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A Study on Utilizing DEA in Efficiency Evaluation of Social Welfare Agencies (자료포락분석(DEA)을 이용한 사회복지관의 효율성 평가에 관한 연구 : 부산지역 사례를 중심으로)

  • Son, Kwang-Hoon
    • Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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    • v.52
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    • pp.117-141
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    • 2003
  • This study is to identify the efficiency in Busan social welfare agencies between input factors and output factors. For this purpose, gathered are the 2001 services reports of those study agencies. This study used 4 difference model, model 1; comparing input factor(social worker number & labor cost) about output factor(the total number of program used person), model 2; comparing input factor(the total number of social welfare agencies staff & the total working expenses) about output factor(the total number of program used person), model 3; comparing input factor(the total number of volunteer, social welfare agencies staff & a period of operation) about output factor(the total number of program used person), model 4; comparing input factor(the total number of volunteer, social welfare agencies staff, a period of operation & the total working expenses) about output factor(the total number of program used person). Charnes's study(1978) provided an analytical tool for efficiency services output of non-profit organizations, and DEA(Data Envelopment Analysis) was a analytical framework for evaluating the impact of social service outcome. the finding are as follows : (1) In the results of comparing 4 models as same standard, we can find 35-55%(16-25) efficiency agencies among the 45 social welfare agencies. (2) For all DMU becoming the efficiency 1 to standard of output factor, model 1; 33 agencies are increasing the social worker number($\Delta$0.8 number), 10 agencies are raising the labor cost of social worker($\Delta$1,189,000 Won), model 2; 30 agencies are increasing the total number of social welfare agencies staff($\Delta$1.25 number), 14 agencies are raising the total working expenses($\Delta$1,447,000 Won), model 3; 8 agencies are increasing the total number of social welfare agencies staff($\Delta$2.26 number), 14 agencies are increasing the total number of volunteer($\Delta$52 number), and 10 agencies are increasing a period of operation($\Delta$13 month), model 4; 24 agencies are increasing the total number of social welfare agencies staff($\Delta$1.8 number), 12 agencies are raising the total working expenses($\Delta$5,017,000 Won), 12 agencies are increasing the total number of volunteer($\Delta$43.2 number), and 23 agencies are increasing a period of operation($\Delta$16 month).

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A Clinical Study of Pulmonary Tuberculosis in Diabetics (당뇨병에 동반된 폐결핵의 임상적 연구)

  • Jeong, In-Kyung;Yoo, Jee-Hong;Lee, Seon-Mee;Koh, Kwan-Pyo;Han, Min-Soo;Kang, Hong-Mo
    • Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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    • v.45 no.4
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    • pp.705-713
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    • 1998
  • Background: An association between diabetes and tuberculosis has long been implied. The severity of diabetes appears to correlate with the degree of tuberculous activity. Methods: A retrospective chart review of 82 patients with active pulmonary tuberculosis in diabetics (DMTB) and 83 patients with active pulmonary tuberculosis in nondiabetics (Non-DMTB) admitted to the Kyung Hee Medical Center between January 1995 and December 1996 was underiaken. Results: The sex ratio of DMTB was 58 : 24, and that of Non-DMTB was 62 : 21. Male patients predominated in both groups. The highest incidence of DMTB was 6th and 7th decades and that of Non-DMTB was 3rd and 4th decades. In case which the tuberculosis developed after diagnosis of diabetes, the prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis was the highest in diabetes for 5-10 years. On chest X-ray findings, the moderate advanced tuberculosis cases were the most common (60.9% in DMTTB and 50.6% in Non-DMTB). There was no relation between the degree of tuberculosis activity on chest x-ray(minimal, moderate, and far advanced tuberculosis) and presence of diabetes. The incidence of lower lung field tuberculosis in DMTB was significantly higher than Non-DMTB(p<0.05). The multiple lobe involvement was the predominant chest roentgenographic finding in both groups. There was no significant difference of treatment response between DMTB and Non-DMTB. There was no relationship between initial HbA1c and the severity of pulmonary tuberculosis on chest X-ray. During treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis in excellently and well controlled diabetes, the cure rate of pulmonary tuberculosis was significantly higher than the poorly controlled diabetes and the rate of treatment failure was significantly lower than poorly controlled diabetes. (p<0.05). Conclusion: Poor control of blood glucose is related with increased rate of treatment failure in pulmonary tuberculosis with diabetes mellitus. Further investigation will be needed to study the mechanisms of treatment failure in poorly controlled diabetics with pulmonary tuberculosis.

