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Nanoscale Pattern Formation of Li2CO3 for Lithium-Ion Battery Anode Material by Pattern Transfer Printing (패턴전사 프린팅을 활용한 리튬이온 배터리 양극 기초소재 Li2CO3의 나노스케일 패턴화 방법)

  • Kang, Young Lim;Park, Tae Wan;Park, Eun-Soo;Lee, Junghoon;Wang, Jei-Pil;Park, Woon Ik
    • Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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    • v.27 no.4
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    • pp.83-89
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    • 2020
  • For the past few decades, as part of efforts to protect the environment where fossil fuels, which have been a key energy resource for mankind, are becoming increasingly depleted and pollution due to industrial development, ecofriendly secondary batteries, hydrogen generating energy devices, energy storage systems, and many other new energy technologies are being developed. Among them, the lithium-ion battery (LIB) is considered to be a next-generation energy device suitable for application as a large-capacity battery and capable of industrial application due to its high energy density and long lifespan. However, considering the growing battery market such as eco-friendly electric vehicles and drones, it is expected that a large amount of battery waste will spill out from some point due to the end of life. In order to prepare for this situation, development of a process for recovering lithium and various valuable metals from waste batteries is required, and at the same time, a plan to recycle them is socially required. In this study, we introduce a nanoscale pattern transfer printing (NTP) process of Li2CO3, a representative anode material for lithium ion batteries, one of the strategic materials for recycling waste batteries. First, Li2CO3 powder was formed by pressing in a vacuum, and a 3-inch sputter target for very pure Li2CO3 thin film deposition was successfully produced through high-temperature sintering. The target was mounted on a sputtering device, and a well-ordered Li2CO3 line pattern with a width of 250 nm was successfully obtained on the Si substrate using the NTP process. In addition, based on the nTP method, the periodic Li2CO3 line patterns were formed on the surfaces of metal, glass, flexible polymer substrates, and even curved goggles. These results are expected to be applied to the thin films of various functional materials used in battery devices in the future, and is also expected to be particularly helpful in improving the performance of lithium-ion battery devices on various substrates.

Numerical Study on Thermochemical Conversion of Non-Condensable Pyrolysis Gas of PP and PE Using 0D Reaction Model (0D 반응 모델을 활용한 PP와 PE의 비응축성 열분해 기체의 열화학적 전환에 대한 수치해석 연구)

  • Eunji Lee;Won Yang;Uendo Lee;Youngjae Lee
    • Clean Technology
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    • v.30 no.1
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    • pp.37-46
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    • 2024
  • Environmental problems caused by plastic waste have been continuously growing around the world, and plastic waste is increasing even faster after COVID-19. In particular, PP and PE account for more than half of all plastic production, and the amount of waste from these two materials is at a serious level. As a result, researchers are searching for an alternative method to plastic recycling, and plastic pyrolysis is one such alternative. In this paper, a numerical study was conducted on the pyrolysis behavior of non-condensable gas to predict the chemical reaction behavior of the pyrolysis gas. Based on gas products estimated from preceding literature, the behavior of non-condensable gas was analyzed according to temperature and residence time. Numerical analysis showed that as the temperature and residence time increased, the production of H2 and heavy hydrocarbons increased through the conversion of the non-condensable gas, and at the same time, the CH4 and C6H6 species decreased by participating in the reaction. In addition, analysis of the production rate showed that the decomposition reaction of C2H4 was the dominant reaction for H2 generation. Also, it was found that more H2 was produced by PE with higher C2H4 contents. As a future work, an experiment is needed to confirm how to increase the conversion rate of H2 and carbon in plastics through the various operating conditions derived from this study's numerical analysis results.

