• Title/Summary/Keyword: process variability

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AFLP analysis to assess genomic stability in Solanum regenerants derived from wild and cultivated species

  • Aversano, Riccardo;Di Dato, Francesco;Di Matteo, Antonio;Frusciante, Luigi;Carputo, Domenico
    • Plant Biotechnology Reports
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    • v.5 no.3
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    • pp.265-271
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    • 2011
  • The cultivated potato as well as its tuber-bearing relatives are considered model plants for cell and tissue culture, and therefore for exploiting the genetic variation induced by in vitro culture. The association between molecular stability and tissue culture in different genetic backgrounds and ploidy levels has already been explored. However, it still remains to be ascertained whether somaclonal variation differs between callus-derived chromosome-doubled and undoubled regenerants. Our research aimed at investigating, through amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers, the genetic changes in marker-banding patterns of diploid and tetraploid regenerants obtained from one clone each of Solanum bulbocastanum Dunal and S. cardiophyllum Lindl (both 2n = 2x = 24) and tetraploids from cultivated S. tuberosum L. (2n = 4x = 48). Pairwise comparisons between the banding patterns of regenerants and parents allowed detecting considerable changes associated to in vitro culture both at diploid and tetraploid level. The percentages of polymorphic bands between diploid and tetraploid regenerants were, respectively, 57 and 69% in S. bulbocastanum and 58 and 63% in S. cardiophyllum. On average, the frequencies of lost parental fragments in regenerants were significantly higher than novel bands both in S. bulbocastanum (48 vs. 22%) and S. tuberosum (36 vs. 18%) regenerants. By contrast, in S. cardiophyllum, a similar incidence of the two events was detected (32 vs. 29%). Our results revealed that structural changes after tissue culture process strongly affected the genome of the species studied, but diploid and tetraploids regenerated plants responded equally.

A FRAM-based Systemic Investigation of a Rail Accident Involving Human Errors (인적오류가 관여된 철도 사고의 체계적 분석을 위한 FRAM의 활용)

  • Choi, Eun-Bi;Ham, Dong-Han
    • Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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    • v.22 no.1
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    • pp.23-32
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    • 2020
  • There has been a significant decline in the number of rail accidents in Korea since system safety management activities were introduced. Nonetheless, analyzing and preventing human error-related accidents is still an important issue in railway industry. As a railway system is increasingly automated and intelligent, the mechanism and process of an accident occurrence are more and more complicated. It is now essential to consider a variety of factors and their intricate interactions in the analysis of rail accidents. However, it has proved that traditional accident models and methods based on a linear cause-effect relationship are inadequate to analyze and to assess accidents in complex systems such as railway systems. In order to supplement the limitations of traditional safety methods, recently some systemic safety models and methods have been developed. Of those, FRAM(Functional Resonance Analysis Method) has been recognized as one of the most useful methods for analyzing accidents in complex systems. It reflects the concepts of performance adjustment and performance variability in a system, which are fundamental to understanding the processes of an accident in complex systems. This study aims to apply FRAM to the analysis of a rail accident involving human errors, which occurred recently in South Korea. Through the application of FRAM, we found that it can be a useful alternative to traditional methods in the analysis and assessment of accidents in complex systems. In addition, it was also found that FRAM can help analysts understand the interactions between functional elements of a system in a systematic manner.

Mass Balance on the Pulping Extracts of Maple Hardwood using High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC 분석기를 이용한 펄프용 단풍나무의 펄핑 추출액에 관한 물질수지)

  • Um, Byung-Hwan
    • Journal of the Korean Wood Science and Technology
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    • v.36 no.4
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    • pp.102-108
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    • 2008
  • At the University of Maine, a hemicellulose pre-extraction technology is now being investigated to improve pulp yields, reduce the organic and inorganic load for liquor recovery, and create a feed stream for the generation of new biomaterials. It is important to understand the composition of unextracted wood, extracted wood, and pulping extracts in the design of an economically viable pilot-scale ethanol plant. For analysis of wood pulp composition, the total analytical mass balance closure was 100.6, 100.3, and 81.6% for unextracted chips, extracted chips, and pulping extracts from HPLC-H column analysis. Meanwhile, the total analytical mass balance from the HPLC-P column was 97.8, 86.3, and 80.7%, respectively. This slight variability between H- and P-column results for analytical mass balance may be within the experimental error of the measurement. The data generated by this analysis are important to further design work in commercializing this process.