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The Clinical Characteristics of Diffuse Alveolar Hemorrhage : A Retrospective Study of 21cases (미만성 폐포 출혈의 임상 양상과 예후)

  • Ham, Hyoung-Suk;Roh, Gil-Hwan;Kang, Eun-Hae;Kang, Soo-Jung;An, Chang-Hyeok;Suh, Gee-Young;Chung, Man-Pyo;Kim, Ho-Joong;Kwon, O-Jung;Rhee, Chong-H.
    • Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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    • v.49 no.5
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    • pp.614-623
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    • 2000
  • Background : Diffuse alveolar hemorrhage (DAH) is rare but often fatal. To determine the clinical manifestations of DAH, its etiology, clinical course and prognosis were studied. Method : A retrospective analysis was performed in 21 patients that were diagnosed as DAH. Diagnosis of DAH was based on the presence of the "classical triad" of hemoptysis, anemia, and rapidly progressive infiltrates on chest X-ray and a finding of bronchoalveolar lavage or lung biopsy. Results : Thirteen patients (61.9%) had collagen vascular diseases (CVDs) as underlying disease and 10 patients had systemic lupus erythematosus. Females were more prevalent in CVD than in non-collagen vascular disease (NCVD). Otherwise, there were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of clinical manifestations. Dyspnea (95.2%), cough (76.2%), hemoptysis (61.9%), and fever (33.0%) were frequent symptoms. The initial creatinine level was higher in CVD than in NCVD ($3.27{\pm}3.15$ mg/dl vs. $1.19{\pm}0.94$ mg/dl, p=0.030). The corresponding drop in hemoglobin level was $2.69{\pm}1.26$ g/dl. Maximal drop in hemoglobin preceded the progression of infiltrates on the chest radiograph by $1.38{\pm}4.22$ days. The mortality rate was higher in the patients with NCVD than in those with CVD (50.0% vs. 23.1%). Conclusion : The DAH can occur not only in patients with CVD but also in those with NCVD. Higher creatinine level CVD in patients is associated with renal involvement in conjunction with DAH. The maximal drop in hemoglobin preceeding the progression of infiltrates on the chest radiograph suggests that the drop in hemoglobin is important for diagnosing DAH.

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A Study on the Chitin and Protein Contents in Shells of 5 Marine Crustaceans (5종(種)의 해산(海産) 갑각류각피(甲殼類殼皮)에서의 Chitin 및 단백질함량(蛋白質含量)에 관한 연구(硏究))

  • Lee, Mee-Sook;Seo, Jung-Sook;Mo, Su-Mi
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
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    • v.13 no.3
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    • pp.307-312
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    • 1984
  • The dried pure shells deprived of soft tissues were subjected to analysis of chitin-protein complexes from 5 species of marine crustaceans, including 2 species of crabs and 3 species of shrimps. The protein fractions were obtained from chitin-protein complexes under the varying conditions of extractions and the crude chitin was prepared from the shells by the sulfurous acid process. The crude chitin was purified through the extraction with several organic solvents such as dimethyl-acetamide, N-methylpyrrolidone. The purified chitin was also examined using the phase contrast microscope. Total protein contents of the shells were diverse, showing 9.6% for Portunus trituberculatus, 3.1%, Charybdis bimaculata, 9.4%, Penaeus japonicus, 10.9%, Metapenaeus intermedius and 5.8%, Squilla oratoria. Covalently bound protein varied with species from 2.1% for Charybdis bimaculata to 9.9% for Metapenaeus intermedius. The puified chitin contents of the shells were shown to 21.1% for Portunus tritube rculatus, 6.2%, Charybdis bimaculata, 20.2%, Penaeus japonicus, 27.1%, Metapenaeus intermedius and 25.5%, Squilla oratoria. Exceptionally low analytical value obtained with Charybdis bimaculata are supposed to be due to the very young subjects. The ratios of chitin to covalently bound protein in the shells were various such as 2.7 to 1 for Portunus trituberculatus, Penaeus japonicus and Metapenaeus intermedius, 3.1 to 1, Charybdis bimaculata and 6.1 to 1, Squilla oratoria. The microscope finding of the purified chitin showed the filamentous form in all the specimen.

