• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.56 no.2
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• pp.125-138
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• 2023

Most of previous cesium (Cs) sorbents have limitations on the treatment in the large-scale water system having low Cs concentration and high ion strength. In this study, the new Cs sorbent that is eco-friendly and has a high Cs removal efficiency was developed by improving the coal mine drainage treated sludge (hereafter 'CMDS') with the addition of Na and S. The sludge produced through the treatment process for the mine drainage originating from the abandoned coal mine was used as the primary material for developing the new Cs sorbent because of its high Ca and Fe contents. The CMDS was improved by adding Na and S during the heat treatment process (hereafter 'Na-S-CMDS' for the developed sorbent in this study). Laboratory experiments and the sorption model studies were performed to evaluate the Cs sorption capacity and to understand the Cs sorption mechanisms of the Na-S-CMDS. The physicochemical and mineralogical properties of the Na-S-CMDS were also investigated through various analyses, such as XRF, XRD, SEM/EDS, XPS, etc. From results of batch sorption experiments, the Na-S-CMDS showed the fast sorption rate (in equilibrium within few hours) and the very high Cs removal efficiency (> 90.0%) even at the low Cs concentration in solution (< 0.5 mg/L). The experimental results were well fitted to the Langmuir isotherm model, suggesting the mostly monolayer coverage sorption of the Cs on the Na-S-CMDS. The Cs sorption kinetic model studies supported that the Cs sorption tendency of the Na-S-CMDS was similar to the pseudo-second-order model curve and more complicated chemical sorption process could occur rather than the simple physical adsorption. Results of XRF and XRD analyses for the Na-S-CMDS after the Cs sorption showed that the Na content clearly decreased in the Na-S-CMDS and the erdite (NaFeS₂·2(H₂O)) was disappeared, suggesting that the active ion exchange between Na⁺ and Cs⁺ occurred on the Na-S-CMDS during the Cs sorption process. From results of the XPS analysis, the strong interaction between Cs and S in Na-S-CMDS was investigated and the high Cs sorption capacity was resulted from the binding between Cs and S (or S-complex). Results from this study supported that the Na-S-CMDS has an outstanding potential to remove the Cs from radioactive contaminated water systems such as seawater and groundwater, which have high ion strength but low Cs concentration.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.61-118
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• 2008