Business Application of Convolutional Neural Networks for Apparel Classification Using Runway Image (합성곱 신경망의 비지니스 응용: 런웨이 이미지를 사용한 의류 분류를 중심으로)

  • Seo, Yian;Shin, Kyung-shik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.3
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    • pp.1-19
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    • 2018
  • Large amount of data is now available for research and business sectors to extract knowledge from it. This data can be in the form of unstructured data such as audio, text, and image data and can be analyzed by deep learning methodology. Deep learning is now widely used for various estimation, classification, and prediction problems. Especially, fashion business adopts deep learning techniques for apparel recognition, apparel search and retrieval engine, and automatic product recommendation. The core model of these applications is the image classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). CNN is made up of neurons which learn parameters such as weights while inputs come through and reach outputs. CNN has layer structure which is best suited for image classification as it is comprised of convolutional layer for generating feature maps, pooling layer for reducing the dimensionality of feature maps, and fully-connected layer for classifying the extracted features. However, most of the classification models have been trained using online product image, which is taken under controlled situation such as apparel image itself or professional model wearing apparel. This image may not be an effective way to train the classification model considering the situation when one might want to classify street fashion image or walking image, which is taken in uncontrolled situation and involves people's movement and unexpected pose. Therefore, we propose to train the model with runway apparel image dataset which captures mobility. This will allow the classification model to be trained with far more variable data and enhance the adaptation with diverse query image. To achieve both convergence and generalization of the model, we apply Transfer Learning on our training network. As Transfer Learning in CNN is composed of pre-training and fine-tuning stages, we divide the training step into two. First, we pre-train our architecture with large-scale dataset, ImageNet dataset, which consists of 1.2 million images with 1000 categories including animals, plants, activities, materials, instrumentations, scenes, and foods. We use GoogLeNet for our main architecture as it has achieved great accuracy with efficiency in ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). Second, we fine-tune the network with our own runway image dataset. For the runway image dataset, we could not find any previously and publicly made dataset, so we collect the dataset from Google Image Search attaining 2426 images of 32 major fashion brands including Anna Molinari, Balenciaga, Balmain, Brioni, Burberry, Celine, Chanel, Chloe, Christian Dior, Cividini, Dolce and Gabbana, Emilio Pucci, Ermenegildo, Fendi, Giuliana Teso, Gucci, Issey Miyake, Kenzo, Leonard, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Marni, Max Mara, Missoni, Moschino, Ralph Lauren, Roberto Cavalli, Sonia Rykiel, Stella McCartney, Valentino, Versace, and Yve Saint Laurent. We perform 10-folded experiments to consider the random generation of training data, and our proposed model has achieved accuracy of 67.2% on final test. Our research suggests several advantages over previous related studies as to our best knowledge, there haven't been any previous studies which trained the network for apparel image classification based on runway image dataset. We suggest the idea of training model with image capturing all the possible postures, which is denoted as mobility, by using our own runway apparel image dataset. Moreover, by applying Transfer Learning and using checkpoint and parameters provided by Tensorflow Slim, we could save time spent on training the classification model as taking 6 minutes per experiment to train the classifier. This model can be used in many business applications where the query image can be runway image, product image, or street fashion image. To be specific, runway query image can be used for mobile application service during fashion week to facilitate brand search, street style query image can be classified during fashion editorial task to classify and label the brand or style, and website query image can be processed by e-commerce multi-complex service providing item information or recommending similar item.

Fly Ash Application Effects on CH4 and CO2 Emission in an Incubation Experiment with a Paddy Soil (항온 배양 논토양 조건에서 비산재 처리에 따른 CH4와 CO2 방출 특성)

