• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.17
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• pp.107-133
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• 2005

The purpose of this study was to analyze a trend of profitability classified by characteristics of hospitals and to analyze related factors. The data for this study were derived from survey material conducted by the Korean Hospital Association on 33 hospitals in Korea between 1993 and 2002. Profitability was measured in the aspect of investment profit rate and operation profit rate with net profit to total assets, normal profit to total assets and operating margin to gross revenue as dependent variables. Independent variables were classified by general factors (ownership, number of beds, period of establishment, region), financial factors (total asset turnover, liabilities to total assets, current ratio, fixed ratio, inventories turnover, personnel costs per operation profit, material costs per operation profits), composition of manpower and facilities(personnel and area per beds), productivity index(the number of daily patients per medical doctor, the number of daily patients per nurse), the score of quality assurance activities. First, Concerning the specialists per beds or area per beds and profitability of hospitals there was not statistically significant. Second, Those hospitals having the most daily patients per nurse had significantly higher profitability than the others, but the number of daily patients per medical doctor had little effect on the profitability. Thirds, Those hospitals having a higher proportion total asset turnover tended to show significantly higher profitability compared to other hospitals, but the liabilities to total assets and liquidity ratio had a little difference to the profitability. Those hospitals having a higher proportion personnel costs per operation profit and material costs per operation profits tended to show significantly lower hospital profitability compared to other hospitals. Fourth, In regression analysis, hospital profitability had negative relationship with personnel costs per operation profit or material costs per operation profits. While it had positive relationship with total asset turnover, the number of daily patients per nurse. In conclusion, private hospitals had higher profitability than that of public hospitals. Though factors related to profitability of hospital were different according to ownership, it is important for securing appropriate profitability by operating appropriate number of nurse, raising total asset turnover, and reducing personnel costs, material costs per operation profits. This study can be used as a baseline data for planning of hospital management. But the study may be limited in that the results cannot be generalized due to its small sample size. However, this longitudinal observation of 33 hospitals over ten year period has significant merit alone.

• Korean Journal of Organic Agriculture
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.75-90
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• 2003

A total of 192 Korean landraces were investigated for the comparison of each other as useful germplasm to organic farming and examined correlation between quantitative traits. Almost Korean landraces were classified into medium-heading variety and average days from seeding to heading was 111.1 days. Plant height and culm length were longer about 20∼40cm than general Japonica cultivar. Average width of leaf blade and average length of panicle were 1.3cm and 22.4cm, respectively, Average number of panicles per plant was 10.0 and almost varieties showed low tilling habit. Average length/width ratio of brown rice was 1.7 and several varieties were long grain type and average 1,000 grain weight was 21.6g. In correlation coefficient among quantitative traits, positive significant correlations were observed between culm length and leaf width, days from seeding to heading, but negative correlations were observed between days from seeding to heading and 1000 grain weight. 27.1% of Korean landraces showed weak and lodging degree in culm strength and 3.6% of total varieties showed purple margin on leaf blade and leaf sheath. In leaf blade angle and flag leaf angle, erect type was 46.9% and 10.9%, respectively. 24.0% of total varieties showed the slow and late degree of leaf senescence. The rate of awned type, waxy type and brown seed coat were 74.5%, 20.3% and 4.2%, respectively. The color of stigma, spikelet, apiculus and awn showed diverse color such as white, brown, red and purple.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.261-266
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• 2015

Many of previous studies suggested that working capital management is an important component of firm's financial decision and efficient working capital management affects firms' profitability and it's value. Recently, Korean shipping firms have been suffering from financial distress by recession of shipping economy. In this point of view, this study tries to investigate the relationship between working capital management and shipping firm's profitability, using panel data on 46 Korean shipping firms for the period of 2004-2013. As result of panel regression, it proved that average payment period, inventory turnover, cash conversion cycle and operating cycle are significantly associated with firms profitabilities such as profit margin ratio and operating profit ratio, and the manager of shipping firm can increase firms profitability by more efficient working capital management. There are strong positive relationships between average payment period and operating cycle and firm's profitability. These results suggest that managers can create firm's value by increasing average payment period and operating cycle. Otherwise inventory turnover and cash conversion cycle have negative relationships with firm's profitability. It means that managers can increase firm's profitability by reducing these variables.