The purpose of this research is to construct research framework for international franchising based on existing literature and to identify research components in the framework. Franchise can be defined as management styles that allow franchisee use various management assets of franchisor in order to make or sell product or service. It can be divided into product distribution franchise that is designed to sell products and business format franchise that is designed for running it as business whatever its form is. International franchising can be defined as a way of internationalization of franchisor to foreign country by providing its business format or package to franchisee of host country. International franchising is growing fast for last four decades but academic research on this is quite limited. Especially in Korea, research about international franchising is carried out on by case study format with single case or empirical study format with survey based on domestic franchise theory. Therefore, this paper tries to review existing literature on international franchising research, providing research framework, and then stimulating new research on this field. International franchising research components include motives and environmental factors for decision of expanding to international franchising, entrance modes and development plan for international franchising, contracts and management strategy of international franchising, and various performance measures from different perspectives. First, motives of international franchising are fee collection from franchisee. Also it provides easier way to expanding to foreign country. The other motives including increase total sales volume, occupying better strategic position, getting quality resources, and improving efficiency. Environmental factors that facilitating international franchising encompasses economic condition, trend, and legal or political factors in host and/or home countries. In addition, control power and risk management capability of franchisor plays critical role in successful franchising contract. Final decision to enter foreign country via franchising is determined by numerous factors like history, size, growth, competitiveness, management system, bonding capability, industry characteristics of franchisor. After deciding to enter into foreign country, franchisor needs to set entrance modes of international franchising. Within contractual mode, there are master franchising and area developing franchising, licensing, direct franchising, and joint venture. Theories about entrance mode selection contain concepts of efficiency, knowledge-based approach, competence-based approach, agent theory, and governance cost. The next step after entrance decision is operation strategy. Operation strategy starts with selecting a target city and a target country for franchising. In order to finding, screening targets, franchisor needs to collect information about candidates. Critical information includes brand patent, commercial laws, regulations, market conditions, country risk, and industry analysis. After selecting a target city in target country, franchisor needs to select franchisee, in other word, partner. The first important criteria for selecting partners are financial credibility and capability, possession of real estate. And cultural similarity and knowledge about franchisor and/or home country are also recognized as critical criteria. The most important element in operating strategy is legal document between franchisor and franchisee with home and host countries. Terms and conditions in legal documents give objective information about characteristics of franchising agreement for academic research. Legal documents have definitions of terminology, territory and exclusivity, agreement of term, initial fee, continuing fees, clearing currency, and rights about sub-franchising. Also, legal documents could have terms about softer elements like training program and operation manual. And harder elements like law competent court and terms of expiration. Next element in operating strategy is about product and service. Especially for business format franchising, product/service deliverable, benefit communicators, system identifiers (architectural features), and format facilitators are listed for product/service strategic elements. Another important decision on product/service is standardization vs. customization. The rationale behind standardization is cost reduction, efficiency, consistency, image congruence, brand awareness, and competitiveness on price. Also standardization enables large scale R&D and innovative change in management style. Another element in operating strategy is control management. The simple way to control franchise contract is relying on legal terms, contractual control system. There are other control systems, administrative control system and ethical control system. Contractual control system is a coercive source of power, but franchisor usually doesn't want to use legal power since it doesn't help to build up positive relationship. Instead, self-regulation is widely used. Administrative control system uses control mechanism from ordinary work relationship. Its main component is supporting activities to franchisee and communication method. For example, franchisor provides advertising, training, manual, and delivery, then franchisee follows franchisor's direction. Another component is building franchisor's brand power. The last research element is performance factor of international franchising. Performance elements can be divided into franchisor's performance and franchisee's performance. The conceptual performance measures of franchisor are simple but not easy to obtain objectively. They are profit, sale, cost, experience, and brand power. The performance measures of franchisee are mostly about benefits of host country. They contain small business development, promotion of employment, introduction of new business model, and level up technology status. There are indirect benefits, like increase of tax, refinement of corporate citizenship, regional economic clustering, and improvement of international balance. In addition to those, host country gets socio-cultural change other than economic effects. It includes demographic change, social trend, customer value change, social communication, and social globalization. Sometimes it is called as westernization or McDonaldization of society. In addition, the paper reviews on theories that have been frequently applied to international franchising research, such as agent theory, resource-based view, transaction cost theory, organizational learning theory, and international expansion theories. Resource based theory is used in strategic decision based on resources, like decision about entrance and cooperation depending on resources of franchisee and franchisor. Transaction cost theory can be applied in determination of mutual trust or satisfaction of franchising players. Agent theory tries to explain strategic decision for reducing problem caused by utilizing agent, for example research on control system in franchising agreements. Organizational Learning theory is relatively new in franchising research. It assumes organization tries to maximize performance and learning of organization. In addition, Internalization theory advocates strategic decision of direct investment for removing inefficiency of market transaction and is applied in research on terms of contract. And oligopolistic competition theory is used to explain various entry modes for international expansion. Competency theory support strategic decision of utilizing key competitive advantage. Furthermore, research methodologies including qualitative and quantitative methodologies are suggested for more rigorous international franchising research. Quantitative research needs more real data other than survey data which is usually respondent's judgment. In order to verify theory more rigorously, research based on real data is essential. However, real quantitative data is quite hard to get. The qualitative research other than single case study is also highly recommended. Since international franchising has limited number of applications, scientific research based on grounded theory and ethnography study can be used. Scientific case study is differentiated with single case study on its data collection method and analysis method. The key concept is triangulation in measurement, logical coding and comparison. Finally, it provides overall research direction for international franchising after summarizing research trend in Korea. International franchising research in Korea has two different types, one is for studying Korean franchisor going overseas and the other is for Korean franchisee of foreign franchisor. Among research on Korean franchisor, two common patterns are observed. First of all, they usually deal with success story of one franchisor. The other common pattern is that they focus on same industry and country. Therefore, international franchise research needs to extend their focus to broader subjects with scientific research methodology as well as development of new theory.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-22
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• 2017