  • Lim, Sang-Sun;Choi, Woo-Jung;Kim, Han-Yong;Jung, Jae-Woon;Yoon, Kwang-Sik
    • Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
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    • v.45 no.5
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    • pp.853-860
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    • 2012
  • To estimate potential use of fly ash in reducing $CH_4$ and $CO_2$ emission from soil, $CH_4$ and $CO_2$ fluxes from a paddy soil mixed with fly ash at different rate (w/w; 0, 5, and 10%) in the presence and absence of fertilizer N ($(NH_4)_2SO_4$) addition were investigated in a laboratory incubation for 60 days under changing water regime from wetting to drying via transition. The mean $CH_4$ flux during the entire incubation period ranged from 0.59 to $1.68mg\;CH_4\;m^{-2}day^{-1}$ with a lower rate in the soil treated with N fertilizer due to suppression of $CH_4$ production by $SO_4^{2-}$ that acts as an electron acceptor, leading to decreases in electron availability for methanogen. Fly ash application reduced $CH_4$ flux by 37.5 and 33.0% in soils without and with N addition, respectively, probably due to retardation of $CH_4$ diffusion through soil pores by addition of fine-textured fly ash. In addition, as fly ash has a potential for $CO_2$ removal via carbonation (formation of carbonate precipitates) that decreases $CO_2$ availability that is a substrate for $CO_2$ reduction reaction (one of $CH_4$ generation pathways) is likely to be another mechanisms of $CH_4$ flux reduction by fly ash. Meanwhile, the mean $CO_2$ flux during the entire incubation period was between 0.64 and $0.90g\;CO_2\;m^{-2}day^{-1}$, and that of N treated soil was lower than that without N addition. Because N addition is likely to increase soil respiration, it is not straightforward to explain the results. However, it may be possible that our experiment did not account for the substantial amount of $CO_2$ produced by heterotrophs that were activated by N addition in earlier period than the measurement was initiated. Fly ash application also lowered $CO_2$ flux by up to 20% in the soil mixed with fly ash at 10% through $CO_2$ removal by the carbonation. At the whole picture, fly ash application at 10% decreased global warming potential of emitted $CH_4$ and $CO_2$ by about 20%. Therefore, our results suggest that fly ash application can be a soil management practice to reduce green house gas emission from paddy soils. Further studies under field conditions with rice cultivation are necessary to verify our findings.

An Empirical Study on Motivation Factors and Reward Structure for User's Createve Contents Generation: Focusing on the Mediating Effect of Commitment (창의적인 UCC 제작에 영향을 미치는 동기 및 보상 체계에 대한 연구: 몰입에 매개 효과를 중심으로)

