• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.61-78
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• 2007

A method for poll analysis using information theory and data visualization is proposed in this paper. Questions of opinion poll consist of a target variable and many explanation variables. The type of explanation variables is either numerical or categorical. In this study, explanation variables of mixed types have been ranked according to the magnitude of their effect on target variable by using mutual information. Likewise, the order of explanation variables has been evaluated using data visualization. This is the first study to quantify the impact of specific explanation variable on the related target variable.

• Korean Medical Education Review
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.35-43
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• 2011

Purpose: Communication skills are considered as one of the essential requirements in medical education, and the training often involves exercising medical interviews with standardized patients(SP) or role play. This study investigated the helpfulness of the communication skills training programs for students' performance on the clinical performance examination (CPX). Methods: Fourth-year students who have taken one of two communication skills programs(exercising communication skills with SP or elective communication skill course with role play) completed a questionnaire on their evaluation of the helpfulness of communication skills programs immediately after finishing the CPX. Then, the programs were objectively assessed by comparing all fourth-year students' CPX scores between program participants and non-participants. Results: About 70% of participants answered that the programs were helpful to perform clinical clerkship and CPX. However, there was no difference in either the total CPX score or 2 categorical scores(integrated clinical encounter, communication and interpersonal skill) between program participants and non-participants. Conclusion: Although the students felt that the communication skills programs were helpful to their clinical activities, this study failed to find objective evidence of any effect of the programs on the CPX results. Communication skills training should be continued during clinical clerkship to maintain or enhance the skills, and it is necessary to introduce more effective methods for precise evaluation of students' communication skills.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.19-28
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• 2009

This paper reports experimental findings about the duration feature of the acoustic components of English stops in Korean speakers' voicing perception. In our experiment, 35 participants discriminated between recorded stimuli and digitally transformed stimuli with different duration features from the original stimuli. 72 sets of paired stimuli are generated to test the effects of the duration feature in various phonetic contexts. The result of our experiment is a complicated cross-tabulation with 540 cells defined by five categorical independent variables plus one response variable. To find a meaningful generalization out of this complex frequency table, we ran logit log-linear regression analyses. Surprisingly, we have found that there is no single effect of the duration feature in all phonetic contexts on Korean speakers' perception of the voicing contrasts of English stops. Instead, the logit log-linear analyses reveal that there are interaction effects among phonetic contexts (=C), the places of articulation of stops (=P), and the voicing contrast (=V), and among duration (=T), phonetic contexts, and the places of articulation. To put it in mathematical terms, the distribution of the data can be explained by a simple log-linear equation, logF=${\mu}+{\lambda}CPV+{\lambda}TCP$.

• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.173-191
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• 2017

This study develops a new type of latent class analysis (LCA) in order to explain the associations between one latent variable and several other categorical latent variables. Our model postulates that the prevalence of the latent variable of interest is affected by another latent variable composed of other several latent variables. For the parameter estimation, we propose deterministic annealing EM (DAEM) to deal with local maxima problem in the proposed model. We perform simulation study to demonstrate how DAEM can find the set of parameter estimates at the global maximum of the likelihood over the repeated samples. We apply the proposed LCA model in an investigation of the effect of and joint patterns for drug-using behavior to violent behavior among US high school male students using data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System 2015. Considering the age of male adolescents as a covariate influencing violent behavior, we identified three classes of violent behavior and three classes of drug-using behavior. We also discovered that the prevalence of violent behavior is affected by the type of drug used for drug-using behavior.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.527-544
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• 2013

William Shakespeare's dirge, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," is still a crux in the Shakespearean canon and interpretation. The poem is still believed a dark allegory dealing with some arcane and obscure courtly matters and politics. However, we cannot recover its allegorical significance. This interpretive situation enforces us to read the poem as a self-conscious artwork in terms of its paradoxical language and meta-poetic metaphors. Paradox, as a subspecies of metaphor, challenges categorical and judgmental absolutes, and produces a sense of wonder in reconciling the logically contradictory opposites. In this poem the urn containing the ashes of the phoenix and the turtle is the icon of the mysterious unity of art, born of the wonderful marriage of male and female. Shakespeare's poem demonstrates in itself the magical power of poetic language in transforming an elegy into an epithalamion. The union of the phoenix and the turtle defies the singularity of their respective entity, and at the same time it retains their distinctive particularity of the two-ness. This neo-Platonic mystery of the "married chastity" is a paradox which confounds reason and verifies the poetic truth of imaginative intellect. The marriage of Christian perichoresis is crystallized in the artwork of the urn, which is admired at by posterity, though the marriage was issueless, due to its passing virtue. "The Phoenix and the Turtle" depicts the metaphor-making process and its effect, the poem.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2023

