• The Journal of Churna Manual Medicine for Spine and Nerves
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.47-53
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• 2022

Objectives This case study aimed to investigate the effect of acupotomy and fascia chuna therapy on talipes cavus-type plantar fasciitis. Methods We classified the foot arch type using a podoscope and estimated the outcome by evaluating the numeric rating scale, pain disability index, and EuroQol-5-dimension measurement. Results After treatment, heel pain decreased and the quality-of-life score improved. Conclusions This study suggests that treatment with acupotomy and muscle energy techniques based on the foot arch type may be effective for plantar fasciitis. A limitation of this study is the small number of cases. Further clinical studies are required.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.44.2-44.2
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• 2021

Detecting lensed quasar systems and estimating their time delays using the unresolved joint light curves can be the next frontier among the cosmological probes in the near future. One can get the independent measurement of the Hubble constant from the time delays but without requiring the systems to be resolved a priori followed by monitoring the image light curves using high-resolution telescopes for years. In this work, we propose a novel technique that can identify lensed quasars only using the observed unresolved light curves and without assuming a template or any prior information. Following a set of conservative selection criteria that gives zero false-positive outcome, we can accurately estimate the time delay for almost all the lensed systems with marginal noise in the data. For the case of noisy data, our approach can still correctly identify a substantial number of lensed systems with high certainty and measure the time delay accurately.

• Educational Technology International
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.1-15
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• 2008

One of the challenges that online learners face is feeling of isolation and diminishing desire of maintaining active participation during e-learning. Social presence, that is considered to be a vital factor in e-learning, is recently started to receive a support from the field. Although research indicated a significant role of social presence in both learning process and learning outcome, there is no widely accepted measurement scale of social presence. This study, therefore, developed a new scale to measure social presence based on the existing theories and validated it against 723 participants. Nineteen self-report items with three dimensions, co-presence, influence, and cohesiveness, were identified and validated using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) in a preliminary and a follow-up study.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.25-32
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• 2020

An analysis of emotional English utterances with 7 emotions (calm, happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgust, surprised) was conducted using the measurement of prosodic distance between 672 emotional and 48 neutral utterances. Applying the technique proposed in the automatic evaluation model of English pronunciation to the present study on emotional utterances, Euclidean distance measurement of 3 prosodic elements such as F0, intensity and duration extracted from emotional and neutral utterances was utilized. This paper, furthermore, extended the analytical methods to include Euclidean distance normalization, z-score and z-score normalization resulting in 4 groups of measurement schemes (sqrF0, sqrINT, sqrDUR; norsqrF0, norsqrINT, norsqrDUR; sqrzF0, sqrzINT, sqrzDUR; norsqrzF0, norsqrzINT, norsqrzDUR). All of the results from perceptual analysis and acoustical analysis of emotional utteances consistently indicated the greater effectiveness of norsqrF0, norsqrINT and norsqrDUR, among 4 groups of measurement schemes, which normalized the Euclidean measurement. The greatest acoustical change of prosodic information influenced by emotion was shown in the values of F0 followed by duration and intensity in descending order according to the effect size based on the estimation of distance between emotional utterances and neutral counterparts. Tukey Post Hoc test revealed 4 homogeneous subsets (calm

• Information Systems Review
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.75-97
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• 2012