  • Kim, Jin-Woo;Yang, Seung-Hwa;Lim, Seong-Taek;Lee, In-Seong
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.20 no.1
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    • pp.141-170
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    • 2010
  • User created content (UCC) is created and shared by common users on line. From the user's perspective, the increase of UCCs has led to an expansion of alternative means of communications, while from the business perspective UCCs have formed an environment in which an abundant amount of new contents can be produced. Despite outward quantitative growth, however, many aspects of UCCs do not meet the expectations of general users in terms of quality, and this can be observed through pirated contents and user-copied contents. The purpose of this research is to investigate effective methods for fostering production of creative user-generated content. This study proposes two core elements, namely, reward and motivation, which are believed to enhance content creativity as well as the mediating factor and users' committement, which will be effective for bridging the increasing motivation and content creativity. Based on this perspective, this research takes an in-depth look at issues related to constructing the dimensions of reward and motivation in UCC services for creative content product, which are identified in three phases. First, three dimensions of rewards have been proposed: task dimension, social dimension, and organizational dimention. The task dimension rewards are related to the inherent characteristics of a task such as writing blog articles and pasting photos. Four concrete ways of providing task-related rewards in UCC environments are suggested in this study, which include skill variety, task significance, task identity, and autonomy. The social dimensioni rewards are related to the connected relationships among users. The organizational dimension consists of monetary payoff and recognition from others. Second, the two types of motivations are suggested to be affected by the diverse rewards schemes: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation occurs when people create new UCC contents for its' own sake, whereas extrinsic motivation occurs when people create new contents for other purposes such as fame and money. Third, commitments are suggested to work as important mediating variables between motivation and content creativity. We believe commitments are especially important in online environments because they have been found to exert stronger impacts on the Internet users than other relevant factors do. Two types of commitments are suggested in this study: emotional commitment and continuity commitment. Finally, content creativity is proposed as the final dependent variable in this study. We provide a systematic method to measure the creativity of UCC content based on the prior studies in creativity measurement. The method includes expert evaluation of blog pages posted by the Internet users. In order to test the theoretical model of our study, 133 active blog users were recruited to participate in a group discussion as well as a survey. They were asked to fill out a questionnaire on their commitment, motivation and rewards of creating UCC contents. At the same time, their creativity was measured by independent experts using Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Finally, two independent users visited the study participants' blog pages and evaluated their content creativity using the Creative Products Semantic Scale. All the data were compiled and analyzed through structural equation modeling. We first conducted a confirmatory factor analysis to validate the measurement model of our research. It was found that measures used in our study satisfied the requirement of reliability, convergent validity as well as discriminant validity. Given the fact that our measurement model is valid and reliable, we proceeded to conduct a structural model analysis. The results indicated that all the variables in our model had higher than necessary explanatory powers in terms of R-square values. The study results identified several important reward shemes. First of all, skill variety, task importance, task identity, and automony were all found to have significant influences on the intrinsic motivation of creating UCC contents. Also, the relationship with other users was found to have strong influences upon both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Finally, the opportunity to get recognition for their UCC work was found to have a significant impact on the extrinsic motivation of UCC users. However, different from our expectation, monetary compensation was found not to have a significant impact on the extrinsic motivation. It was also found that commitment was an important mediating factor in UCC environment between motivation and content creativity. A more fully mediating model was found to have the highest explanation power compared to no-mediation or partially mediated models. This paper ends with implications of the study results. First, from the theoretical perspective this study proposes and empirically validates the commitment as an important mediating factor between motivation and content creativity. This result reflects the characteristics of online environment in which the UCC creation activities occur voluntarily. Second, from the practical perspective this study proposes several concrete reward factors that are germane to the UCC environment, and their effectiveness to the content creativity is estimated. In addition to the quantitive results of relative importance of the reward factrs, this study also proposes concrete ways to provide the rewards in the UCC environment based on the FGI data that are collected after our participants finish asnwering survey questions. Finally, from the methodological perspective, this study suggests and implements a way to measure the UCC content creativity independently from the content generators' creativity, which can be used later by future research on UCC creativity. In sum, this study proposes and validates important reward features and their relations to the motivation, commitment, and the content creativity in UCC environment, which is believed to be one of the most important factors for the success of UCC and Web 2.0. As such, this study can provide significant theoretical as well as practical bases for fostering creativity in UCC contents.

Subject-Balanced Intelligent Text Summarization Scheme (주제 균형 지능형 텍스트 요약 기법)

