• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.173-178
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• 2010

A privately held, third generation family owned company, Boom Technologies, Inc. (BTI), a provider of products and services to the electric utility, telecommunications and contractor markets, continues to make progress in exporting. Although export sales only equaled 5% of total revenue in 2008, BTI has an entire export division. Their export division's Managing Director reveals the trial and errors of a privately held company and their quest for success overseas. From its inception, BTI has always believed its greatest asset is its employees. When export sales struggled due to lack of strategy and direction, BTI hired a Managing Director for its export division. With leadership and guidance from BTI's president and from the Managing Director, they utilized the department's skills and knowledge. Structural changes were made to expand their market presence abroad and increase export sales. As a result, export sales increased four-fold, area managers in new countries were added and distribution networks were successfully cultivated. At times, revenue generation was difficult to determine due to the structure of the company. Therefore, in 1996, the export division was restructured as a limited liability company. This allowed the company to improve the tracking of revenue and expenses. Originally, 80% of BTI's export sales came from two countries; therefore, the initial approach to selling overseas was not reaching their anticipated goals of expanding their foreign market presence. However, changes were made and now the company manages the details of selling to over 80 countries. There were three major export expansion challenges noted by the Managing Director: 1. Product and Shipping - The major obstacle for BTI was product assembly. Originally, the majority of the product was assembled in the United States, which increased shipping and packaging costs. With so many parts specified in the order, many times the order would arrive with parts missing. The missing parts could equate to tens of thousands of dollars. Shipping these missing parts separately in another shipment also cost tens of thousands of dollar, plus a delivery delay time of six to eight weeks; all of which came out of the BTI's pockets. 2. Product Adaptation - Safety and product standards varied widely for each of the 80 countries to which BTI exported. Weights, special licenses, product specification requirements, measurement systems, and truck stability can all differ from country to country and can serve as a type of barrier to entry, making it difficult to adapt products accordingly. Technical and safety standards are barriers that serve as a type of protection for the local industry and can stand in the way of successfully pursuing foreign markets. 3. Marketing Challenges - The importance of distribution creates many challenges for BTI as they attempt to determine how each country prefers to operate with regard to their distribution systems. Some countries have competition from a small competitor that only produces one competing product; whereas BTI manufactures over 100 products. Marketing material is another concern for BTI as they attempt to push marketing costs to the distributors. Adapting the marketing material can be costly in terms of translation and cultural differences. In addition, the size of paper in the United States differs from those in some countries, causing many problems when attempting to copy the same layout and With distribution being one of several challenges for BTI, the company claims their distribution network is one of their competitive advantages, as the location and names of their distributors are not revealed. In addition, BTI rotates two offerings yearly: training to their distributors one year and then the next is a distributor's meeting. With a focus on product and shipping, product adaptation, and marketing challenges, the intricacies of selling overseas takes time and patience. Another competitive advantage noted is BTI's cradle to grave strategy, where they follow the product from sale to its final resting place, whether the truck is leased or purchased new or used. They also offer service and maintenance plans with a detailed cost analysis provided to the company prior to purchasing or leasing the product. Expanding abroad will always create challenges for a company. As the Managing Director stated, "If you don't have patience (in the export business), you better do something else." Knowing how to adapt quickly provides BTI with the skills necessary to adjust to the changing needs of each country and its own unique challenges, allowing them to remain competitive.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.32 no.10
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• pp.916-927
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• 2010

In general water treatment process, the disinfection process by chlorine is used to prevent water borne disease and microbial regrowth in water distribution system. Because chlorines were reacted with organic matter, carcinogens such as disinfection by-products (DBPs) were produced in drinking water. Therefore, a suitable injection of chlorine is need to decrease DBPs. Rechlorination in water pipelines or reservoirs are recently increased to secure the residual chlorine in the end of water pipelines. EPANET 2.0 developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is used to compute the optimal chlorine injection in water treatment plant and to predict the dosage of rechlorination into water distribution system. The bulk decay constant ($k_{bulk}$) was drawn by bottle test and the wall decay constant ($k_{wall}$) was derived from using systermatic analysis method for water quality modeling in target region. In order to predict water quality based on hydraulic analysis model, residual chlorine concentration was forecasted in water distribution system. The formation of DBPs such as trihalomethanes (THMs) was verified with chlorine dosage in lab-scale test. The bulk decay constant ($k_{bulk}$) was rapidly decreased with increasing temperature in the early time. In the case of 25 degrees celsius, the bulk decay constant ($k_{bulk}$) decreased over half after 25 hours later. In this study, there were able to calculate about optimal rechlorine dosage and select on profitable sites in the network map.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.220-229
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• 2011