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A Study on Interdepartmental Organizational Effectiveness of Medium and Small Sized Hospitals (서울지역 중소병원의 부서간 조직효과성에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Wook-Soo;Ha, Ho-Wook;Sohn, Tae-Yang
    • Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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    • v.7 no.1
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    • pp.64-87
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    • 2002
  • The purpose of this study is aimed to grasp the factors, which may influence the harmonized organizational efficiency of the objects of hospital structure as well as its structural constituents of each departments of administration, nursing, and para-medical personnels, in order to provide basic data enable to contribute in the development of hospital. The survey data involved in the study was derived from 385 personnels working in 5 medium and small sized hospitals in Seoul area. The main finding of the study can be summarized as follows; 1. The organizational efficiency in accordance with the general characteristics of subjects in order of male, over 30 years of age, university graduates, long-term tenure and high position is higher, whereas, in as much as wage and well trained personnels in administration departments are higher, its organizational efficiency is higher in comparison with those of nursing and para-medical departments. 2. The organizational efficiency in accordance with satisfaction and the motive contributional factors is higher as much as the high satisfactory level in every departments in general. 3. The organizational efficiency in accordance with the factors of job characteristics is higher in as much as difficulty of the jobs is lesser, however there was not statically significance between administration and para-medical departments. In as much as the job circulation is intact, job standard level is higher and the more job responsibility the higher organizational efficiency, while the more workload and the more work feud resulted lower organizational efficiency. It was obvious that the higher professional expertise as well as the training and application level are improving the organizational efficiency. 4. The organizational efficiency in accordance with the factors of structural characteristics was higher in as much as the intercommunication was smooth and the structural formalization level are higher, however there was not statically significance between the participation level of decision making and the organizational efficiency. 5. In as much as higher educational level of over university graduates, management of organization and the job level are satisfied, the psychological motive contributional level is higher, while the lesser job difficulty, the smooth job performance, the higher level of professional expertise, the higher structural formalization level, the smooth intercommunication, have affected as major influence factors of the structural characteristics of organizational efficiency. 6. As the management of hospital organization, the job level and personal relation are satisfied or psychological motive is provided, especially when there are no difficult jobs or smooth job circulation and no job feud are prevailing, it was apparent that the organizational efficiency is improving accordingly. The nursing departments has high educational standard and is satisfied in the management and job level of hospital organization as there are no difficult jobs while the level of hospital's organizational formality is high and the intercommunication is smooth, which are improving the organizational efficiency. The para-medical departments is also satisfied the management and job level of hospital organization and it was apparent that the organizational efficiency is higher in as much as the level of job standardization is high and the intercommunication is smooth. As a result of this study, in order for improving the organizational efficiency of the medium and small sized hospitals, the management and job level as well as personal relation are preferably satisfied, whereas the level of job circulation, job responsibility, the expertise and formalization of organization, intercommunication and etc. should be satisfied, and, therefore, it is advisable to buildup discriminated organizational management and environment for different division on the basis above factors. Since this study is carried on several hospitals in Seoul area, there is a certain limit to generalize its result to all domestic hospitals, nevertheless the gallop poll was made by developing the questionnaires with reasonability and reliability. Especially, as the study was carried by analyzing the comparison of influence factors' difference of organizational efficiency in accordance with the divisional characteristics of the medium and small sized hospitals.

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An Empirical Study on the Effect of CRM System on the Performance of Pharmaceutical Companies (고객관계관리 시스템의 수준이 BSC 관점에서의 기업성과에 미치는 영향 : 제약회사를 중심으로)