  • Yun, Yeoil;Ko, Eunjung;Kim, Namgyu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.25 no.2
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    • pp.141-166
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    • 2019
  • Recently, channels like social media and SNS create enormous amount of data. In all kinds of data, portions of unstructured data which represented as text data has increased geometrically. But there are some difficulties to check all text data, so it is important to access those data rapidly and grasp key points of text. Due to needs of efficient understanding, many studies about text summarization for handling and using tremendous amounts of text data have been proposed. Especially, a lot of summarization methods using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms have been proposed lately to generate summary objectively and effectively which called "automatic summarization". However almost text summarization methods proposed up to date construct summary focused on frequency of contents in original documents. Those summaries have a limitation for contain small-weight subjects that mentioned less in original text. If summaries include contents with only major subject, bias occurs and it causes loss of information so that it is hard to ascertain every subject documents have. To avoid those bias, it is possible to summarize in point of balance between topics document have so all subject in document can be ascertained, but still unbalance of distribution between those subjects remains. To retain balance of subjects in summary, it is necessary to consider proportion of every subject documents originally have and also allocate the portion of subjects equally so that even sentences of minor subjects can be included in summary sufficiently. In this study, we propose "subject-balanced" text summarization method that procure balance between all subjects and minimize omission of low-frequency subjects. For subject-balanced summary, we use two concept of summary evaluation metrics "completeness" and "succinctness". Completeness is the feature that summary should include contents of original documents fully and succinctness means summary has minimum duplication with contents in itself. Proposed method has 3-phases for summarization. First phase is constructing subject term dictionaries. Topic modeling is used for calculating topic-term weight which indicates degrees that each terms are related to each topic. From derived weight, it is possible to figure out highly related terms for every topic and subjects of documents can be found from various topic composed similar meaning terms. And then, few terms are selected which represent subject well. In this method, it is called "seed terms". However, those terms are too small to explain each subject enough, so sufficient similar terms with seed terms are needed for well-constructed subject dictionary. Word2Vec is used for word expansion, finds similar terms with seed terms. Word vectors are created after Word2Vec modeling, and from those vectors, similarity between all terms can be derived by using cosine-similarity. Higher cosine similarity between two terms calculated, higher relationship between two terms defined. So terms that have high similarity values with seed terms for each subjects are selected and filtering those expanded terms subject dictionary is finally constructed. Next phase is allocating subjects to every sentences which original documents have. To grasp contents of all sentences first, frequency analysis is conducted with specific terms that subject dictionaries compose. TF-IDF weight of each subjects are calculated after frequency analysis, and it is possible to figure out how much sentences are explaining about each subjects. However, TF-IDF weight has limitation that the weight can be increased infinitely, so by normalizing TF-IDF weights for every subject sentences have, all values are changed to 0 to 1 values. Then allocating subject for every sentences with maximum TF-IDF weight between all subjects, sentence group are constructed for each subjects finally. Last phase is summary generation parts. Sen2Vec is used to figure out similarity between subject-sentences, and similarity matrix can be formed. By repetitive sentences selecting, it is possible to generate summary that include contents of original documents fully and minimize duplication in summary itself. For evaluation of proposed method, 50,000 reviews of TripAdvisor are used for constructing subject dictionaries and 23,087 reviews are used for generating summary. Also comparison between proposed method summary and frequency-based summary is performed and as a result, it is verified that summary from proposed method can retain balance of all subject more which documents originally have.

A Deep Learning Based Approach to Recognizing Accompanying Status of Smartphone Users Using Multimodal Data (스마트폰 다종 데이터를 활용한 딥러닝 기반의 사용자 동행 상태 인식)

  • Kim, Kilho;Choi, Sangwoo;Chae, Moon-jung;Park, Heewoong;Lee, Jaehong;Park, Jonghun
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.25 no.1
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    • pp.163-177
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    • 2019
  • As smartphones are getting widely used, human activity recognition (HAR) tasks for recognizing personal activities of smartphone users with multimodal data have been actively studied recently. The research area is expanding from the recognition of the simple body movement of an individual user to the recognition of low-level behavior and high-level behavior. However, HAR tasks for recognizing interaction behavior with other people, such as whether the user is accompanying or communicating with someone else, have gotten less attention so far. And previous research for recognizing interaction behavior has usually depended on audio, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi sensors, which are vulnerable to privacy issues and require much time to collect enough data. Whereas physical sensors including accelerometer, magnetic field and gyroscope sensors are less vulnerable to privacy issues and can collect a large amount of data within a short time. In this paper, a method for detecting accompanying status based on deep learning model by only using multimodal physical sensor data, such as an accelerometer, magnetic field and gyroscope, was proposed. The accompanying status was defined as a redefinition of a part of the user interaction behavior, including whether the user is accompanying with an acquaintance at a close distance and the user is actively communicating with the acquaintance. A framework based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent networks for classifying accompanying and conversation was proposed. First, a data preprocessing method which consists of time synchronization of multimodal data from different physical sensors, data normalization and sequence data generation was introduced. We applied the nearest interpolation to synchronize the time of collected data from different sensors. Normalization was performed for each x, y, z axis value of the sensor data, and the sequence data was generated according to the sliding window method. Then, the sequence data became the input for CNN, where feature maps representing local dependencies of the original sequence are extracted. The CNN consisted of 3 convolutional layers and did not have a pooling layer to maintain the temporal information of the sequence data. Next, LSTM recurrent networks received the feature maps, learned long-term dependencies from them and extracted features. The LSTM recurrent networks consisted of two layers, each with 128 cells. Finally, the extracted features were used for classification by softmax classifier. The loss function of the model was cross entropy function and the weights of the model were randomly initialized on a normal distribution with an average of 0 and a standard deviation of 0.1. The model was trained using adaptive moment estimation (ADAM) optimization algorithm and the mini batch size was set to 128. We applied dropout to input values of the LSTM recurrent networks to prevent overfitting. The initial learning rate was set to 0.001, and it decreased exponentially by 0.99 at the end of each epoch training. An Android smartphone application was developed and released to collect data. We collected smartphone data for a total of 18 subjects. Using the data, the model classified accompanying and conversation by 98.74% and 98.83% accuracy each. Both the F1 score and accuracy of the model were higher than the F1 score and accuracy of the majority vote classifier, support vector machine, and deep recurrent neural network. In the future research, we will focus on more rigorous multimodal sensor data synchronization methods that minimize the time stamp differences. In addition, we will further study transfer learning method that enables transfer of trained models tailored to the training data to the evaluation data that follows a different distribution. It is expected that a model capable of exhibiting robust recognition performance against changes in data that is not considered in the model learning stage will be obtained.

