographic factors, particular tastes, prejudices, and previous patterns of acceptance in the area, a high discontinuation rate for all methods and a high wastage rate for the oral pill and condom results. In the future. to alleviate these problems of the methodbased target system. an alternative. such as the weighted-credit system, should be adopted on a nation wide basis. In this system. each contraceptive method is. assigned a specific number of points based upon the couple-years of protection (CYP) provided by the method. and no specific targets for each method are given. 5. INCREASE OF STERILIZA.TION TARGET Two special projects. the hospital-based family planning program and the armed forces program, has greatly contributed to the increasing acceptance in female and male sterilization respectively. From January-September 1974, 28,773 sterilizations were performed. During the same time in 1975, 46,894 were performed; a 63% increase. If this trend continues, by the end of 1975. approximately 70,000 sterilizations will have been performed. Sterilization is a much better method than both the loop and pill, in terms of more effective contraceptive protection and the almost zero dropout rate. In the future, the. family planning program should continue to stress the special programs which make more sterilizations possible. In particular, it should seek to add the laparoscope techniques to facilitate female sterilization acceptance rates. 6. INCREASE NUMBER OF PRIVATE ACCEPTORS Among the current family planning users, approximately 1/3 are in the private sector and thus do not- require government subsidy. The number of private acceptors increases with increasing urbanization and economic growth. To speed this process, the government initiated the special hospital based family planning program which is utilized mostly by the private sector. However, in the future, to further hasten the increase of private acceptors, the government should encourage doctors in private practice to provide family planning services, and provide the contraceptive supplies. This way, those do utilize the private medical system will also be able to receive family planning services and pay for it. Another means of increasing the number of private acceptors, IS to greatly expand the commercial outlets for pills and condoms beyond the existing service points of drugstores, hospitals, and health centers. 7. IE&C PROGRAM The current preferred family size is nearly twice as high as needed to achieve a stable poplation. Also, a strong boy preference hinders a small family size as nearly all couples fuel they must have at least one or more sons. The IE&C program must, in the future, strive to emphasize the values of the small family and equality of the sexes. A second problem for the IE&C program to work. with in the: future is the large group of people who approves family planning, want no more children, but do not practice. The IE&C program must work to motivate these people to accept family planning And finally, for those who already practice, an IE&C program in the future must stress continuation of use. The IE&C campaign, to insure highest effectiveness, should be based on a detailed factor analysis of contraceptive discontinuance. In conclusion, Korea faces a serious unfavorable sociodemographic situation- in the future unless the population growth rate can be curtailed. And in the future, the decrease in fertility will depend solely on the family planning program, as the effect of other socio-economic factors has already been maximumally felt. A second serious factor to consider is the increasing number of eligible women due to the 1950's baby boom. Thus, to meet these challenges, the program target must be increased and the program must improve the effectiveness of its current activities and develop new programs.

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