This study investigated the influences of probabilistic accessibility of the word being produced - as determined by its usage frequency and neighborhood density - on native and high-proficiency L2 speakers' realization of six English monophthong vowels. The native group hyperarticulated the vowels over an expanded acoustic space when the vowel occurred in words with low frequency and high density, supporting the claim that vowel forms are modified in accordance with the probabilistic accessibility of words. However, temporal expansion occurred in words with greater accessibility (i.e., with high frequency and low density) as an effect of low phonotactic probability in low-density words, particularly in attended speech. This suggests that temporal modification in the opposite direction may be part of the phonetic characteristics that are enhanced in communicatively driven focus realization. Conversely, none of these spectral and temporal patterns were found in the L2 group, thereby indicating that even the high-proficiency L2 speakers may not have developed experience-based sensitivity to the modulation of sub-categorical phonetic details indexed with word-level probabilistic information. The results are discussed with respect to how phonological representations are shaped in a word-specific manner for the sake of communicatively driven lexical intelligibility, and what factors may contribute to the lack of native-like sensitivity in L2 speech.

• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.65 no.5
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• pp.254-261
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• 2022

Background: The use of systemic steroids for 6+ weeks in children is associated with decreased bone mineral content (BMC) and density (BMD). However, the effects of a shorter duration of use on BMD are unknown. Purpose: To determine the effect of the use of systemic steroids for 2-6 weeks on BMD and BMC in pediatric patients. Methods: Twenty-five pediatric patients (21 with tuberculosis, 2 with systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis, 1 with inflammatory bowel disease, 1 with autoimmune hemolytic anemia) who received systemic steroids for 2-6 weeks and 25 age- and sex-matched controls were enrolled. BMC, BMD, and z scores of the whole body (WB), lumbar spine (LS), nondominant distal radius (DR), and total body less the head (TBLH) were determined by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry at baseline, the end of steroid therapy or 6 weeks (whichever was earlier; first follow-up), and at the end of 3 months from baseline (second follow-up) in patients and at baseline in controls. The values were adjusted for confounding variables. Continuous and categorical variables were compared using Student t test and the chi-square test or Fisher exact test, respectively. Pairwise comparisons employed Bonferroni correction. Results: Statistically significant decreases in BMC, BMD, and all z scores were observed. BMC declined by 5.37%, 2.08%, 1.82%, and 2.27%, and 11.42%, 3.75%, 3.34%, and 4.17% for WB, LS, DR, and TBLH, respectively, at the first and second follow-ups, respectively. Similarly, BMD declined by 2.01%, 2.31%, 2.18%, and 1.70% and 4.59%, 3.76%, 3.14%, and 3.50% for the WB, LS, DR, and TBLH, respectively, at the first and second follow-ups, respectively. A significant negative correlation was found among bone densitometric parameters, duration, and cumulative dose. Conclusion: The use of systemic steroids for 2-6 weeks in pediatric patients decreased the BMD and BMC of trabecular and cortical bones, an effect that persisted after discontinuation.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.4373-4378
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• 2012