Fostering trusting belief in financial transactions is a challenging task in Internet banking services. Authenticated Certificate had been regarded as an effective method to guarantee the trusting belief for online transactions. However, previous research claimed that this method has some loopholes for such abusers as hackers, who intend to attack the financial accounts of innocent transactors in Internet. Two types of methods have been suggested as alternatives for securing user identification and activity in online financial services. Control transparency uses information over the transaction process to verify and to control the transactions. Outcome feedback, which refers to the specific information about exchange outcomes, provides information over final transaction results. By using these two methods, financial service providers can send signals to involved parties about the robustness of their security mechanisms. These two methods-control transparency and outcome feedback-have been widely used in the IS field to enhance the quality of IS services. In this research, we intend to verify that these two methods can also be used to reduce risks and to increase the security protections in online banking services. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the effects of the control transparency and the outcome feedback on the risk perceptions in Internet banking services. Our assumption is that these two methods-control transparency and outcome feedback-can reduce perceived risks involved with online financial transactions, while increasing perceived trust over financial service providers. These changes in user attitudes can increase the level of user satisfactions, which may lead to the increased user loyalty as well as users' willingness to pay for the financial transactions. Previous research in IS suggested that the increased level of transparency on the process and the result of transactions can enhance the information quality and decision quality of IS users. Transparency helps IS users to acquire the information needed to control the transaction counterpart and thus to complete transaction successfully. It is also argued that transparency can reduce the perceived transaction risks in IS usage. Many IS researchers also argued that the trust can be generated by the institutional mechanisms. Trusting belief refers to the truster's belief for the trustee to have attributes for being beneficial to the truster. Institution-based trust plays an important role to enhance the probability of achieving a successful outcome. When a transactor regards the conditions crucial for the transaction success, he or she considers the condition providers as trustful, and thus eventually trust the others involved with such condition providers. In this process, transparency helps the transactor complete the transaction successfully. Through the investigation of these studies, we expect that the control transparency and outcome feedback can reduce the risk perception on transaction and enhance the trust with the service provider. Based on a theoretical framework of transparency and institution-based trust, we propose and test a research model by evaluating research hypotheses. We have conducted a laboratory experiment in order to validate our research model. Since the transparency artifact(control transparency and outcome feedback) is not yet adopted in online banking services, the general survey method could not be employed to verify our research model. We collected data from 138 experiment subjects who had experiences with online banking services. PLS is used to analyze the experiment data. The measurement model confirms that our data set has appropriate convergent and discriminant validity. The results of testing the structural model indicate that control transparency significantly enhances the trust and significantly reduces the risk perception of online banking users. The result also suggested that the outcome feedback significantly enhances the trust of users. We have found that the reduced risk and the increased trust level significantly improve the level of service satisfaction. The increased satisfaction finally leads to the increased loyalty and willingness to pay for the financial services.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.133-153
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• 2008

Understanding of the length of time required to realize the return on the investment of informatization is important for policy makers and decision makers of information system adoption. Previous researchers, however, assessed this issue with the performance measurement approach that was primarily based on static point of view. However, the static analysis on the outcome of the informatization investment is limited in measuring the priori and ex ante effects of the informatization implementation on temporal basis. This study present a methodology to capture the outcome of the informatization investment on dynamic basis. This assessment was performed based on an e-government project in Korea, called "Industry Human Resource Project." Particularly, the study addressed how long it takes to obtain the benefit of WorkNet System, which was part of this Korean e-government project. We proposed various approaches to illustrate the importance and temporal effect of the WorkNet System by analyzing DB data, time reduction of WorkNet business processes and return of investment of IT.

• Journal of Korean Critical Care Nursing
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.12-22
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• 2012

Purpose: This study was conducted to evaluate the learning outcomes of simulation-based practice on emergency care for patients with dyspnea in nursing students. Methods: One group pre-post experimental design with 28 nursing students was used. Simulation-based practice on the basis of SimMan Human Patient Simulator including academic lectures, simulation lab exercises and debriefing was applied for four and half hours. The learning outcomes were assessed by measuring knowledge, critical thinking, problem solving process of cognitive skills, self-confidence and learning attitudes of affective domain. Furthermore, self reported clinical performance ability of psychomotor skills was examined. Results: After the completion of simulation-based practice, there was a significant increase in the mean of following measured variables: knowledge, critical thinking, problem solving process of cognitive skills, self-confidence, learning attitudes of affective domain and clinical performance ability of psychomotor skills. Significant positive relationships were found among learning outcome measurement variables. Conclusion: Simulation-based practice is an effective method to improve cognitive skills, affective domain and psychomotor skills of nursing students. Hence, Simulation-based practice should be applied for improving current limited emergency care training for nursing students and enhancing students' competency in clinical situations.