• Journal of Periodontal and Implant Science
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.153-162
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• 2008

Purpose: Recombining bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) is usually acquiredfrom high level animals. Though this method is effective, its high cost limits its use. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of bone morphogenetic protein-2 with protein transduction domain (BMP-2/PTD;TATBMP-2) on bone regeneration. Rat calvarial defect model and osteoblastic differentiation model using MC3T3 cell were used for the purpose of the study. Materials and Methods: MC3T3 cells were cultured until they reached a confluence stage. The cells were treated with 0, 0.1, 1, 10, 100, 500 ng/ml of BMP-2/PTD for 21 days and at the end of the treatment, osteoblastic differentiation was evaluated usingvon Kossa staining. An 8mm, calvarial, critical-size osteotomy defect was created in each of 48 male Spraque-Dawley rats (weight $250{\sim}300\;g$). Three groups of 16 animals each received either BMP-2/PTD (0.05mg/ml) in a collagen carrier, collagen only, or negative surgical control. And each group was divided into 2 and 8 weeks healing intervals. The groups were evaluated by histologic analysis(8 animals/group/healing intervals) Result: In osteoblastic differentiation evaluation test, a stimulatory effect of BMP-2/PTD was observed in 10ng/ml of BMP-2/PTD with no observation of dose-dependent manner. The BMP-2/PTD group showed enhanced local bone formation in the rat calvarial defect at 2 weeks. New bone was observed at the defect margin and central area of the defect. However, new bone formation was observed only in 50% of animals used for 2weeks. In addition, there was no new bone formation observed at 8 weeks. Conclusion: The results of the present study indicated that BMP-2/PTD(TATBMP-2) have an positive effect on the bone formation in vitro and in vivo. However, further study should be conducted for the reproducibility of the outcomes.

• Korean Journal of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
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• v.61 no.11
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• pp.600-604
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• 2018

Background and Objectives This study aimed to identify a reliable preoperative predictive factor for the development of thyroid cancer in patients with atypia of undetermined significance (AUS) identified by fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB). Subjects and Method This was a retrospective cohort study. Two hundred and ninety-nine patients diagnosed with AUS by preoperative FNAB who underwent curative thyroid surgery at our institution between September 2005 and February 2014 were analyzed. Clinical, radiological and molecular features were investigated as preoperative predictors for postoperative permanent malignant pathology. Results The final pathologic results revealed 36 benign tumors including nodular hyperplasia, follicular adenoma, adenomatous goiter, nontoxic goiter, and lymphocytic thyroiditis, as well as 263 malignant tumors including 1 follicular carcinoma and 1 invasive follicular carcinoma; the rest were papillary thyroid carcinomas. The malignancy rate was 87.9%. The following were identified as risk factors for malignancy by univariate analysis: $BRAF^{V600E}$ gene mutation, specific ultrasonographic findings including smaller nodule size, low echogenicity of the nodule, and irregular or spiculated margin (p<0.05). Multivariate analysis revealed that only $BRAF^{V600E}$ mutation was a statistically significant risk factor for malignancy (p<0.05). When $BRAF^{V600E}$ mutation was positive, 98.5% of enrolled patients developed malignant tumors. In addition, the diagnostic rate of malignancy in these cases was approximately 16-fold higher than BRAF-negative cases. Conclusion Patients with AUS thyroid nodules should undergo $BRAF^{V600E}$ gene mutation analysis to improve diagnostic accuracy and if the mutation is confirmed, surgery is recommended due to the high risk of malignancy.

• Journal of Environmental Health Sciences
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.169-177
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• 2023

Background: The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) has identified cases of people suspected of suffering lung disease potentially caused by chloromethylisothiazolinone/methylisothiazolinone (CMIT/MIT) used in humidifier disinfectants (HDs). The Korean Ministry of Environment (MoE) epidemiological investigation and toxicity test study found that HDs caused health damage such as asthma and lung disease. Objectives: The main purposes of this study were to classify the HD exposure rating and to analyze the exposure characteristics that affect exposure to CMIT/MIT HDs. Methods: The exposure characteristics and socio-demographic characteristics of victim participants using CMIT/MIT HDs were investigated through questionnaires. An inhalation no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) for CMIT/MIT was produced based on inhalation toxicity values. Exposure ratings (class 1~class 2) were cross-tabulated with clinical ratings (acceptable~unacceptable). A correlation analysis was conducted with the main exposure characteristics that affect the exposure concentration of CMIT/MIT HDs. Results: The concentration in indoor air of CMIT/MIT was 8.75±25.40 ㎍/m³, and the exposure concentration was 2.30±6.29 ㎍/m³. The CMIT/MIT exposure rating of 67 participants with high exposures of not more than MOE 100 were evaluated as 14.5%, while the damage participants who matched the clinical rating made up 4.5%. The exposure concentration of CMIT/MIT showed a positive correlation with the daily usage amount and usage frequency, and a negative correlation with volume of the indoor environment. Conclusions: A new exposure rating could be suggested and calculated based on the MOE, and the factors affecting the exposure concentration could be identified.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.53-69
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• 2011

