• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.66-94
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• 2004

The objective of this study is to examine how to maximize the efficiency of hospital management by minimizing the unit cost of hospital operation. For this purpose, this paper proposes to develop a model of the profit maximization based on the cost minimization dictum using the statistical tools of arriving at the maximum likelihood values. The preliminary survey data are collected from the annual statistics and their analyses published by Korea Health Industry Development Institute and Korean Hospital Association. The maximum likelihood value statistical analyses are conducted from the information on the cost (function) of each of 36 hospitals selected by the random stratified sampling method according to the size and location (urban or rural) of hospitals. We believe that, although the size of sample is relatively small, because of the sampling method used and the high response rate, the power of estimation of the results of the statistical analyses of the sample hospitals is acceptable. The conceptual framework of analyses is adopted from the various models of the determinants of hospital costs used by the previous studies. According to this framework, the study postulates that the unit cost of hospital operation is determined by the size, scope of service, technology (production function) as measured by capacity utilization, labor capital ratio and labor input-mix variables, and by exogeneous variables. The variables to represent the above cost determinants are selected by using the step-wise regression so that only the statistically significant variables may be utilized in analyzing how these variables impact on the hospital unit cost. The results of the analyses show that the models of hospital cost determinants adopted are well chosen. The various models analyzed have the (goodness of fit) overall determination (R2) which all turned out to be significant, regardless of the variables put in to represent the cost determinants. Specifically, the size and scope of service, no matter how it is measured, i. e., number of admissions per bed, number of ambulatory visits per bed, adjusted inpatient days and adjusted outpatients, have overall effects of reducing the hospital unit costs as measured by the cost per admission, per inpatient day, or office visit implying the existence of the economy of scale in the hospital operation. Thirdly, the technology used in operating a hospital has turned out to have its ramifications on the hospital unit cost similar to those postulated in the static theory of the firm. For example, the capacity utilization as represented by the inpatient days per employee tuned out to have statistically significant negative impacts on the unit cost of hospital operation, while payroll expenses per inpatient cost has a positive effect. The input-mix of hospital operation, as represented by the ratio of the number of doctor, nurse or medical staff per general employee, supports the known thesis that the specialized manpower costs more than the general employees. The labor/capital ratio as represented by the employees per 100 beds is shown to have a positive effect on the cost as expected. As for the exogeneous variable's impacts on the cost, when this variable is represented by the percent of urban 100 population at the location where the hospital is located, the regression analysis shows that the hospitals located in the urban area have a higher cost than those in the rural area. Finally, the case study of the sample hospitals offers a specific information to hospital administrators about how they share in terms of the cost they are incurring in comparison to other hospitals. For example, if his/her hospital is of small size and located in a city, he/she can compare the various costs of his/her hospital operation with those of other similar hospitals. Therefore, he/she may be able to find the reasons why the cost of his/her hospital operation has a higher or lower cost than other similar hospitals in what factors of the hospital cost determinants.

• Journal of Korean Clinical Health Science
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.825-833
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• 2017

Purpose .This study aims to assess the influence factors on the level of satisfaction with hospital training and to provide basic data for more efficient hospital practice of students' public health administration . Methods . We have conducted a survey on students satisfaction with their hands on practice against 200 students in Busan, Kyeongnam and Kyungbook area, who have completed their practice in public health administration. We have identified the general characteristics of the target respondents, the current training status of the department for the hospital practice and training venue; also analyzed the characteristics composed of the apprentice student's attitude before the practice, satisfaction with the department training program and hospital for practice, as well as their practice at hospital. The general characteristics of the target respondents and clinic practice status at the hospital were measured in percentage and frequency analysis; the average and standard deviations of hospital size were also measured; and the correlations between satisfaction with the department, attitude towards the practice and satisfaction with the hospital were analyzed. Results . Most public health administration students experienced their practice at the hospital after the first semester on the $2^{nd}$year and they have received the foundation training for the practice. The survey allowed multiple responses and the results are as follows: medical terminology 49.5%, medical coordinator 36.7%, Hospital administration 26.5%, Health insurance 17.3%, and medical recording and practice 13.8% respectively. In terms of each individual student's attitude towards the practice at the hospital, the respondents answered as follows: I have completed the obligatory subjects for the practice before the practice 89.5%; I have been fully informed on the hospital for my practice. 74.5%; I responsibly practiced and worked with professionalism and sense of belonging to the hospital as a member of staff 90%; I have actively learned and adopted 95%; My knowledge and skills from the practice was relevant to the theory and practice from my course 83.5%. The findings of satisfaction by size of hospital were in order of a small clinic($3.24{\pm}0.63$), medium sized clinic($3.27{\pm}0.65$), hospital ($3.20{\pm}0.61$), and large sized comprehensive hospital ($2.93{\pm}0.74$). Consequently the satisfaction rate shows no significant difference by size of hospital. In relations between practice attitude and satisfaction with subject, the matter of acquiring information and fully understanding of the hospital for practice before practice(p=0.04), the matter of a sense of belonging and responsibility at hospital during practice(p=0.33). the matter of active adaptation attitude during practice (p=0.42), and the matter of correlations with school curriculum during practice(p=0.00) showed significant results. In relations between practice attitude and satisfaction with the hospital for practice, the matter of acquiring information and fully understanding of the hospital for practice before practice(p=0.01), the matter of a sense of belonging and responsibility at hospital during practice(p=0.04), and the matter of correlations with school curriculum during practice(p=0.00) showed significant results. Conclusion . The most essential subject for the practice in public health administration is medical terminology and there is no significance in satisfaction with the practice by size of hospital. Students were content with the hospital where they can experience as much as possible. Students content with their major show positive attitude towards the practice and so do those content with the hospital. Those with the positive attitude towards the practice show the high correlation of satisfaction with both the major and hospital. As a result, the satisfaction with the major is the significant attribute to the practice in the hospital.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.80-96
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• 2016