The Trend and Achievements of Forest Genetics Research in Abroad (선진국(先進國)에 있어서의 임목육종연구(林木育種硏究)의 동향(動向))

  • Hyun, Sin Kyu
    • Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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    • v.14 no.1
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    • pp.1-20
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    • 1972
  • The trend and achievements of forest genetics research in abroad were investigated through observation tours and reference work and following facts were found to be important aspects which should be adopted in the forest genetics research program in Korea. Because of world wide recognization on the urgency of taking a measure to reserve some areas of the representative forest type on the globe before the extingtion of such forest type as the results of continuous exploitations of the natural forests to meet the timber demand all over the world, it is urgently needed to take a measure to reserve certain areas of natural stand of Pinus koraiensis, Pinus parviflora, Pinus densiflora f. erectra, Abies koreana, Quercus sp., Populus sp., etc. as gene pool to be used for the future program of forest tree improvement. And the genetic studies of those natural forest of economic tree species are also to be performed. 1. Increase of the number of selected tree for breeding purpose. Because of the fact that the number of plus tree at present is too small to carry out selection program for tree improvement, particularly for the formation of source population for recurrent selection of parent trees of the 2nd generation seed orchard it is to be strongly emphasized to increase the number of plus tree by alleviating selection criteria in order to enlarge the population size of plus trees to make the selection program more efficient. 2. Progeny testing More stress should be placed on carrying out progeny testing of selected trees with open pollinated seeds. And particular efforts are to be made for conducting studies on adult/juvenile correlation of important traits with a view to enable to predict adult performances with some traits revealed in juvenile age thus to save time for progeny testing. 3. Genotype-environment interaction Studies on genotype and environment interaction should be conducted in order to elucidate whether the plus trees selected on the good site express their superiority on the poor site or not and how the environment affect the genotype. And the justification of present classification of seed distribution area should be examined. 4. Seed orchard of broad leaf tree species. Due to the difficulty of accurate comparison of growth rate of neighbouring trees of broad leaf tree species in natural stand, it is recommended that for the improvement of broad leaf trees a seedling seed orchard is to be made by roguing the progeny test plantation planted densely with control pollinated seedlings of selected trees. 5. Breeding for insect resistant varieties. In the light of the fact that the resistant characteristics against insect such as pine gall midge (Thiecodiplosis japonensis U. et I.) and pine bark beetle (Myelophilus pinipera L.) are highly correlated with the amount and quality of resin which are known as gene controlled characteristics, breeding for insect resistance should be carried out. 6. Breeding for timber properties. With the tree species for pulp wood in particular, emphasis should be placed upon breeding for high specific gravity of timber. 7. Introduction of Cryptomeria and Japanese Cypress In the light of the fact that the major clones of Cryptomeria are originated from Yoshino source and are being planted up to considerably north and high elevation in Japan, those species should be examined on their cold resistance in Korea by planting them in further northern part of the country.