Vision and voice-based technologies are commonly utilized for human-robot interaction. But it is widely recognized that the performance of vision and voice-based interaction systems is deteriorated by a large margin in the real-world situations due to environmental and user variances. Human users need to be very cooperative to get reasonable performance, which significantly limits the usability of the vision and voice-based human-robot interaction technologies. As a result, touch screens are still the major medium of human-robot interaction for the real-world applications. To empower the usability of robots for various services, alternative interaction technologies should be developed to complement the problems of vision and voice-based technologies. In this paper, we propose the use of accelerometer-based gesture interface as one of the alternative technologies, because accelerometers are effective in detecting the movements of human body, while their performance is not limited by environmental contexts such as lighting conditions or camera's field-of-view. Moreover, accelerometers are widely available nowadays in many mobile devices. We tackle the problem of classifying acceleration signal patterns of 26 English alphabets, which is one of the essential repertoires for the realization of education services based on robots. Recognizing 26 English handwriting patterns based on accelerometers is a very difficult task to take over because of its large scale of pattern classes and the complexity of each pattern. The most difficult problem that has been undertaken which is similar to our problem was recognizing acceleration signal patterns of 10 handwritten digits. Most previous studies dealt with pattern sets of 8~10 simple and easily distinguishable gestures that are useful for controlling home appliances, computer applications, robots etc. Good features are essential for the success of pattern recognition. To promote the discriminative power upon complex English alphabet patterns, we extracted 'motion trajectories' out of input acceleration signal and used them as the main feature. Investigative experiments showed that classifiers based on trajectory performed 3%~5% better than those with raw features e.g. acceleration signal itself or statistical figures. To minimize the distortion of trajectories, we applied a simple but effective set of smoothing filters and band-pass filters. It is well known that acceleration patterns for the same gesture is very different among different performers. To tackle the problem, online incremental learning is applied for our system to make it adaptive to the users' distinctive motion properties. Our system is based on instance-based learning (IBL) where each training sample is memorized as a reference pattern. Brute-force incremental learning in IBL continuously accumulates reference patterns, which is a problem because it not only slows down the classification but also downgrades the recall performance. Regarding the latter phenomenon, we observed a tendency that as the number of reference patterns grows, some reference patterns contribute more to the false positive classification. Thus, we devised an algorithm for optimizing the reference pattern set based on the positive and negative contribution of each reference pattern. The algorithm is performed periodically to remove reference patterns that have a very low positive contribution or a high negative contribution. Experiments were performed on 6500 gesture patterns collected from 50 adults of 30~50 years old. Each alphabet was performed 5 times per participant using $Nintendo{(R)}$ $Wii^{TM}$ remote. Acceleration signal was sampled in 100hz on 3 axes. Mean recall rate for all the alphabets was 95.48%. Some alphabets recorded very low recall rate and exhibited very high pairwise confusion rate. Major confusion pairs are D(88%) and P(74%), I(81%) and U(75%), N(88%) and W(100%). Though W was recalled perfectly, it contributed much to the false positive classification of N. By comparison with major previous results from VTT (96% for 8 control gestures), CMU (97% for 10 control gestures) and Samsung Electronics(97% for 10 digits and a control gesture), we could find that the performance of our system is superior regarding the number of pattern classes and the complexity of patterns. Using our gesture interaction system, we conducted 2 case studies of robot-based edutainment services. The services were implemented on various robot platforms and mobile devices including $iPhone^{TM}$. The participating children exhibited improved concentration and active reaction on the service with our gesture interface. To prove the effectiveness of our gesture interface, a test was taken by the children after experiencing an English teaching service. The test result showed that those who played with the gesture interface-based robot content marked 10% better score than those with conventional teaching. We conclude that the accelerometer-based gesture interface is a promising technology for flourishing real-world robot-based services and content by complementing the limits of today's conventional interfaces e.g. touch screen, vision and voice.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.25-53
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• 2011