Recently, a series of lawsuits were filed in Korea claiming tort liability against tobacco companies. The Supreme Court has already issued decisions in some cases, while others are still pending. The primary issue in these cases is whether the epidemiological evidence submitted by the plaintiffs clearly proves the causal relationship between smoking and disease as required by civil law. Proving causation is difficult in tobacco lawsuits because factors other than smoking are involved in the development of a disease, and also because of the lapse of time between smoking and the manifestation of the disease. The Supreme Court (Supreme Court Decision, 2011Da22092, April 10, 2014) has imposed some limitations on using epidemiological evidence to prove causation in tobacco lawsuits filed by smokers and their family members, but these limitations should be reconsidered. First, the Court stated that a disease can be categorized as specific or non-specific, and for each disease type, causation can be proven by different types of evidence. However, the concept of specific diseases is not compatible with multifactor theory, which is generally accepted in the field of public health. Second, when the epidemiological association between the disease and the risk factor is proven to be significant, imposing additional burdens of proof on the plaintiff may considerably limit the plaintiff's right to recovery, but the Court required the plaintiffs to provide additional information such as health condition and lifestyle. Third, the Supreme Court is not giving greater weight to the evidential value of epidemiological study results because the Court focuses on the fact that these studies were group-level, not individual-level. However, group-level studies could still offer valuable information about individual members of the group, e.g., probability of causation.

• The Journal of Information Technology
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.81-102
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• 1998

It is common description that modern society is In the era of limitless competition. In order to challenge the change of economy and its management at home and abroad, organization should be changed anew, and in this case, there accompanies conflict or trouble whether the subject of change wants it or not. Therefore, according to change, we should concern with settlement of small troubles as well as big ones, and by managing the conflict or trouble productively and originally, it should be utilized as new fatality and chance to develop something in organization. In the system organized by people, there exist various conflicts in accordance with the target and want of the system, therefore giving no freedom to each Individual member of the system, and this is an unavoidable tate in consideration of the modem society where the survival of mankind and human systems should be guaranteed. Therefore, it determines the coordinates of success of any of organizations to manage conflict or trouble well, and so, when decreasing or increasing conflicts so that the organization exerts its full influence, it is note worthy that conflict itself should be rationally and efficiently managed. In a view point of the theory of organization and its behavior, relating job satisfaction with the performance and validity of organization, the influence of individual conflict is so great on the rate of job transfer within an organization or nonattendance, even on the productivity of the organization. So, the manager to cope with conflict within an organization should devise following three plans to manage conflict for job satisfaction and conflict settlement. In conclusion, it is suggested that in order to manage conflict within an organization well, some plans to control conflict should be well utilized while giving more efforts to improving management of individual conflict, job satisfaction, validity of organization, productivity, etc and all the members of organization should remember that the Issue of conflict within an organization be recognized ad an opportunity of new development and a way to settle a trouble within an organization, and a direction of conflict management should be suggested so that new innovation ca be created.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.121-139
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• 2014