Statistical Behavior of RC Cooling Tower Shell due to Shape Imperfection (철근콘크리트 냉각탑의 형상불완전에 의한 확률론적 거동)

  • 최창근;노혁천
    • Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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    • v.13 no.1
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    • pp.147-158
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    • 2000
  • For the large scale reinforced concrete cooling tower shells, the shape imperfection can be introduced due not only to mistakes in the process of construction but also to the long term behavior of concrete. The shape imperfection evokes the additional responses such as displacements and stresses in addition to the design values. In this study, the statistical behavior of the RC cooling tower shell due to the shape imperfection is investigated using the Monte Carlo simulation. The radius of cooling tower and the shell thickness are adopted as the parameters which cause the shape imperfection. The shape imperfection is modeled as a stochastic field rather than the local one of axisymmetric or bulge type of imperfection. The randomness in the radius is shown to be more affecting the structural responses than the randomness in the shell thickness. In addition to the geometrical randomness, the effect of randomness in the modulus of elasticity on the structural response is also investigated and compared with that of the geometrical ones.

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Mechanical and Thermal Conductivity Properties of Yttrium Nitrate Added AlN Sintering Body (Y(NO3)3·6H2O 첨가된 AlN 소결체의 기계적 및 열전도도 특성)

  • Chung, J.K.;Lee, J.H.;Ha, T.K.
    • Transactions of Materials Processing
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    • v.27 no.1
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    • pp.48-53
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    • 2018
  • Aluminum nitride (AlN) is used by the semiconductor industry that has requirements for high thermal conductivity. The theoretical thermal conductivity of single crystal AlN is 320W/mK. Whereas, the values measured for polycrystalline AlN ceramics range from 20 W/mK to 280 W/mK. The variability is strongly dependent upon the purity of the starting materials and non-uniform dispersibility of the sintering additive. The conventional AlN sintering additive used yttria ($Y_2O_3$), but the dispersibility of the powder in the mixing process was important. In this study, we investigated the mechanical and thermal conductivity of yttrium nitrate ($Y(NO_3)_3{\cdot}6H_2O$), as a sintering additive in order to improve the dispersibility of $Y_2O_3$. The sintering additives content was in the range of 2 to 4.5wt.%. The density of AlN gradually increased with increasing contents of sintering additive and the flexural strength gradually increased as well. The flexural strength of the sintered body containing 4 wt% of $Y_2O_3$ and $Y(NO_3)_3{\cdot}6H_2O$ was 334.1 MPa and 378.2 MPa, respectively. The thermal conductivities were 189.7W/mK and 209.4W/mK, respectively. In the case of hardness, there was only a slight difference and the average value was about 10 GPa. Therefore, densification, density and strength values were found to be proportional to its content. It was confirmed that AlN using $Y(NO_3)_3{\cdot}6H_2O$ displayed relatively higher thermal conductivity and mechanical properties than the $Y_2O_3$.

Multimodal Imaging of Sarcopenia using Optical Coherence Tomography and Ultrasound in Rat Model

  • Jeon, Byeong Hwan;Chae, Yu-Gyeong;Hwang, Sang Seok;Kim, Dong Kyu;Oak, Chulho;Park, Eun-Kee;Ahn, Yeh-Chan
    • Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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    • v.18 no.1
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    • pp.55-59
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    • 2014
  • Sarcopenia, or reduced muscle mass and volume, is due to various factors such as senile change, neuronal degeneration, drug, malignancy, and sepsis. Sarcopenia with the aging process has been evidenced by the decline in muscle mass by 0.5 to 1% per year with 3-5% reduction in muscle strength for 10 years between the ages of 40 and 50, and a 1-2% of decline of mass every year in people aged 60-70. Therefore, early diagnosis and understanding the mechanism of sarcopenia are crucial in the prevention of muscle loss. However, it is still difficult to image changes of muscle microstructure due to a lack of techniques. In this study, we developed an animal model using denervated rats to induce a rapid atrophy in the tibialis anterior (TA) and imaged its structural changes using optical coherence tomography (OCT) along with histologic and ultrasound analyses. Ultrasound showed changes of overall muscle size. Histology revealed that the atrophic TA muscle displayed an increased size variability of muscle fiber and inflammatory changes. Three dimensional OCT imaged the changes of perimysial grid and muscle fiber structure in real time without sacrifice. These observed advantages of multimodal imaging using OCT and ultrasound would provide clinical benefits in the diagnosis of sarcopenia.

An Efficient Indoor-Outdoor Scene Classification Method (효율적인 실내의 영상 분류 기법)

  • Kim, Won-Jun;Kim, Chang-Ick
    • Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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    • v.46 no.5
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    • pp.48-55
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    • 2009
  • Prior research works in indoor-outdoor classification have been conducted based on a simple combination of low-level features. However, since there are many challenging problems due to the extreme variability of the scene contents, most methods proposed recently tend to combine the low-level features with high-level information such as the presence of trees and sky. To extract these regions from videos, we need to conduct additional tasks, which may yield the increasing number of feature dimensions or computational burden. Therefore, an efficient indoor-outdoor scene classification method is proposed in this paper. First, the video is divided into the five same-sized blocks. Then we define and use the edge and color orientation histogram (ECOH) descriptors to represent each sub-block efficiently. Finally, all ECOH values are simply concatenated to generated the feature vector. To justify the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method, a diverse database of over 1200 videos is evaluated. Moreover, we improve the classification performance by using different weight values determined through the learning process.

