• 한국노년학
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.611-632
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• 2016

Solutions for elderly health issues need to be found that take into account not only a medical perspective, but also interactions with social conditions such as socioeconomic status. With this in mind, this study aims to understand how socioeconomic status leads to health inequalities for the elderly. Specifically, this study investigates the mediating effects of socioeconomic status(income and education levels), health activities as an intermediary of the three dimensions of physical health(medical health, functional health, subjective health), accessibility of medical facilities, social participation, and social network. To test the research model, a secondary data analysis was conducted on the 2014 National Survey of Senior Citizens. The participants of the study were 10,451 elderly men and women aged 65 and above. To test the mediated model, hierarchical multiple regression analysis was conducted following the procedures suggested by Baron and Kenny(1986). In addition, a Sobel test was conducted to test the mediated model's significance. According to the analysis, the effects of income and educational levels on the health of the elderly were not the same. Additionally, different results were found depending on health dimensions. However, the overall direction of the results showed that the socioeconomic status of the elderly creates health disparities, and health behaviors, accessibility of medical facilities, social participation, and social network had significant mediation effects between socioeconomic status and physical health. Study findings especially worth noting are as follows: education was shown to have a stronger effect on health than income; effects of social integration factors such as social participation were highlighted; and significant mediating effects on the accessibility of medical facilities remained even after taking residential area into account. Results of this study shed light on health inequality mechanisms due to socioeconomic conditions and the need to find alternatives to alleviate these problems.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.437-463
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• 2013

As polarization and class reproduction between generations are considered to be serious problems in Korean society, increasing number of assortative mating, which means marrying between homogeneous family background, income class, and educational background, is on the spotlight socially. Some worry that the increase of assortative mating can reinforce closure of social mobility so it deepens inequality and limits class mobility between generations. This research analyzes the effects of accomplishment characteristics of husbands and wives and ascriptive characteristics of parents which consist the concept of assortative mating, on income, consumption, and assets those represent economic status of a family. The purpose of this research is to suggest empirical understanding on the role of assortative mating that affect on inequality within generations and income mobility between generations in Korean society. In the result of multiple regression analysis on the effect of assortative mating on income, consumption, and assets, high educational background was the factor that increase income and consumption level as accomplishment characteristics of assortative mating. As ascriptive characteristics of assortative mating, educational homogeneous of fathers was the factor that increased asset level. While accomplishment characteristics affect income and consumption, ascriptive characteristics of homogeneous had significant effect on assets. Thus, it was found that transfer between generations had effects around asset rather than income. In particular, ascriptive characteristics in young husbands and wives aged 20s or 30s had significant effect only on the assets.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.42
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• pp.69-106
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• 2016

Early marriage in contemporary society has brought about many problems. The practice is encouraged by gender inequality, poverty and social norms. It reproduces social power imbalances including increased economic vulnerability of women, low educational attainment of girls, gender inequality at home and in the labor market, physical and sexual violence against women and their health problems. The Ethiopian government increased the minimum legal age of marriage for women from 15 to 18 years, by revising its family code in 2000 and newly adopting a criminal law in 2005 that includes punishment against any harmful tradition. Nonetheless, early marriage is still widely practiced in many parts of rural Ethiopia. This is because the practice has long been embedded and deeply rooted in the lives of the people. Earlier literature on early marriage in Ethiopia tends to focus only on women's experiences and regard that all early-married people, particularly women, are unhappy with their lives. This paper attempts to explore the issue of early marriage through voices of people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, in order to address the limitations of the previous literature. This article aims at examining why early marriage has occurred in Ethiopia and how it has affected family life and women's educational attainment, focusing on the case of Meki town. As seen from this study, it is true that early marriage generally had negative influences on the lives of women. However, it is equally true that some men are also victims of the practice while some women have improved their lives by means of it. This implies that we need to listen to the voices of diverse people when we examine early marriage.

• 한국사회정책
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.69-96
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• 2013

This paper is to critically review the economic reasoning of non-sustainability of welfare state due to its intrinsic incentive problems and to see how the nordic welfare state responds to them. The welfare state as a political design of state to pursue equality has social insurance as its main economic function. It survives market failure of private insurance to contribute to human capital investment and industrial restructuring. The universal tax-financed welfare state, however, has the problem of tragedy of commons such as reduced work incentive and work ethics. But, the existing nordic welfare state overcomes it through employment-focused policy arrangements, maintenance of work ethics and benefits moral, incentive mechanism of wage-compression, public educational investment and its complementation with social security. The Nordic model shows that problems of incentive and moral are not about those of theory and reasoning, but about their reality which policies and institutions could respond to.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.547-560
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• 2018