Predicting corporate failure has been an important topic in accounting and finance. The costs associated with bankruptcy are high, so the accuracy of bankruptcy prediction is greatly important for financial institutions. Lots of researchers have dealt with the topic associated with bankruptcy prediction in the past three decades. The current research attempts to use ensemble models for improving the performance of bankruptcy prediction. Ensemble classification is to combine individually trained classifiers in order to gain more accurate prediction than individual models. Ensemble techniques are shown to be very useful for improving the generalization ability of the classifier. Bagging is the most commonly used methods for constructing ensemble classifiers. In bagging, the different training data subsets are randomly drawn with replacement from the original training dataset. Base classifiers are trained on the different bootstrap samples. Instance selection is to select critical instances while deleting and removing irrelevant and harmful instances from the original set. Instance selection and bagging are quite well known in data mining. However, few studies have dealt with the integration of instance selection and bagging. This study proposes an improved bagging ensemble based on instance selection using genetic algorithms (GA) for improving the performance of SVM. GA is an efficient optimization procedure based on the theory of natural selection and evolution. GA uses the idea of survival of the fittest by progressively accepting better solutions to the problems. GA searches by maintaining a population of solutions from which better solutions are created rather than making incremental changes to a single solution to the problem. The initial solution population is generated randomly and evolves into the next generation by genetic operators such as selection, crossover and mutation. The solutions coded by strings are evaluated by the fitness function. The proposed model consists of two phases: GA based Instance Selection and Instance based Bagging. In the first phase, GA is used to select optimal instance subset that is used as input data of bagging model. In this study, the chromosome is encoded as a form of binary string for the instance subset. In this phase, the population size was set to 100 while maximum number of generations was set to 150. We set the crossover rate and mutation rate to 0.7 and 0.1 respectively. We used the prediction accuracy of model as the fitness function of GA. SVM model is trained on training data set using the selected instance subset. The prediction accuracy of SVM model over test data set is used as fitness value in order to avoid overfitting. In the second phase, we used the optimal instance subset selected in the first phase as input data of bagging model. We used SVM model as base classifier for bagging ensemble. The majority voting scheme was used as a combining method in this study. This study applies the proposed model to the bankruptcy prediction problem using a real data set from Korean companies. The research data used in this study contains 1832 externally non-audited firms which filed for bankruptcy (916 cases) and non-bankruptcy (916 cases). Financial ratios categorized as stability, profitability, growth, activity and cash flow were investigated through literature review and basic statistical methods and we selected 8 financial ratios as the final input variables. We separated the whole data into three subsets as training, test and validation data set. In this study, we compared the proposed model with several comparative models including the simple individual SVM model, the simple bagging model and the instance selection based SVM model. The McNemar tests were used to examine whether the proposed model significantly outperforms the other models. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the other models.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.157-165
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• 2006

The change of external/internal factors of the cell rquires specific biological functions to maintain life. Such functions encourage particular genes to jnteract/regulate each other in multiple ways. Accordingly, we applied a linear decomposition model IFSA, which derives hidden variables, called the 'expression mode' that corresponds to the functions. To interpret gene interaction/regulation, we used a cross-correlation method given an expression mode. Linear decomposition models such as principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA) were shown to be useful in analyzing high dimensional DNA microarray data, compared to clustering methods. These methods assume that gene expression is controlled by a linear combination of uncorrelated/indepdendent latent variables. However these methods have some difficulty in grouping similar patterns which are slightly time-delayed or asymmetric since only exactly matched Patterns are considered. In order to overcome this, we employ the (IFSA) method of [1] to locate phase- and shut-invariant features. Membership scoring functions play an important role to classify genes since linear decomposition models basically aim at data reduction not but at grouping data. We address a new function essential to the IFSA method. In this paper we stress that IFSA is useful in grouping functionally-related genes in the presence of time-shift and expression phase variance. Ultimately, we propose a new approach to investigate the multiple interaction information of genes.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.307-317
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• 2002

In this paper we propose a new mesh reconstruction scheme that produces a displaced subdivision surface directly from unorganized points. The displaced subdivision surface is a new mesh representation that defines a detailed mesh with a displacement map over a smooth domain surface, but original displaced subdivision surface algorithm needs an explicit polygonal mesh since it is not a mesh reconstruction algorithm but a mesh conversion (remeshing) algorithm. The main idea of our approach is that we sample surface detail from unorganized points without any topological information. For this, we predict a virtual triangular face from unorganized points for each sampling ray from a parameteric domain surface. Direct displaced subdivision surface reconstruction from unorganized points has much importance since the output of this algorithm has several important properties: It has compact mesh representation since most vertices can be represented by only a scalar value. Underlying structure of it is piecewise regular so it ran be easily transformed into a multiresolution mesh. Smoothness after mesh deformation is automatically preserved. We avoid time-consuming global energy optimization by employing the input data dependant mesh smoothing, so we can get a good quality displaced subdivision surface quickly.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.322-331
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• 2003