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Lipopolysaccharide-induced Synthesis of IL-1beta, IL-6, TNF-alpha and TGF-beta by Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells (내독소에 의한 말초혈액 단핵구의 IL-1beta, IL-6, TNF-alpha와 TGF-beta 생성에 관한 연구)

  • Jung, Sung-Hwan;Park, Choon-Sik;Kim, Mi-Ho;Kim, Eun-Young;Chang, Hun-Soo;Ki, Shin-Young;Uh, Soo-Taek;Moon, Seung-Hyuk;Kim, Yang-Hoon;Lee, Hi-Bal
    • Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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    • v.45 no.4
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    • pp.846-860
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    • 1998
  • Background: Endotoxin (LPS : lipopolysaccharide), a potent activator of immune system, can induce acute and chronic inflammation through the production of cytokines by a variety of cells, such as monocytes, endothelial cells, lymphocytes, eosinophils, neutrophils and fibroblasts. LPS stimulate the mononucelar cells by two different pathway, the CD14 dependent and independent way, of which the former has been well documented, but not the latter. LPS binds to the LPS-binding protein (LBP), in serum, to make the LPS-LBP complex which interacts with CD14 molecules on the mononuclear cell surface in peripheral blood or is transported to the tissues. In case of high concentration of LPS, LPS can stimulate directly the macrophages without LBP. We investigated to detect the generation of proinflammatory cytokines such as interleukin 1 (IL-1), IL-6 and TNF-$\alpha$ and fibrogenic cytokine, TGF-$\beta$, by peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) after LPS stimulation under serum-free conditions, which lacks LBPs. Methods : PBMC were obtained by centrifugation on Ficoll Hypaque solution of peripheral venous bloods from healthy normal subjects, then stimulated in the presence of LPS (0.1 ${\mu}g/mL$ to 100 ${\mu}g/mL$ ). The activities of IL-1, IL-6, TNF, and TGF-$\beta$ were measured by bioassaies using cytokines - dependent proliferating or inhibiting cell lines. The cellular sources producing the cytokines was investigated by immunohistochemical stains and in situ hybridization. Results : PBMC started to produce IL-6, TNF-$\alpha$ and TGF-$\beta$ in 1 hr, 4 hrs and 8hrs, respectively, after LPS stimulation. The production of IL-6, TNF-$\alpha$ and TGF-$\beta$ continuously increased 96 hrs after stimulation of LPS. The amount of production was 19.8 ng/ml of IL-6 by $10^5$ PBMC, 4.1 ng/mL of TNF by $10^6$ PBMC and 34.4 pg/mL of TGF-$\beta$ by $2{\times}10^6$ PBMC. The immunoreactivity to IL-6, TNF-$\alpha$ and TGF-$\beta$ were detected on monocytes in LPS-stimulated PBMC. Some of lymphocytes showed positive immunoreactivity to TGF-$\beta$. Double immunohistochemical stain showed that IL-1$\beta$, IL-6, TNF-$\alpha$ expression was not associated with CD14 postivity on monocytes. IL-1$\beta$, IL-6, TNF-$\alpha$ and TGF-$\beta$mRNA expression were same as observed in immunoreactivity for each cytokines. Conclusion: When monocytes are stimulated with LPS under serum-free conditions, IL-6 and TNF-$\alpha$ are secreted in early stage of inflammation. In contrast, the secretion of TGF-$\beta$ arise in the late stages and that is maintained after 96 hrs. The main cells releasing IL-1$\beta$, IL-6, TNF-$\alpha$ and TGF-$\beta$ are monocytes, but also lymphocytes can secret TGF-$\beta$.

