• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
• /
• 2017.05a
• /
• pp.471-472
• /
• 2017

There are 3,931,822 elderly who receives long-term care at home and 1,704,469 elderly who stay at long-term care facilities in those of 34,610,000 of +65 years old population in Japan; thus, the elderly people who need home care are 2.3 times more than facilities (2016).In the near future, the number of elderly people with a degree of daily life independence and dementia category II or more will increase to 4.7 million (12.8% of the elderly population). Therefore, the use of home-care robots is essential for the disaster evacuation of the overwhelming majority of those elderly who need home care and for of vitals checks to keep family, caregivers, and medical professionals informed to reduce the risk in chronic health conditions in welfare evacuation centers. This also helps to care for the caregivers who are caring for the elderly, and the introduction of home-robots to evacuation centers should receive prompt attention from our care-friendly society.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.58 no.1
• /
• pp.21-42
• /
• 2012

Gloria Naylor's second novel Linden Hills (1985) explores the issues of self-exploration, empowerment, history, and memory by delineating the communal and familial tragedies and the distortion of values prevalent in a prosperous African-American urban community called Linden Hills. Drawing upon the Freud's concept of "primal scene" and "family romance," this paper aims to focus upon the Nedeed family, the founder of Linden Hills, and investigate the compelling traumatogenic force within the family, which is inseparably intertwined with the inversion of values and moral corruption permeating the entire community. The "primal crime" committed by the Nedeed ancestors serves to preserve and perpetuate a tyrannical rule by ruthless patriarchs who reign by underhanded strategies of purposefully neglecting and abusing others, including their own wives. The imprisonment, by Luther Nedeed, of his wife Willa in the family morgue epitomizes the long legacy running in the family-the oppression and burial of the pre-Oedipal, maternal history. Willa's accidental encounter, at the nadir of the family estate and her personal despair, with the faded records of the forgotten and abused Nedeed women exposes the violence-ridden ground of the family's primal scene and the absurdity of family romance the Nedeeds pursued. As the several lines of poem composed by Willie, Willa's male double, show, the hidden, forgotten history of the Nedeed women, in a sense, is the real, which cannot be assimilated to the social symbolic governed by the inhumane patriarchy of the Nedeed family and the success-oriented Linden Hills society. By portraying a catastrophic downfall of the Nedeed family and the futile outcome of its family romance, the ending of Linden Hills conveys implicitly that the contingent symbolic order and its oppressive control, however solid and invincible they may seem, can be toppled down by the real, its nameless forgotten Other.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.16 no.2
• /
• pp.47-70
• /
• 2016

Under the inhumane oppression of imperialism, the Third World's political violence has been often represented as an immediate and explosive one with an instant, concentrated visibility. Yet the ecological and psychological exploitation of the Third-World countries by empires, as Rob Nixon insists, shows the relative invisibility of slow violence. This paper is to reveal this slow violence of the marginalized areas symbolized as the lowland. Although Arne Naess' deep ecology promotes the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. this paper deals with three postcolonial ecological textbooks which criticize the white-centered deep ecology: Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Through postcolonial critical study, this paper finds out that all these three works have some themes in common. First, these postcolonial works assume a shape of family saga which is parallel to the slow violence of ecological and psychological plundering of empires in the postcolonial countries. Second, like the mangroves which have a tenacious hold on life, these postcolonial people rather overcome the heterogenic challenge with the sturdy and tough mind than defeated. Third, the native people's ethics of earth functions as the stronghold for their respectable lifestyle in their indigenous historicity. Finally, as a big fat brother, the Americanized globalization or neoliberalism is warned as the neocolonialism which is often shown as the disguised pattern of greenwashing. Namely, the people's self-enhancement is always prior to the imperialistic development or neoliberalism in the postcolonial ecological texts which sharply contrast the native's life consciousness and the empire's development theory.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
• /
• 2017.06a
• /
• pp.36-36
• /
• 2017

Out of twenty common protein amino acids, there are many kinds of non protein amino acids (NPAAs) that exist as secondary metabolites and exert ecological functions in plants. Mimosine (Mim), one of those NPAAs derived from L. leucocephala acts as an iron chelator and reversely block mammalian cell cycle at G1/S phases. Cysteine (Cys) is decisive for protein and glutathione that acts as an indispensable sulfur grantor for methionine and many other sulfur-containing secondary products. Cys biosynthesis includes consecutive two steps using two enzymes-serine acetyl transferase (SAT) and O-acetylserine (thiol)lyase (OASTL) and appeared in plant cytosol, chloroplast, and mitochondria. In the first step, the acetylation of the ${\beta}$-hydroxyl of L-serine by acetyl-CoA in the existence of SAT and finally, OASTL triggers ${\alpha}$, ${\beta}$-elimination of acetate from OAS and bind $H_2S$ to catalyze the synthesis of Cys. Mimosine synthase, one of the isozymes of the OASTLs, is able to synthesize Mim with 3-hydroxy-4-pyridone (3H4P) instead of $H_2S$ for Cys in the last step. Thus, the aim of this study was to clone and characterize the cytosolic (Cy) OASTL gene from L. leucocephala, express the recombinant OASTL in Escherichia coli, purify it, do enzyme kinetic analysis, perform docking dynamics simulation analysis between the receptor and the ligands and compare its performance between Cys and Mim synthesis. Cy-OASTL was obtained through both directional degenerate primers corresponding to conserved amino acid region among plant Cys synthase family and the purified protein was 34.3KDa. After cleaving the GST-tag, Cy-OASTL was observed to form mimosine with 3H4P and OAS. The optimum Cys and Mim reaction pH and temperature were 7.5 and $40^{\circ}C$, and 8.0 and $35^{\circ}C$ respectively. Michaelis constant (Km) values of OAS from Cys were higher than the OAS from Mim. Inter fragment interaction energy (IFIE) of substrate OAS-Cy-OASTL complex model showed that Lys, Thr81, Thr77 and Gln150 demonstrated higher attraction force for Cys but 3H4P-mimosine synthase-OAS intermediate complex showed that Gly230, Tyr227, Ala231, Gly228 and Gly232 might provide higher attraction energy for the Mim. It may be concluded that Cy-OASTL demonstrates a dual role in biosynthesis both Cys and Mim and extending the knowledge on the biochemical regulatory mechanism of mimosine and cysteine.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.19-27
• /
• 2023

This paper is aimed at exploring a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural trianglulation of Black, White, and Korean American race relations connected to a large-scale disturbance in the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The second generation Korean American Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay (2019) focuses on a social portrait of the racially marginalized beings as Korean immigrant merchants and African American native consumers. This family saga explores issues resulting from racial hierarchy, racialized stereotypes, and historical marginalization in the internalized sociometry of race and class inequality. This work grapples with issues involved in a sociocultural web of racial triangulation under the white dominant structure, and ensuing intergroup conflicts of social minorities in the economic geography of urban space. It opens up civil discussions for transracial, transethnic, and transcultural interactions and coexistence. It ultimately leads to extending young people's minds for a deep understanding of the socioecomonic landscape of racial matrix, and enhancing the cultural literacy for a better awareness of social empathy and the communal respect of life.