• IE interfaces
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.338-348
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• 2004

OECD countries including Korea positively adopt performance-based budget systems which convert an input-centered system to an output-centered system to solve two baffling problems: public expense retrenchment and efficiency recovery of government management. Output management of IT project propelled in public sector becomes a prominent figure influenced by these keynote of policy. However, it is placed in difficult circumstances to develop a performance index and the methodology to cover characteristics of IT project, measuring the goal achievement of business and the customer contentment according to the phases of business progress. Existing studies of IT project accomplishment measurement have been fulfilled on the subject of business targeting on IT technology application, administrative information network business and national base of information network construction. Most of the studies have been executed using BSC or AHP to reflect synthetically business specifics of IT project from a methodological point of view. In this study, we propose a structural equation model (SEM) to develop a performance index which measures the outcome of IT project according to the phases of business progress, avoiding a simple presentation of project outcome or conceptual frame. The proposed SEM is applied to the survey results of "IT support project for Small and medium business". Based on the fitted model, we apply ACSI concept to develop an Information Technologization Success Index (ITSI). This index allows us comparison of several IT vendors as well as feedback information for further improvement.

• The Korean Journal of Pain
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.109-115
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• 2018

Background: Patients with lumbar disc herniation are treated with physiotherapy/medication and some with surgery. However, even after technically successful surgery some develop a failed back syndrome with persistent pain. Our aim was to evaluate the efficacy of epiduroscopy in patients who suffer chronic low back pain and/or radicular pain with or without surgery and the gender difference in outcome. Methods: A total of 88 patients were included with a mean age of 52 years (27-82), 54 women and 34 men. 66 of them were operated previously and 22 were non-operated. They all had persistent chronic back pain and radicular pain despite of medication and physical rehabilitation. Visual Analog Scale (VAS) for pain and Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) were evaluated preoperatively, after one month, six months and one-year after the epiduroscopy. Results: All patients, and also the subgroups (gender and operated/non-operated) improved significantly in pain (VAS) and disability (ODI) at one month. A significant improvement was also seen at one year. No differences were found between men and woman at the different follow-up times. A slight worsening in VAS and ODI was noticed over time except for the non-operated group. Conclusions: Epiduroscopy helps to improve the back and leg pain due to lumbar disc herniation in the early stage. At one year an improvement still exists, and the non-operated group seems to benefit most of the procedure.

• Journal of Acupuncture Research
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.120-128
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• 2018

Background: Adhesive capsulitis (AC) is a common condition that includes shoulder pain and limited movement. Despite more than 100 years of AC treatment, the most efficacious treatment remains unclear. The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) using acupuncture for AC. Methods: Thirty participants with AC were randomly assigned to acupuncture (A) or sham acupuncture (SA) groups. The participants received 15 acupuncture sessions over 6 weeks, and follow-up occurred for an additional 4 weeks thereafter. The primary clinical outcome was the numeric rating scale (NRS) for shoulder pain 6 weeks from the baseline. Secondary outcomes included range of motion (ROM) in the shoulder, the shoulder pain and disability index (SPADI), the EuroQol-5 dimensions (EQ-5D), the Pittsburgh sleep quality index (PSQI), and the patient global impression of change (PGIC). Results: Thirty participants were enrolled out of 37 screened individuals. Recruitment was conducted between August 2014 until May 2015. A total of 28 participants (93%) completed the 6-week intervention, and 26 participants (87%) completed the study. NRS, ROM, SPADI, EQ-5D, PSQI, and PGIC scores improved in both the experimental group and the sham group after 6 weeks, but the difference between the groups was not statistically significant. Adverse events were reported by 12 participants, although these events were not associated with acupuncture. Conclusion: A future RCT for AC may be feasible with some modifications to the recruitment plan and the secondary outcome measurement methods.