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The Study of Characteristics of Consumer Purchasing Private Brand Products at Large-Scale Mart (국내 대형마트의 유통업체 브랜드 상품 구매 소비자의 특성 분석에 관한 연구)

  • Hwang, Seong-Huyk;Lee, Jung-Hee;Roh, Eun-Jung
    • Journal of Distribution Research
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    • v.15 no.4
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    • pp.1-19
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    • 2010
  • As having the movement of developing private brand (PB) goods, domestic big retailers are facing up with new problems. Thus, it is required studies of PB products, and how consumers recognize PB products as a consideration commodity set. Also, it is worthy in order that it gives us the important meaning on the marketing strategy with focusing on evaluating the differences between customers buying PB grocery goods with respect to demographic characteristics and purchasing behaviors. PB has some advantages for customers and retailers. However, according to AC Nielson's report (2005), Asian and emerging market has 1/5 sales relatively to Western countries. But we can assume that the emerging market has the most potential growth through this result. As a result from several other studies, it becomes necessary to not only increase the rate of selling composition of PB product temporarily, but also analyze the characteristics of customers using big retailers and segmenting customer groups to make PB product as a consideration commodity set for them. In addition, it is needed to have a variety of acts of marketing. From studies related to PB, there is a prejudice - cheap products have low quality - but, evaluation by customers who have used those products shows neutral stand, and there is a study representing that it is the most important to accumulate the belief between the retailers selling PB products and consumers using those for the accurate evaluation and intention on purchasing. Also, by the result from analyzing the characteristics of customers buying PB products, we could assume that higher income and higher education level, more preference on PB products. Especially, according to TNS's research, the primary targets of PB product are 30's who seeks value for money and planned spending habits, and 40's who have teenager children, and are interested in encouraging themselves. This paper used Probit model to analyze the characteristics of consumers. This model helps us to analyze with the variables representing the demographic characteristics of consumers (gender, age, educational level, occupation, income level, living area), and variables related to purchasing behavior (visiting frequency on big retailers, the average amount that they pay for goods in there, and check-up which brand made those goods). The method we used in this study is by man to man interview and survey on-line with the rate of 89% and 11% in Seoul and Gyunggi Province, respectively, for about one month from the beginning of February, 2008. As a result of this, under the assumption that people buy PB products more as long as they go shopping more, it was not meaningful for target groups which we pointed out as frequently visiting customers to be. Although, we have expected women buy more PB products than men do, gender doesn't mean anything for the result. And, it has inferred that married people buy more PB goods than singles do. It was also meaningless with variables related to occupation. Because housewives are often exposed to any kind of supermarket than workers are, we could not get any relatives. Moreover, we couldn't proof that younger generation prefer big retailers more than older people who 50~60's. Education levels doesn't affect on the purchase of PB product as well. Related to living area, the result is statistically not similar as we expected whether living in Seoul or not. It shows there is no relationship with the preference on retail brands and PB products, and it is similar with the study researched by TNS(2008) that customers tend to buy PB product impulsively no matter which brand it is and where they are even though their shopping place is the big market where customers are often using. Variables on which we had meaningful results are income level and living place. That is, customers who have 3,000,000~6,000,000 WON every month on average are more willing to buy PB products than other customers whose income is over 6,000,000 WON, and residents not living in Seoul prefer PB goods than those who are living in Seoul. To explain more about what we got, if there is only one condition about customer's visiting frequency on big retails, we could come up with this result that more exposed to PB products, more purchasing frequency. Consequently, it brings the important insight that large retailers have to prepare something to make customers visit them often to increase selling rate of PB products. To demonstrate the result of analyzing more, what is more efficient variables are demographically including marital status, income level, and residential area to buy items that affect the PB products and could include the frequency of visiting large markets by the purchase habits. Specifically, then, married couples rather than singles, middle-income customers than high-income customers, and local residents not living in Seoul than customers in Seoul are more likely to purchase PB goods. In addition, as long as a customer visits two times more, then the purchasing rate of PB products is to increase over 5.3%. Therefore, it seems that retailers are better to make a shopping place as fun and comfortable places. With overwhelming the idea that PB products are just cheap, one-time purchase goods, it is needed to increase the loyalty on those goods like NB products, try to make PB products as a consideration products set, and occur to sustainable sales. Especially, as suggested by this paper, it seems like it strongly needs to identify the characteristics of customers who prefer PB, to segment those customers, and to select the main target, and to do positioning with well-planned marketing strategies. Then, it is able to give us a meaningful point on marketing strategy by developing the field of PB study, identifying the difference of life style and shopping habits of customers.

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