  • Kim, Hyun-Jung;Park, Jong-Woo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.16 no.4
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    • pp.43-65
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    • 2010
  • Facing a complex environment driven by a decade, many companies are adopting new strategic frameworks such as Customer Relationship Management system to achieve sustainable profitability as well as overcome serious competition for survival. In many business areas, CRM system advanced a great deal in a matter of continuous compensating the defect and overall integration. However, pharmaceutical companies in Korea were slow to accept them for usesince they still have a tendency of holding fast to traditional way of sales and marketing based on individual networks of sales representatives. In the circumstance, this article tried to empirically address current status of CRM system as well as the effects of the system on the performance of pharmaceutical companies by applying BSC method's four perspectives, from financial, customer, learning and growth and internal process. Survey by e-mail and post to employers and employees who were working in pharma firms were undergone for the purpose. Total 113 cases among collected 140 ones were used for the statistical analysis by SPSS ver. 15 package. Reliability, Factor analysis, regression were done. This study revealed that CRM system had a significant effect on improving financial and non-financial performance of pharmaceutical companies as expected. Proposed regression model fits well and among them, CRM marketing information system shed the light on substantial impact on companies' outcome given profitability, growth and investment. Useful analytical information by CRM marketing information system appears to enable pharmaceutical firms to set up effective marketing and sales strategies, these result in favorable financial performance by enhancing values for stakeholderseventually, not to mention short-term profit and/or mid-term potential to growth. CRM system depicted its influence on not only financial performance, but also non-financial fruit of pharmaceutical companies. Further analysis for each component showed that CRM marketing information system were able to demonstrate statistically significant effect on the performance like the result of financial outcome. CRM system is believed to provide the companies with efficient way of customers managing by valuable standardized business process prompt coping with specific customers' needs. It consequently induces customer satisfaction and retentionto improve performance for long period. That is, there is a virtuous circle for creating value as the cornerstone for sustainable growth. However, the research failed to put forward to evidence to support hypothesis regarding favorable influence of CRM sales representative's records assessment system and CRM customer analysis system on the management performance. The analysis is regarded to reflect the lack of understanding of sales people and respondents between actual work duties and far-sighted goal in strategic analysis framework. Ordinary salesmen seem to dedicate short-term goal for the purpose of meeting sales target, receiving incentive bonus in a manner-of-fact style, as such, they tend to avail themselves of personal network and sales and promotional expense rather than CRM system. The study finding proposed a link between CRM information system and performance. It empirically indicated that pharmaceutical companies had been implementing CRM system as an effective strategic business framework in order for more balanced achievements based on the grounded understanding of both CRM system and integrated performance. It suggests a positive impact of supportive CRM system on firm performance, especially for pharmaceutical industry through the initial empirical evidence. Also, it brings out unmet needs for more practical system design, improvement of employees' awareness, increase of system utilization in the field. On the basis of the insight from this exploratory study, confirmatory research by more appropriate measurement tool and increased sample size should be further examined.

Predicting the Performance of Recommender Systems through Social Network Analysis and Artificial Neural Network (사회연결망분석과 인공신경망을 이용한 추천시스템 성능 예측)

  • Cho, Yoon-Ho;Kim, In-Hwan
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.16 no.4
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    • pp.159-172
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    • 2010
  • The recommender system is one of the possible solutions to assist customers in finding the items they would like to purchase. To date, a variety of recommendation techniques have been developed. One of the most successful recommendation techniques is Collaborative Filtering (CF) that has been used in a number of different applications such as recommending Web pages, movies, music, articles and products. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. Broadly, there are memory-based CF algorithms, model-based CF algorithms, and hybrid CF algorithms which combine CF with content-based techniques or other recommender systems. While many researchers have focused their efforts in improving CF performance, the theoretical justification of CF algorithms is lacking. That is, we do not know many things about how CF is done. Furthermore, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting the performances of CF algorithms in advance is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose an efficient approach to predict the performance of CF. Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are applied to develop our prediction model. CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. SNA facilitates an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in data for CF recommendations. An ANN model is developed through an analysis of network topology, such as network density, inclusiveness, clustering coefficient, network centralization, and Krackhardt's efficiency. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Inclusiveness refers to the number of nodes which are included within the various connected parts of the social network. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. Krackhardt's efficiency characterizes how dense the social network is beyond that barely needed to keep the social group even indirectly connected to one another. We use these social network measures as input variables of the ANN model. As an output variable, we use the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the ANN model, sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well-known department stores in Korea, was used. Total 396 experimental samples were gathered, and we used 40%, 40%, and 20% of them, for training, test, and validation, respectively. The 5-fold cross validation was also conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. The input variable measuring process consists of following three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used Net Miner 3 and UCINET 6.0 for SNA, and Clementine 11.1 for ANN modeling. The experiments reported that the ANN model has 92.61% estimated accuracy and 0.0049 RMSE. Thus, we can know that our prediction model helps decide whether CF is useful for a given application with certain data characteristics.