As the complexity of a 3D game is increased by various factors of the game scenario, it has a problem for controlling the interrelation of the game objects. Therefore, a game system has a necessity of the coordination of the responses of the game objects. Also, it is necessary to control the behaviors of animations of the game objects in terms of the game scenario. To produce realistic game simulations, a system has to include a structure for designing the interactions among the game objects. This paper presents a method that designs the dynamic control mechanism for the interaction of the game objects in the game scenario. For the method, we suggest a game agent system as a framework that is based on intelligent agents who can make decisions using specific rules. Game agent systems are used in order to manage environment data, to simulate the game objects, to control interactions among game objects, and to support visual authoring interface that ran define a various interrelations of the game objects. These techniques can process the autonomy level of the game objects and the associated collision avoidance method, etc. Also, it is possible to make the coherent decision-making ability of the game objects about a change of the scene. In this paper, the rule-based behavior control was designed to guide the simulation of the game objects. The rules are pre-defined by the user using visual interface for designing their interaction. The Agent State Decision Network, which is composed of the visual elements, is able to pass the information and infers the current state of the game objects. All of such methods can monitor and check a variation of motion state between game objects in real time. Finally, we present a validation of the control method together with a simple case-study example. In this paper, we design and implement the supervised classification systems for high resolution satellite images. The systems support various interfaces and statistical data of training samples so that we can select the most effective training data. In addition, the efficient extension of new classification algorithms and satellite image formats are applied easily through the modularized systems. The classifiers are considered the characteristics of spectral bands from the selected training data. They provide various supervised classification algorithms which include Parallelepiped, Minimum distance, Mahalanobis distance, Maximum likelihood and Fuzzy theory. We used IKONOS images for the input and verified the systems for the classification of high resolution satellite images.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.47
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• pp.193-215
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• 2017

This study has researched that tempo is an element influencing the fun of narrative webtoon. In spite of many elements that could create fun in narrative webtoon, the theory this study pays attention to is the accumulation and solution of tension. Lee Hyun-bee said in his book that the accumulation and solution of tension would be the element creating fun. Tensions of a story create the immersion by bringing readers into the story. However, if such tensions are maintained throughout the whole story, readers get insensitive to tensions, so that the accumulation and solution of tension should be used in turn to maintain the immersion. One of the directions creating the accumulation and solution of tension in narrative webtoon is the direction of tempo. When creating a narrative webtoon with the full-length structure, it is not easy to describe the whole incident from beginning to the end of it in order of time. Therefore, it is inevitable to have differences between story time and narrative time, and the difference of this time is called 'tempo'. This tempo creates fun when readers are immersed in the work, by adjusting breaths of the story in the direction of narrative webtoon. Such a role of tempo direction is based on the relation between the occurrence of tempo direction and information of the story. The information actually leading the story creates the accumulation and relief of tension which is the essential element of fun formation while tempo also maximizes the effects of accumulation and relief of tension. Tempo direction in narrative webtoons uses panels and gaps between them. The scene direction using panels and gaps between them considers tempo and dynamics because of the temporality of panels and gaps between them. This paper analyzes the use of tempo direction for narrative webtoon through the analysis on the 1st episode of . The significance of this study is to reveal that tempo direction is one of the factors creating fun in narrative webtoons, and also to suggest the theoretical grounds for researches on direction creating fun in the future.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.53-74
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• 2012

IT outsourcing (ITO) is an integration of two firms-external vendor(s) and a client firm-IT resources by contract. According to resource-based view(RBV), three different resources-ITO vendor's resource, client firm's resource, and the relationship resource between two firms- may have an impact on ITO performance. However, there have been few previous studies considering all three IT resources simultaneously. There have been also few empirical studies in ITO context, which test Bharadwaj (2000)'s findings: 1) IT resources can be divided into tangible IT asset and intangible IT capability, and 2) only IT capability has an impact on the IT performance. Therefore we examined whether, in ITO context, all three different resources have a significant impact on ITO performance. Adopting the findings of previous IT studies, we also divided IT resource into IT asset and IT capability. To achieve this research objective, we analyzed 62 ITO cases of 45 companies being listed in Korean top 100 companies for recent 3 years. Also, we analyzed the data with the Partial Least Squares method. The results of this research lead to the following conclusions: First, only when partnership is high, ITO vendors' resource can have an influence on ITO performance. Second, only client firm's IT capability, not IT asset, is directly related to the ITO success. Third, a firm's IT capability can increase the partnership. Therefore, we concluded that 1) RBV is also an useful theory in ITO context, 2) Bharadwaj(2000)'s suggestion is valid in ITO context as well, and 3) the relationship resource is also important in ITO.