Introduction: Hypercalcemia is mainly caused by bone resorption due to either secretion of cytokines including parathyroid hormone-related protein (PTHrP) or bone metastases. However, hypercalcemia may occur in patients with or without bone metastases. The present study aimed to describe the effect of chemotherapy treatment, regimens and doses on calcium levels among breast and lung cancer patients with hypercalcemia. Methods: We carried a review of medical records of breast and lung cancer patients hospitalized in years 2003 and 2009 at Penang General Hospital, a public tertiary care center in Penang Island, north of Malaysia. Patients with hypercalcemia (defined as a calcium level above 10.5 mg/dl) at the time of cancer diagnosis or during cancer treatment had their medical history abstracted, including presence of metastasis, chemotherapy types and doses, calcium levels throughout cancer treatment, and other co-morbidity. The mean calcium levels at first hospitalization before chemotherapy were compared with calcium levels at the end of or at the latest chemotherapy treatment. Statistical analysis was conducted using the Chi-square test for categorical data, logistic regression test for categorical variables, and Spearman correlation test, linear regression and the paired sample t tests for continuous data. Results: Of a total 1,023 of breast cancer and 814 lung cancer patients identified, 292 had hypercalcemia at first hospitalization or during cancer treatment (174 breast and 118 lung cancer patients). About a quarter of these patients had advanced stage cancers: 26.4% had mild hypercalcemia (10.5-11.9 mg/dl), 55.5% had moderate (12-12.9 mg/dl), and 18.2% severe hypercalcemia (13-13.9; 14-16 mg/dl). Chemotherapy lowered calcium levels significantly both in breast and lung cancer patients with hypercalcemia; in particular with chemotherapy type 5-flurouracil+epirubicin+cyclophosphamide (FEC) for breast cancer, and gemcitabine+cisplatin in lung cancer. Conclusion: Chemotherapy decreases calcium levels in breast and lung cancer cases with hypercalcemia at cancer diagnosis, probably by reducing PTHrP levels.

• Food Science of Animal Resources
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.663-669
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• 2017

This study were estimated the contribution of carcass traits to unit price, to analyze the marbling score as a categorical variable rather than a numerical variable, and to develop an optimal model that also includes the holiday effect and the raising period. The data for this study were acquired from the Quality Evaluation of the Korea Institute for Animal Products, and consisted of the trading records of 1,613,699 heads at 12 wholesale markets from 2010 to 2014. The unit price of a cow was estimated from the following parameters: -52.50 Won/mm, $8.93Won/cm^2$, 7.20 Won/kg, and -1.04 Won/day for backfat thickness, eye muscle area, carcass weight, and raising period, respectively. Parameters for the dummy variables of marbling scores varied from 0 to 8328.74 Won/kg, which means that each marbling score grade had a different price value. The unit price of a steer was estimated from the following parameters: - 92.12 Won/mm, $20.22Won/cm^2$, 1.30 Won/kg, and -1.72 Won/day for backfat thickness, eye muscle area, carcass weights, and raising period, respectively. Parameters for dummy variables of marbling scores varied from 0 to 7338.80 Won/kg, which means that the grades of each marbling score had different price values. The unit price of sales during traditional holidays was significantly higher (827.71 Won/kg for cows, and 645.15 Won/kg for steers) than during non-holidays.We conclude that the use of categorical values for marbling scores would be needed to evaluate the price of Hanwoo beef using multiple regression analysis based on carcass traits and environmental factors.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.363-376
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• 2012

Excessive zeroes are often observed in ordinal categorical response variables. An ordinary ordered Probit model is not appropriate for zero-inflated data especially when there are many different sources of generating 0 observations. In this paper, we apply a two-stage zero-inflated ordered Probit (ZIOP) model which incorporate the zero-flated nature of data, propose a Bayesian analysis of a ZIOP model, and apply the method to alcohol consumption data collected by the National Bureau of Statistics, Korea. In the first stage of a ZIOP model, a Probit model is introduced to divide the non-drinkers into genuine non-drinkers who do not participate in drinking due to personal beliefs or permanent health problems and potential drinkers who did not drink at the time of the survey but have the potential to become drinkers. In the second stage, an ordered probit model is applied to drinkers that consists of zero-consumption potential drinkers and positive consumption drinkers. The analysis results show that about 30% of non-drinkers are genuine non-drinkers and hence the Korean alcohol consumption data has the feature of zero-inflated data. A study on the marginal effect of each explanatory variable shows that certain explanatory variables have effects on the genuine non-drinkers and potential drinkers in opposite directions, which may not be detected by an ordered Probit model.