• Journal of Public Diplomacy
• /
• v.1 no.2
• /
• pp.27-48
• /
• 2021

Remarkably, despite the growing frequency and severity of global problems such as climate change, earthquakes and health pandemics, public diplomacy has remained largely focused on the goals of state actors and threats from other actors. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the consequences of focusing on individual actors of public diplomacy, including their competitive quest for soft power, over the more pressing needs of humanity and public diplomacy's global mandate. The aim of this piece is to expand the vision of soft power from a competitive state-centric perspective to a broader and more collaborative, humanity-centered perspective. Although public diplomacy's link to power may appear recent and linked to Nye's (2004) concept of soft power, research suggests that it may stem from the traditional diplomacy's "diplomacy of imperialism" (Langer, 1935) that immediately preceded public diplomacy's rise. While this diplomatic heritage may currently dominate public diplomacy perspectives, humankind's global heritages and evolutionary capacity for cooperation suggest another vision is possible. The paper draws upon Alexander Vuving's (2009) explanation of how soft power works in a comparative analysis with Nye's original works to sketch out a new humanity-centered perspective of soft power. The paper concludes with implications of a humanity-centered perspective of soft power for public diplomacy's global mandate.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
• /
• v.27 no.4
• /
• pp.297-304
• /
• 2022

This study compares the performance of artificial intelligence (AI)-based maximum power point tracking (MPPT) methods under partial shading conditions in a photovoltaic generation system. Although many studies on AI-based MPPT have been conducted, few studies comparing the tracking performance of various AI-based global MPPT methods seem to exist in the literature. Therefore, this study compares four representative AI-based global MPPT methods including fuzzy logic control (FLC), particle swarm optimization (PSO), grey wolf optimization (GWO), and genetic algorithm (GA). Each method is theoretically analyzed in detail and compared through simulation studies with MATLAB/Simulink under the same conditions. Based on the results of performance comparison, PSO, GWO, and GA successfully tracked the global maximum power point. In particular, the tracking speed of GA was the fastest among the investigated methods under the given conditions.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
• /
• v.10 no.3
• /
• pp.272-280
• /
• 2022

During last few years, pandemic of COVID-19 has been a global issue. Under the COVID-19, global events have been restricted or canceled to secure public hygiene and safety. Since one of the largest global events is Olympic Games, we selected recent Olympic Games as our case of analysis. Tokyo Olympic Games (TOG) was held in 2021, but it encountered a millennium disaster, the pandemic of COVID-19. In such a special period, it is of great significance to explore the emotional tendency of global views before and TOG via artificial intelligence. This paper vastly collects the TOG comment data of mainstream websites in South Korea, China, and the United States by implementing crawler program for sentiment analysis (SA). And we use a variety of sentiment analysis models to compare the accuracy of the experimental results, to obtain more reliable SA results. In addition, in the prediction results, to reduce the distortion of opinion by a minority, we introduce an algorithm called "Removing Biased Minority Opinions (RBMO)" and provide how to apply this method to the interpretation domain. Through our method, more authoritative SA results were obtained, which in turn provided a basis for predicting the sentiment tendency of countries around the world in TOG during the COVID-19 epidemic.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
• /
• v.10 no.3
• /
• pp.111-119
• /
• 2022

Boredom is considered anxiety and is an experience accompanied by a lack of meaning because the need for meaning is not met. It is the pain that people feel without using their mind, and the suffering that people fall into the absence of desire. On the other hand, religious activities give people meaning in life, which reduces the tendency to feel bored. This study investigates whether there is a difference in boredom depending on whether individuals participate in religious activities, and to verify whether the meaning in life mediates the relationships between religious activities and boredom. We predicted that if individuals engaged in religious activities, the meaning in life would increase, and they would be less bored than those who did not. A total of 82 college students participated in this study. Results showed that there were significant differences in the meaning in life and boredom between the two groups according to whether they participated in religious activities or not. The group actively participating in religious activities had significantly higher meaning in life and lower boredom than the non-religious group. Second, the meaning in life significantly mediated the relationship between religious activities and boredom. We conclude that active participation in religious activities can increase the meaning in life and ultimately reduce boredom. Based on the results of this study, the implications and suggestions for follow-up studies are discussed.

• Steel and Composite Structures
• /
• v.42 no.4
• /
• pp.447-458
• /
• 2022

Cold-formed steel (CFS) sections are thin-walled, therefore, more susceptible to different types of geometric imperfections. Global type of geometric imperfections has a significant impact on the load-carrying capacity of flexural members. This paper reports an experimental study that discusses the influence of global imperfections on the flexural response of CFS built-up I-beams composed of two lipped channels, with simply supported ends, under four-point loading. Global imperfections of magnitude over eight times the maximum permissible ones were induced in the specimens, leading to their distress. Using various simple stiffening schemes, the capacity and stiffness of the distressed specimens were improvised. The performance comparisons were made based on the maximum loads resisted, flexural stiffnesses offered, and failure modes experienced by the specimens. As experimental data on such distressed specimens are currently lacking in the literature, the test results of the present study will provide the necessary data needed by future researchers to numerically extend this study further, which will help in the development of necessary design guidelines for the same. The stiffening schemes significantly improved the structural efficiency of distressed specimens in terms of strength and stiffness, by over 60%. As a result, an effective and time-saving solution to such realistic structural engineering problems is given.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
• /
• v.10 no.4
• /
• pp.518-528
• /
• 2022

Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely used in various applications to generate realistic virtual environments. A sense of immersion can be increased by providing additional stimuli such as tactile sensation to VR contents. However, it is still challenging to provide a realistic feel for the wind blowing over the whole body by smoothly controlling the airflow. To address this issue, we employ a household electric fan as a wind generating device to provide users with wind experience in VR environments. The wind generating device targets the whole body to mimic the wind we feel outside in our daily life. To do so, we present a low-cost method to smoothly control household fan speed using an Arduino microcontroller. Here, we use the Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation (SPWM) technique to generate the sinusoidal voltage required to drive the fan motor. Our experimental results show how Variable Voltage Variable Frequency (VVVF) is implemented at a low cost using our method for household fan speed control. The results can be applied to various VR applications to enhance the sense of immersion by providing users with realistic wind.

• The Korea Journal of Herbology
• /
• v.28 no.2
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2013

Objectives : Sesamin, a major lignan in sesame seeds, has been reported to have neuroprotective effects against in vitro ischemia and in vivo MCAo-reperfusion cerebral ischemia model, however, there is no reports in an in vivo global cerebral ischemia model. The purpose of the study was to investigate the neuroprotective effect of sesamin in global cerebral ischemia induced by four-vessel occlusion (4-VO) in rats through inhibition of microglial activation in this model. Methods : The neuroprotective effects were investigated using a 10 min of 4-VO ischemia rat model by measuring intact pyramidal neurons in the CA1 region of the hippocampus using Nissle staining. The antiinflammatory or reducing neurotoxicity effect was investigated using immunohistochemisty, RT-PCR and western blot analysis of inflammatory or neurotoxic mediators. Results : Intraperitoneal injection of sesamin at doses of 0.3, 1.0, 3.0, and 10.0 mg/kg at 0 min and 90 min after ischemia conferred 26.6%, 30.1%, 42.5%, and 30.5% neuroprotection, respectively, compared to the vehicle-treated control group. A 3.0 mg/kg dose of sesamin inhibited microglia activation and consequently, cyclooxygenase-2, inducible nitric oxide, and interleukine-$1{\beta}$ expressions at 48 h after reperfusion. Conclusions : Sesamin protects neuronal cell death through inhibition of microglial activation or the production of neurotoxic metabolites and proinflammatory mediators by microglia such as COX-2, iNOS and IL-$1{\beta}$ in global cerebral ischemia.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
• /
• 2023.05a
• /
• pp.180-180
• /
• 2023

To improve global risk management, understanding the characteristics and distribution of precipitation is crucial. However, obtaining spatially and temporally resolved climatic data remains challenging due to sparse gauge observations and limited data availability, despite the use of satellite and reanalysis products. To address this challenge, merging available precipitation products has been introduced to generate spatially and temporally reliable data by taking advantage of the strength of the individual products. However, most of the existing studies utilize all the available products without considering the varying performances of each dataset in different regions. Comprehensively considering the relative contributions of each parent dataset is necessary since their contributions may vary significantly and utilizing all the available datasets for data merging may lead to significant data redundancy issues. Hence, for this study, we introduce a site-specific precipitation merging method that utilizes the Quadruple Collocation (QC) approach, which acknowledges the existence of error-cross correlation between the parent datasets, to create a high-resolution global daily precipitation data from 2001-2020. The performance of multiple gridded precipitation products are first evaluated per region to determine the best combination of quadruplets to be utilized in estimating the error variances through the QC approach and computation of merging weights. The merged precipitation is then computed by adding the precipitation from each dataset in the quadruplet multiplied by each respective merging weight. Our results show that our approach holds promise for generating reliable global precipitation data for data-scarce regions lacking spatially and temporally resolved precipitation data.

• Journal of International Area Studies (JIAS)
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.51-68
• /
• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to review China's perception on the U.S. power after the global financial crisis. Although economic power of U.S. was declined by the global financial crisis, U.S. hegemony in the international order still maintains. Gap of national power between U.S. and China may be narrow because of decline of U.S. economic power. It can be predicted China will push a policy that secures an initiative of reform in the global monetary system and is going to take a more cooperative policy without U.S. hegemony power harming China's core interests.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.189-201
• /
• 2022

The study empirically examines the impact of monetary fundamentals along with global oil prices on the Pak-rupee exchange rate using the monthly data over 2001-2020. Employing the cointegrating vector autoregressive with exogenous variables (VARX) and vector error correction model with exogenous variables (VECMX), the study analyzes the impact of domestic monetary fundamentals while considering the foreign variables as weakly exogenous. In order to account for the structural breaks in the data, the Lagrange multiplier (LM) unit root test with two structural breaks has been used (Lee & Strazicich, 2003). The empirical results reveal that the domestic and foreign monetary variables significantly explain the exchange rate movements in Pakistan both in the long run and in the short run. The dynamic properties of the monetary model of exchange rate have been analyzed using the persistence profile analysis and generalized impulse response functions (GIRFs). The results reveal that the responses of shocks to domestic monetary fundamentals are consistent with the predictions of the monetary model of the exchange rate. Furthermore, being a net oil importer, a rise in global oil prices significantly depreciated the Pak-rupee exchange rate over the period of study. The global financial crisis (GFC) and pandemic (COVID-19) were also found to cause the Pak-rupee exchange rate depreciation.