Optimal Selection of Classifier Ensemble Using Genetic Algorithms (유전자 알고리즘을 이용한 분류자 앙상블의 최적 선택)

  • Kim, Myung-Jong
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.16 no.4
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    • pp.99-112
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    • 2010
  • Ensemble learning is a method for improving the performance of classification and prediction algorithms. It is a method for finding a highly accurateclassifier on the training set by constructing and combining an ensemble of weak classifiers, each of which needs only to be moderately accurate on the training set. Ensemble learning has received considerable attention from machine learning and artificial intelligence fields because of its remarkable performance improvement and flexible integration with the traditional learning algorithms such as decision tree (DT), neural networks (NN), and SVM, etc. In those researches, all of DT ensemble studies have demonstrated impressive improvements in the generalization behavior of DT, while NN and SVM ensemble studies have not shown remarkable performance as shown in DT ensembles. Recently, several works have reported that the performance of ensemble can be degraded where multiple classifiers of an ensemble are highly correlated with, and thereby result in multicollinearity problem, which leads to performance degradation of the ensemble. They have also proposed the differentiated learning strategies to cope with performance degradation problem. Hansen and Salamon (1990) insisted that it is necessary and sufficient for the performance enhancement of an ensemble that the ensemble should contain diverse classifiers. Breiman (1996) explored that ensemble learning can increase the performance of unstable learning algorithms, but does not show remarkable performance improvement on stable learning algorithms. Unstable learning algorithms such as decision tree learners are sensitive to the change of the training data, and thus small changes in the training data can yield large changes in the generated classifiers. Therefore, ensemble with unstable learning algorithms can guarantee some diversity among the classifiers. To the contrary, stable learning algorithms such as NN and SVM generate similar classifiers in spite of small changes of the training data, and thus the correlation among the resulting classifiers is very high. This high correlation results in multicollinearity problem, which leads to performance degradation of the ensemble. Kim,s work (2009) showedthe performance comparison in bankruptcy prediction on Korea firms using tradition prediction algorithms such as NN, DT, and SVM. It reports that stable learning algorithms such as NN and SVM have higher predictability than the unstable DT. Meanwhile, with respect to their ensemble learning, DT ensemble shows the more improved performance than NN and SVM ensemble. Further analysis with variance inflation factor (VIF) analysis empirically proves that performance degradation of ensemble is due to multicollinearity problem. It also proposes that optimization of ensemble is needed to cope with such a problem. This paper proposes a hybrid system for coverage optimization of NN ensemble (CO-NN) in order to improve the performance of NN ensemble. Coverage optimization is a technique of choosing a sub-ensemble from an original ensemble to guarantee the diversity of classifiers in coverage optimization process. CO-NN uses GA which has been widely used for various optimization problems to deal with the coverage optimization problem. The GA chromosomes for the coverage optimization are encoded into binary strings, each bit of which indicates individual classifier. The fitness function is defined as maximization of error reduction and a constraint of variance inflation factor (VIF), which is one of the generally used methods to measure multicollinearity, is added to insure the diversity of classifiers by removing high correlation among the classifiers. We use Microsoft Excel and the GAs software package called Evolver. Experiments on company failure prediction have shown that CO-NN is effectively applied in the stable performance enhancement of NNensembles through the choice of classifiers by considering the correlations of the ensemble. The classifiers which have the potential multicollinearity problem are removed by the coverage optimization process of CO-NN and thereby CO-NN has shown higher performance than a single NN classifier and NN ensemble at 1% significance level, and DT ensemble at 5% significance level. However, there remain further research issues. First, decision optimization process to find optimal combination function should be considered in further research. Secondly, various learning strategies to deal with data noise should be introduced in more advanced further researches in the future.