This paper investigates the operation of the $H_{\infty}$ static output-feedback controller to reduce dynamic responses under seismic excitation on the five-story and benchmark 20 story building with parametric uncertainties. Linear matrix inequality (LMI) control theory is applied in this system and then to achieve the desired LMI formulations, some transformations of the LMI variables is used. Conversely uncertainties due to material properties, environmental loads such as earthquake and wind hazards make the uncertain system. This problem and its effects are studied in this research. Also to decrease the transition of large amount of data between sensors and controller, avoiding the disruption of whole control system and economy problems, the operation of the decentralized controllers is investigated in this paper. For this purpose the comparison between the performance of the centralized, fully decentralized and partial decentralized controllers in uncoupled and coupled cases is performed. Also, the effect of the changing the number of stories in substructures is considered. Based on the numerical results, the used control algorithm is very robust against the parametric uncertainties and structural responses are decreased considerably in all the control cases but partial decentralized controller in coupled form gets the closest results to the centralized case. The results indicate the high applicability of the used control algorithm in the tall shear buildings to reduce the structural responses and its robustness against the uncertainties.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.32-37
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• 2015

In the fields of plant layout optimization, the main goal is to minimize the construction cost including pipelines as satisfying all constraints such as safety and operating issues. However, what is the lacking of considerations in previous researches is to consider proper safety and maintenance spaces for a complex plant. Based on the mathematical programming, MILP(Mixed Integer Linear Programming) problems including various constraints can be formulated to find the optimal solution which is to achieve the best economic benefits. The objective function of this problem is the sum of piping cost, pumping cost and area cost. In general, many conventional optimization solvers are used to find a MILP problem. However, it is really hard to solve this problem due to complex inequality and equality constraints, since it is impossible to use the derivatives of objective functions and constraints. To resolve this problem, the PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization), which is one of the representative sampling approaches and does not need to use derivatives of equations, is employed to find the optimal solution considering various complex constraints in this study. The EO (Ethylene Oxide) plant is tested to verify the efficacy of the proposed method.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.8-13
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• 2007

During the last years, there has been an increased interest in the new energy such as photovoltaic(PV) system from the viewpoint of environmental pollution. In this regard, this paper estimates the power quality of grid-connected PV system. As the maximum power operating point(MPOP) of photovoltaic(PV) power systems alters with changing atmospheric conditions, the efficiency of maximum power point tracking(MPPT) is important in PV power systems. Moreover, grid-connected PV system occurs some problems such as voltage inequality and harmonics. Therefore, this paper presents the results of a grid-connected PV system modeling that contains incremental conductance MPPT controller by PSCAD/EMTDC simulator and investigates the influence that can occur in the grid-connected PV system from aspect of power quality, i.e. voltage drop, total harmonic distortion(TDD) and total demand distortion(TDD). For the case study, the measured data of the PV way in Cheongwadae, Seoul, Korea is used.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.167-190
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• 2000

The Korean labor market is changing very fast after the economic crisis. In the middle of 2000, the unemployment rate has decreased to the less than 4% and wage income has recovered to its pre-crisis level. However, the number of employed and the labor market participation rate has not yet recovered, and income inequality is widening. In this situation, there is some concern about the potential for the histeresis phenomenon, which occurred in Europe after 1970, and means that a high unemployment rate could continued regardless of price levels. Therefore, focus should be placed on the labor market policy for the 21 st century reducing structural unemployment through creation of jobs in order to solve problems of unemployment and income distribution simultaneously.

• KIEAE Journal
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.29-36
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• 2017

Purpose: Residential differentiation is often considered to be one of the social problems that intensify urban inequality. The purpose of the study was to analyze the changes in the Gwangju urban landscape due to foreign inflows after reviewing the different frameworks about the causes of residential segregation and verifying compliance through case analysis. Method: This study analyzed the increase of Gwangju Foreign Population based on the data of the Statistics Korea and derived the concentrated areas of foreign population using GIS program. Then through the field research around the target areas, the changes of urban landscape by the foreign residents was analyzed. The foreign population in Korea recently surpassed 1.5 million is expected to increase further, and has already raised numerous social issues especially in urban area. Result: Therefore, basic and systematic analyses on foreign population and its impacts on urban residential landscape are necessary to resolve the issues. Since Gwangju is also in a similar situation, this research is first, to address the current situation and identify the problem, and then to suggest the directions for resolving them. It is also expected to be helpful provide a basic reference for related further researches.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.27 no.8
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• pp.1353-1362
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• 2003

This paper considers a simultaneous optimization problem of structure and control systems. The problem is generally formulated as a non-convex optimization problem for the design parameters of mechanical structure and controller. Therefore, it is not easy to obtain the global solutions for practical problems. In this paper, we parameterize all design parameters of the mechanical structure such that the parameters work in the control system as decentralized static output feedback gains. Using this parameterization, we have formulated a simultaneous optimization problem in which the design specification is defined by the Η$_2$and Η$\_$$\infty$/ norms of the closed loop transfer function. So as to lead to a convex problem we approximate the nonlinear terms of design parameters to the linear terms. Then, we propose a convex optimization method that is based on linear matrix inequality (LMI). Using this method, we can surely obtain suboptimal solution for the design specification. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.