Analysis of future business or investment opportunities, such as business feasibility analysis and company or technology valuation, necessitate objective estimation on the relevant market and expected sales. While there are various ways to classify the estimation methods of these new sales or market size, they can be broadly divided into top-down and bottom-up approaches by benchmark references. Both methods, however, require a lot of resources and time. Therefore, we propose a data-based intelligent demand forecasting system to support evaluation of new business. This study focuses on analogical forecasting, one of the traditional quantitative forecasting methods, to develop sales forecasting intelligence systems for new businesses. Instead of simply estimating sales for a few years, we hereby propose a method of estimating the sales of new businesses by using the initial sales and the sales growth rate of similar companies. To demonstrate the appropriateness of this method, it is examined whether the sales performance of recently established companies in the same industry category in Korea can be utilized as a reference variable for the analogical forecasting. In this study, we examined whether the phenomenon of "mean reversion" was observed in the sales of start-up companies in order to identify errors in estimating sales of new businesses based on industry sales growth rate and whether the differences in business environment resulting from the different timing of business launch affects growth rate. We also conducted analyses of variance (ANOVA) and latent growth model (LGM) to identify differences in sales growth rates by industry category. Based on the results, we proposed industry-specific range and linear forecasting models. This study analyzed the sales of only 150,000 start-up companies in Korea in the last 10 years, and identified that the average growth rate of start-ups in Korea is higher than the industry average in the first few years, but it shortly shows the phenomenon of mean-reversion. In addition, although the start-up founding juncture affects the sales growth rate, it is not high significantly and the sales growth rate can be different according to the industry classification. Utilizing both this phenomenon and the performance of start-up companies in relevant industries, we have proposed two models of new business sales based on the sales growth rate. The method proposed in this study makes it possible to objectively and quickly estimate the sales of new business by industry, and it is expected to provide reference information to judge whether sales estimated by other methods (top-down/bottom-up approach) pass the bounds from ordinary cases in relevant industry. In particular, the results of this study can be practically used as useful reference information for business feasibility analysis or technical valuation for entering new business. When using the existing top-down method, it can be used to set the range of market size or market share. As well, when using the bottom-up method, the estimation period may be set in accordance of the mean reverting period information for the growth rate. The two models proposed in this study will enable rapid and objective sales estimation of new businesses, and are expected to improve the efficiency of business feasibility analysis and technology valuation process by developing intelligent information system. In academic perspectives, it is a very important discovery that the phenomenon of 'mean reversion' is found among start-up companies out of general small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as stable companies such as listed companies. In particular, there exists the significance of this study in that over the large-scale data the mean reverting phenomenon of the start-up firms' sales growth rate is different from that of the listed companies, and that there is a difference in each industry. If a linear model, which is useful for estimating the sales of a specific company, is highly likely to be utilized in practical aspects, it can be explained that the range model, which can be used for the estimation method of the sales of the unspecified firms, is highly likely to be used in political aspects. It implies that when analyzing the business activities and performance of a specific industry group or enterprise group there is political usability in that the range model enables to provide references and compare them by data based start-up sales forecasting system.

• Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.234-240
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• 2007

Purpose: In this study we propose a block-iterative method for reconstructing Compton scattered data. This study shows that the well-known expectation maximization (EM) approach along with its accelerated version based on the ordered subsets principle can be applied to the problem of image reconstruction for Compton camera. This study also compares several methods of constructing subsets for optimal performance of our algorithms. Materials and Methods: Three reconstruction algorithms were implemented; simple backprojection (SBP), EM, and ordered subset EM (OSEM). For OSEM, the projection data were grouped into subsets in a predefined order. Three different schemes for choosing nonoverlapping subsets were considered; scatter angle-based subsets, detector position-based subsets, and both scatter angle- and detector position-based subsets. EM and OSEM with 16 subsets were performed with 64 and 4 iterations, respectively. The performance of each algorithm was evaluated in terms of computation time and normalized mean-squared error. Results: Both EM and OSEM clearly outperformed SBP in all aspects of accuracy. The OSEM with 16 subsets and 4 iterations, which is equivalent to the standard EM with 64 iterations, was approximately 14 times faster in computation time than the standard EM. In OSEM, all of the three schemes for choosing subsets yielded similar results in computation time as well as normalized mean-squared error. Conclusion: Our results show that the OSEM algorithm, which have proven useful in emission tomography, can also be applied to the problem of image reconstruction for Compton camera. With properly chosen subset construction methods and moderate numbers of subsets, our OSEM algorithm significantly improves the computational efficiency while keeping the original quality of the standard EM reconstruction. The OSEM algorithm with scatter angle- and detector position-based subsets is most available.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.371-384
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• 1982