The Design and Application of Vibrator Type(AM) Combination Apparatus for Improving Police Equipment for Fugitive Prevention (도주방지용 경찰장구의 기능개선을 위한 진동자 방식(AM) 결속장치 설계 및 응용)

  • Choi, Ki-Nam;Lee, Seon-Jeh
    • Convergence Security Journal
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    • v.11 no.2
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    • pp.13-24
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    • 2011
  • Policemen judge the situations rationally and use their equipment such as handcuffs and rope within the purview, finding them needed to arrest criminals in the act who commit crimes which conforms to death penalty, life imprisonment or long imprisonment for over 3 years in accordance with Clause 10-2, Article 1 of the Police Mandate Law and prevent fleeing from them, defend their and others' lives and bodies, or if there are probable causes to be recognized that using equipment is necessary to restrain the interference with government officials in the execution of their duties. However, as the cases which the criminals run away in handcuffs or with both hands tied occur, it results in the waste of police force, distrust and enormous trouble in the pursuit of their duties. Therefore, if the way to perceive fleeing of criminals who have already worn the police equipment by some simple assistive devices without developing other new equipment, it will be very effective for police duties. This study is about the combination apparatus for fugitive prevention attached to the existing handcuffs and rope whose alert sounds let the staffs working inside the office perceive the fleeing of wanted criminals and examined suspects who wear the handcuffs or are tied up with rope, providing that they go through the exit where a transmitter and a receiver were set. The combination apparatus for fugitive prevention which the study introduces contains the connecting parts which connect a flexible tube(cognition tags inside of the tube) of connector equipped with the police equipment with the ends of the tube and the part where these two meet and which connect them inside of the tube. The connecting parts are easy to be attached to the police equipment such as handcuffs and rope, but hard to be dismantled by the people tied up with the equipment. It enables watchers to perceive the fleeing of wanted criminals and examined suspects who wear the handcuffs or are tied up with rope, providing that they go through the exit where a transmitter and a receiver were set. Plus, if it is combined together with the portable receiver, it can be installed on the patrol cars and easily adopted to supervise illegally accessing of evidences. It is also avaliable to be adjunctively utilized for the handcuffs provided and the cost is so reasonable. Owing to its snap-on way to the cuffs, it can clear up any invasion of privacy and it can not be used as a self-injury tool because of the soft tube. Using AM Tag minimizes the lack of malfunction.

Economic Effects of Eliminating Trade Barriers under Imperfect Competition (불완전경쟁하(不完全競爭下)에서의 무역장벽(貿易障壁) 완화효과(緩和效果))

  • Lee, Hong-gue
    • KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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    • v.14 no.2
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    • pp.29-54
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    • 1992
  • Recent studies on the economic effects of trade liberalization and economic integration have emphasized the significant gains associated with product differentiation and scale economies. Securing access to markets in other countries will make it possible to increase product variety and capture scale economies, thus, expanding the gains from trade. Liberalization is also expected to introduce foreign competition into the previously closed market. Concurrently, the liberalization will improve the competitive market environment for firms selling in the domestic market. Firms will be pressed to either exit or reduce cost. The output per firm, then, will increase due to the exit of rival firms, and the average total cost will decline due to the economies of scale. 'Rationalization' of the production process will eventually follow. This paper addresses the economic effects of (counterfactual) bilateral tariff elimination between Korea and Japan. It computationally assesses the gains from liberalization as well as the resource allocations and welfare effects associated with the tariff reduction. The endogenous determination of the key parameters distinguishes this paper from others. The firm's perceived elasticity of demand and elasticity of substitution in the present model are calibrated to be consistent with the base year data. Korea, Japan, and the rest of the world are modeled explicitly. The sectoral coverage of the model includes twenty-three tradable product categories based on three-digit SITC industries and seven nontradable categories based on one-digit SITC industries. Product categories are also classified into perfectly competitive and imperfectly competitive ones. In the imperfectly competitive industries, product differentiation exists at the firm level, while the perfectly competitive industries are characterized by national product differentiation. The simulation results of bilateral tariff reduction are reported. Tariff elimination tends to increase intra-industry trade flows so that the total amount of exports and imports of both countries expand. Yet, Japan is expected to increase the bilateral trade surplus in the wake of the mutual tariff reduction. Terms-of-trade for Korea will not change, while for Japan it will deteriorate. Equivalent variations reflecting the change in consumer surplus (welfare) will favor Korean consumers. Total output, however, will not change substantially, recording 0.5 and 0.6% for Japan and Korea, respectively. An interesting finding in the analysis is that the gains from increased competition and scale efficiency are not as prevailing as expected in theory.

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