This study attempted to understand the perception and the degree of trust that consumers had in the national agricultural food accreditation system, to inquire into and examine the consumers' perception of traditional food quality certification performed for the protection of excellent traditional food, and to propose the right direction for the policies on the traditional food quality certification system and the plans to improve consumers' perception of the system. According to the results of this survey performed in married women, based on the 'the recognition of accreditation system' and 'the recognition of certification marks' of 'the seventh national agricultural food accreditation system' presently being used by the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the household food purchasers showed high recognition for eco-friendly agricultural product accreditation, processed food KS certification, and organically processed food certification in that order. Meanwhile, it was shown that they indicated low recognition for the traditional food-related accreditation systems such as 'traditional food quality certification' and 'food grand master'. It was found that reliability of the certification mark provided by the agricultural food accreditation system gained 3.54 points (on a 5-point scale), and 68.1% of the study subjects referred to the certification marks while purchasing agricultural foods. And most of them answered to the question of 'why they referred to the certification marks' saying that it was done 'to choose safe food'. The most frequent answer to question of 'the means to recognize the traditional food quality certification system' was 'broadcasting, advertising'. 57.3% of the subjects had a previous experience of buying a product certified by the traditional food quality certification system, and 93.2% of all the subjects had the intention to buy a product certified by the traditional food quality certification system later. And most of them answered that 'strengthening government policies' would be the most ideal way to inform the public of the traditional food quality certification system. According to the results of this study, while 'relying on the traditional food quality certification system in general' was relatively high among the consumers, 'intention to buy quality certified products by visiting a distantly located store' was low; thus, from this analysis, it can be seen that there is a need for diversification of places selling these quality certified products and to establish a distribution network for these products.

• Polymer(Korea)
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.404-411
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• 2004

The microcapsules containing triphenyl phosphate (TPP), a flame retardant, were prepared by phase-inversion emulsification technique using the epoxy resin (Novolac type) with excellent physical properties and network structure. This microencapsulation process was adopted for the protection of TPP evaporation and wetting of polymer composite during the polymer blend processing. The TPP, epoxy resin and mixed surfactants were emulsified to oil in water (O/W) by the phase inversion technology and then conducted on the crosslinking of epoxy resin by in-situ polymerization. The capsule size and size distribution of TPP capsules was controlled by mixed surfactant ratio, concentration and TPP contents, The formation and thermal property of TPP capsules were measured by differential scanning calorimetry and thermogravimetric analysis. The morphology and size of TPP capsules were also investigated by scanning and transmission electron microscopies. As the surfactant concentration increased, the TPP capsules were more spherical and mono-dispersed at the same weight ratio of mixed surfactants (F127: SDBS).

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.10 no.7
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• pp.199-204
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• 2021

Digital substation refers to a substation that digitizes functions and communication methods of power facilities such as monitoring, measuring, control, protection, and operation based on IEC 61850, an international standard for the purpose of intelligent power grids. Based on the intelligent operating system, efficient monitoring and control of power facilities is possible, and automatic recovery function and remote control are possible in the event of an accident, enabling rapid power failure recovery. With the development of digital technology and the expansion of the introduction of eco-friendly renewable energy and electric vehicles, the spread of direct current distribution systems is expected to expand. MVDC is a system that utilizes direct current lines with voltage levels and transmission capacities between HVDCs applied to conventional transmission systems and LVDCs from consumers. Converting existing lines in substations, where most power equipment is alternating current centric, to direct current lines will reduce transmission losses and ensure greater current capacity. The process bus of a digital substation is a communication network consisting of communication equipment such as Ethernet switches that connect installed devices between bay level and process level. For MVDC linkage to existing digital substations, the process level was divided into two buses: AC and DC, and a system that can be comprehensively managed in conjunction with diagnostic IEDs as well as surveillance and control was proposed.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.147-157
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• 2013