Highly cold tolerant varieties are requested not only at high latitute cool area but also tropical high elevated areas, and the required tolerance is different from location to location. IRRI identified 6 different types of cold tolerance required in the world for breeding purpose; a) Hokkaido type, b) Suweon type, c) Taipei 1st season type, d) Taipei 2nd season type, e) Tropical alpine type and, f) Bangladesh type. The cold tolerance requested in Korea is more eargent in Tongil group cultivars and their required tolerance is the one such as the physiological activities at low temperature are as active as in Japonica group cultivars at least during young seedling stage and reproduction stage. With conventional Japonica cultivars, such cold tolerant characters are requested as short growth duration but stable basic vegetative growth, less sensitive to high temperature and less prolonged growth duration at low temperature. The methods screening for cold tolerance were developed rapidly after the Tongil cultivar was reliesed. The facilities of screening for cold tolerance, such as, low temperature incubator, cold water tank, growth cabinet, phytotron, cold water nursery in Chuncheon, breeding nursery located in Jinbu, Unbong and Youngduk, are well established. Foreign facilities such as, cold water tank with the rapid generation advancement facilities, cold nurseries located in Banaue, Kathmandu and Kashimir may be available for the screening of some limitted breeding materials. For the reference, screening methods applied at different growth stages in Japan are introduced. The component characters of cold tolerance are not well identified, but the varietal differences in a) germinability, b) young seedling growth, c) rooting, d) tillering, e) discolation, f) nutrition uptake, g) photosynthesis rate, h) delay in heading, i) pollen sterility, and j) grain fertility at low temperature are reported to be distinguishable. Relationships among those traits are not consistent. Reported studies on the inheritance of cold tolerance are summarized. Four or more genes are controlling low temperature germinability, one or several genes are controlling seedling tolerance, and four or more genes are responsible for the pollen fertility of the rice treated with cold air or grown in the cold water nursery. But most of those data indicate that the results may come out in different way if those were tested at different temperature. Many cold tolerant parents among Japonicas, Indicas and Javanicas were identified as the results of the improvement of cold tolerance screening techniques and IRTP efforts and they are ready to be utilized. Considering a) diversification of germ plasm, b) integration of resistances to diseases and insects, c) identification of adaptability of recommending cultivars and, d) systematic control of recommending cultivars, breeding strategies for short term and long term are suggested. For short term, efforts will be concentrated mainly to the conventional cultivar group. Domestic cultivars will be used as foundation stock and ecologically different foreign introductions such as from Hokkaido, China or from Taiwan, will be used as cross parents for the adjustment of growth durations and synthsize the prototype of tolerances. While at the other side, extreme early waxy Japonicas will be crossed with the Indica parents which are identified for their resistances to the diseases and insects. Through the back corsses to waxy Japonicas, those Indica resistances will be transfered to the Japonicas and these will be utilized to the crosses for the improvement of resistances of prototype. For the long term, efforts will be payed to synthsize all the available tolerances identified any from Japonicas, Indicas and Javanicas to diversify the germ plasm. The tolerant cultivars newly synthsized, should be stable and affected minimum. to the low temperature at all the growing stages. The resistances to the diseases and insects should be integrated also. The rapid generation advancement, pollen culture and international cooperations were emphasized to maximize the breeding efficiency.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.113-132
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• 1999

Recently in Korea, application of the soil nailing is gradually extended to the sites of excavations and slopes having various ground conditions and field characteristics. Design of the soil nailing is generally carried out in two steps, The First step is to examine the minimum safety factor against a sliding of the reinforced nailed-soil mass based on the limit equilibrium approach, and the second step is to check the maximum displacement expected to occur at facing using the numerical analysis technique. However, design parameters related to the soil nailing system are so various that a reliable design method considering interrelationships between these design parameters is continuously necessary. Additionally, taking into account the anisotropic characteristics of in-situ grounds, disturbances in collecting the soil samples and errors in measurements, a systematic analysis of the field measurement data as well as a rational technique of the optimum design is required to improve with respect to economical efficiency. As a part of these purposes, in the present study, a procedure for the optimum design of a soil nailing excavation wall system is proposed. Focusing on a minimization of the expenses in construction, the optimum design procedure is formulated based on the genetic algorithm. Neural network theory is further adopted in predicting the maximum horizontal displacement at a shotcrete facing. Using the proposed procedure, various effects of relevant design parameters are also analyzed. Finally, an optimized design section is compared with the existing design section at the excavation site being constructed, in order to verify a validity of the proposed procedure.