This study probes the effect of loyalty program on the customer retention based on the real transaction data(n=2,892) acquired from education service industry. We try to figure out the outcomes of reward program through more than 1 year-long data gathered and analyzed according to quasi-experimental design(i.e., before and after design). We adopt this kinds of research scheme in regard that previous studies measured the effect of loyalty program by dividing the customers into two group(i.e., members vs. non-members) after the firms or stores had started the program. We believe that it might not avoid the self-selection bias. The research questions of this study could be explained such as: First, most research said that the loyalty programs could increase the customer loyalty and contribute to the sustainable growth of company. But there are little confirmation that this promotional tool could be justified in terms of financial perspective. Thus, we are interested in both the retention rate and financial outcomes caused by the introduction of loyalty programs. Second, reward programs target mainly current customer. Especially CRM(customer relationship management) said that it is more profitable for company to build positive relationship with current customer instead of pursuing new customer. And it claims that reward program is excellent means to achieve this goal. For this purpose, we check in this study whether there is a interaction effect between loyalty program and customer type in retaining customer. Third, it is said that dis-satisfied customers are more likely to leave the company than satisfied customers. While, Bolton, Kannan and Bramlett(2000) claimed that reward program could contribute to minimize the effect of negative service by building emotional link with customer, it is not empirically confirmed. This point of view explained that the loyalty programs might work as exit barrier to current customer. Thus, this study tries to identify whether there is a interaction effect between loyalty program and service experience in keeping customer. To achieve this purpose, this study adopt both Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazard model. The research outcomes show that the average retention period is 179 days before introducing loyalty program but it is increased to 227 days after reward is given to the customers. Since this difference is statistically significant, it could be said that H1 is supported. In addition, the contribution margin coming from increased transaction period is bigger than the cost for administering loyalty programs. To address other research questions, we probe the interaction effect between loyalty program and other factors(i.e., customer type and service experience) affecting it. The analysis of Cox proportional hazard model said that the current customer is more likely to engage in building relationship with company compared to new customer. In addition, retention rate of satisfied customer is significantly increased in relation to dis-satisfied customer. Interestingly, the transaction period of dis-satisfied customer is notably increased after introducing loyalty programs. Thus, it could be said that H2, H3, and H4 are also supported. In summary, we found that the loyalty programs have values as a promotional tool in forming positive relationship with customer and building exit barrier.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.126-132
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• 2009

Purpose: We wanted to evaluate the prognostic factors for the pathologic N2 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients who were treated by postoperative radiotherapy. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively reviewed 112 pN2 NSCLC patients who underwent surgery and postoperative radiotherapy (PORT) From January 1999 to February 2008. Seventy-five (67%) patients received segmentectomy or lobectomy and 37 (33%) patients received pneumonectomy. The resection margin was negative in 94 patients, and it was positive or close in 18 patients. Chemotherapy was administered to 103 (92%) patients. Nine (8%) patients received PORT alone. The median radiation dose was 54 Gy (range, 45 to 66), and the fraction size was 1.8~2 Gy. Results: The 2-year overall survival (OS) rate was 60.2% and the disease free survival (DFS) rate was 44.7% for all the patients. Univariate analysis showed that the patients with multiple-station N2 disease had significantly reduced OS and DFS (p=0.047, p=0.007) and the patients with an advanced T stage ($\geq$T3) had significantly reduced OS and DFS (p<0.001, p=0.025). A large tumor size ($\geq$5 cm) and positive lymphovascular invasion reduced the OS (p=0.035, 0.034). Using multivariate analysis, we found that multiple-station N2 disease and an advanced T stage ($\geq$T3) significantly reduced the OS and DFS. Seventy one patients (63.4%) had recurrence of disease. The patterns of failure were loco-regional in 23 (20.5%) patients, distant failure in 62 (55.4%) and combined loco-regional and distant failure in 14 (12.5%) patients. Conclusion: Multiple involvement of mediastinal nodal stations for the pN2 NSCLC patients with PORT was a poor prognostic factor in this study. A prospective study is necessary to evaluate the N2 subclassification and to optimize the adjuvant treatment.