With the advent of the digital environment that can be accessed anytime, anywhere with the introduction of high-speed network, the free distribution and use of digital content were made possible. Ironically this environment is raising a variety of copyright infringement, and product images used in the online shopping mall are pirated frequently. There are many controversial issues whether shopping mall images are creative works or not. According to Supreme Court's decision in 2001, to ad pictures taken with ham products is simply a clone of the appearance of objects to deliver nothing but the decision was not only creative expression. But for the photographer's losses recognized in the advertising photo shoot takes the typical cost was estimated damages. According to Seoul District Court precedents in 2003, if there are the photographer's personality and creativity in the selection of the subject, the composition of the set, the direction and amount of light control, set the angle of the camera, shutter speed, shutter chance, other shooting methods for capturing, developing and printing process, the works should be protected by copyright law by the Court's sentence. In order to receive copyright protection of the shopping mall images by the law, it is simply not to convey the status of the product, the photographer's personality and creativity can be recognized that it requires effort. Accordingly, the cost of making the mall image increases, and the necessity for copyright protection becomes higher. The product images of the online shopping mall have a very unique configuration unlike the general pictures such as portraits and landscape photos and, therefore, the general image watermarking technique can not satisfy the requirements of the image watermarking. Because background of product images commonly used in shopping malls is white or black, or gray scale (gradient) color, it is difficult to utilize the space to embed a watermark and the area is very sensitive even a slight change. In this paper, the characteristics of images used in shopping malls are analyzed and a watermarking technology which is suitable to the shopping mall images is proposed. The proposed image watermarking technology divide a product image into smaller blocks, and the corresponding blocks are transformed by DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform), and then the watermark information was inserted into images using quantization of DCT coefficients. Because uniform treatment of the DCT coefficients for quantization cause visual blocking artifacts, the proposed algorithm used weighted mask which quantizes finely the coefficients located block boundaries and coarsely the coefficients located center area of the block. This mask improves subjective visual quality as well as the objective quality of the images. In addition, in order to improve the safety of the algorithm, the blocks which is embedded the watermark are randomly selected and the turbo code is used to reduce the BER when extracting the watermark. The PSNR(Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) of the shopping mall image watermarked by the proposed algorithm is 40.7~48.5[dB] and BER(Bit Error Rate) after JPEG with QF = 70 is 0. This means the watermarked image is high quality and the algorithm is robust to JPEG compression that is used generally at the online shopping malls. Also, for 40% change in size and 40 degrees of rotation, the BER is 0. In general, the shopping malls are used compressed images with QF which is higher than 90. Because the pirated image is used to replicate from original image, the proposed algorithm can identify the copyright infringement in the most cases. As shown the experimental results, the proposed algorithm is suitable to the shopping mall images with simple background. However, the future study should be carried out to enhance the robustness of the proposed algorithm because the robustness loss is occurred after mask process.

• Journal of Environmental Impact Assessment
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2020

This study aims to evaluate the effect of artificial facilities constructed afterthe release of the civilian controlled zone (CCZ) in Cheorwon on the inhabitation of cranes. The study site was released from the CCZ in 2012, and several barns have been built since 2017. The average number of Red-crowned Cranes was 9.3±4.3 individuals (±Standard Deviation) in the period before the release of the CCZ from 2009 to 2012, and it decreased by ca. one third of Red-crowned Crane's average individuals were showing 3.5±0.5 individuals after release. The average number of White-naped Cranes also appeared to be decreased by ca. 90% from 63.3±24.6 to 6.0±6.0 individuals. This results suggest that the construction of greenhouses and barns after the releasing of the CCZ affected the decrease of the population of these two crane species. In the case of Red-crowned Crane, the core area tended to move away from the area where barns were built. However, the distribution range of Red-crowned Cranes did not change significantly we expected because the study area was not their favorite place since 2012 when the area was released from the CCZ. The density of the White-naped Crane was relatively high even in the area where greenhouses were built, but after 2017 when the barn was built intensively, core habitat of crane became shrink and fragmented. These results suggest that both Red-crowned Cranes and White-naped Cranes response sensitively against habitat change due to the construction of barns. Since the release of the CCZ, the construction of the greenhouse has been influenced on the distribution of cranes, but subsequently, the construction of the barn seems to have caused a bigger change in their core habitat because the passage of people to barns is more frequent than the greenhouses.