Electromyographic evidence for a gestural-overlap analysis of vowel devoicing in Korean

  • Jun, Sun-A;Beckman, M.;Niimi, Seiji;Tiede, Mark
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.1
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    • pp.153-200
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    • 1997
  • In languages such as Japanese, it is very common to observe that short peripheral vowel are completely voiceless when surrounded by voiceless consonants. This phenomenon has been known as Montreal French, Shanghai Chinese, Greek, and Korean. Traditionally this phenomenon has been described as a phonological rule that either categorically deletes the vowel or changes the [+voice] feature of the vowel to [-voice]. This analysis was supported by Sawashima (1971) and Hirose (1971)'s observation that there are two distinct EMG patterns for voiced and devoiced vowel in Japanese. Close examination of the phonetic evidence based on acoustic data, however, shows that these phonological characterizations are not tenable (Jun & Beckman 1993, 1994). In this paper, we examined the vowel devoicing phenomenon in Korean using data from ENG fiberscopic and acoustic recorders of 100 sentences produced by one Korean speaker. The results show that there is variability in the 'degree of devoicing' in both acoustic and EMG signals, and in the patterns of glottal closing and opening across different devoiced tokens. There seems to be no categorical difference between devoiced and voiced tokens, for either EMG activity events or glottal patterns. All of these observations support the notion that vowel devoicing in Korean can not be described as the result of the application of a phonological rule. Rather, devoicing seems to be a highly variable 'phonetic' process, a more or less subtle variation in the specification of such phonetic metrics as degree and timing of glottal opening, or of associated subglottal pressure or intra-oral airflow associated with concurrent tone and stricture specifications. Some of token-pair comparisons are amenable to an explanation in terms of gestural overlap and undershoot. However, the effect of gestural timing on vocal fold state seems to be a highly nonlinear function of the interaction among specifications for the relative timing of glottal adduction and abduction gestures, of the amplitudes of the overlapped gestures, of aerodynamic conditions created by concurrent oral tonal gestures, and so on. In summary, to understand devoicing, it will be necessary to examine its effect on phonetic representation of events in many parts of the vocal tracts, and at many stages of the speech chain between the motor intent and the acoustic signal that reaches the hearer's ear.

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Understanding No Gun Ri Records from the Perspective of Social Memory (노근리 사건의 사회적 기억과 기록에 관한 연구)

  • Youn, Eunha;Kim, You-seung
    • Journal of Korean Society of Archives and Records Management
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    • v.16 no.2
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    • pp.57-79
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    • 2016
  • This study aims to identify and analyze how the No Gun Ri massacre records are incorporated in social memory. As a theoretical study, it discusses the characteristics of social records. First, they are social products that have an influence on personal memory. Second, they reflect variability of memory. Third, they can be used in proving an event. To analyze the memory and records of the No Gun Ri massacre, this study overviews the outline of the killings and divides it into three eras: countermemory era, memory struggle era, and formal memory era. Furthermore, this study reviews the transformation process and characteristics of each era. The representative records produced in each era are as follows: oral, and personal records in the first period; records related to committee activities, legislative activities, and research activities in the second period; and official records on the special law, and the construction and operation of a peace park in the third period. The third period shows the scalability of the records through a variety of cultural records production to remember the No Gun Ri incident.

Variation of EEG Band Powers Related with Human Errors in Knowledge-based Responses (지식기반 반응 시 인간과오 관련 뇌파 밴드파워의 변화)

  • Lim, Hyeon-Kyo;Kim, Hong-Young
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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    • v.28 no.3
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    • pp.107-113
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    • 2013
  • Problem solving and/or decision making process usually encountered in human living consists of a sequence of human behaviors based upon his/her knowledge. Thus, Rasmussen introduced Skill-Rule-Knowledge paradigm to countermeasure human errors that can occur in Nuclear Power Plants. Unfortunately however, it was not so easy as expected since objective evidence have not been obtainable with conventional research techniques. With the help of EEG band pawer ratio techniques, this study tried to get psycho-physiological symptoms of human errors, if any, while human beings perform knowledge-based behaviors such as simple arithmetic computations with different difficulty level. A set of simulated works was carried out with a computer station. Four kinds of arithmetic computation tasks were given to 10 health male under-graduate students on different day individually, and during the experiment, EEG and ECG was measured continuously for objective psycho-physiological analysis. According to the results, ${\alpha}$/(${\alpha}+{\beta}$) as well as ${\alpha}/{\beta}$ band power ratio were sensitive to task difficulty level which consistently decreased both. However, any one of them failed to reveal the influence of tasks with different difficulty level in the aspect of task duration time. On the contrary, Heart Rate Variability was more suggestive than expected. To make a conclusion, it can be said that band power of EEG waves will be helpful in not only assessment of work difficulty level but also assessment of workers' skill development if supported by cardiac function such as HRV.