• Title/Summary/Keyword: quality factor

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Analyzing the User Intention of Booth Recommender System in Smart Exhibition Environment (스마트 전시환경에서 부스 추천시스템의 사용자 의도에 관한 조사연구)

  • Choi, Jae Ho;Xiang, Jun-Yong;Moon, Hyun Sil;Choi, Il Young;Kim, Jae Kyeong
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.18 no.3
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    • pp.153-169
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    • 2012
  • Exhibitions have played a key role of effective marketing activity which directly informs services and products to current and potential customers. Through participating in exhibitions, exhibitors have got the opportunity to make face-to-face contact so that they can secure the market share and improve their corporate images. According to this economic importance of exhibitions, show organizers try to adopt a new IT technology for improving their performance, and researchers have also studied services which can improve the satisfaction of visitors through analyzing visit patterns of visitors. Especially, as smart technologies make them monitor activities of visitors in real-time, they have considered booth recommender systems which infer preference of visitors and recommender proper service to them like on-line environment. However, while there are many studies which can improve their performance in the side of new technological development, they have not considered the choice factor of visitors for booth recommender systems. That is, studies for factors which can influence the development direction and effective diffusion of these systems are insufficient. Most of prior studies for the acceptance of new technologies and the continuous intention of use have adopted Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Extended Technology Acceptance Model (ETAM). Booth recommender systems may not be new technology because they are similar with commercial recommender systems such as book recommender systems, in the smart exhibition environment, they can be considered new technology. However, for considering the smart exhibition environment beyond TAM, measurements for the intention of reuse should focus on how booth recommender systems can provide correct information to visitors. In this study, through literature reviews, we draw factors which can influence the satisfaction and reuse intention of visitors for booth recommender systems, and design a model to forecast adaptation of visitors for booth recommendation in the exhibition environment. For these purposes, we conduct a survey for visitors who attended DMC Culture Open in November 2011 and experienced booth recommender systems using own smart phone, and examine hypothesis by regression analysis. As a result, factors which can influence the satisfaction of visitors for booth recommender systems are the effectiveness, perceived ease of use, argument quality, serendipity, and so on. Moreover, the satisfaction for booth recommender systems has a positive relationship with the development of reuse intention. For these results, we have some insights for booth recommender systems in the smart exhibition environment. First, this study gives shape to important factors which are considered when they establish strategies which induce visitors to consistently use booth recommender systems. Recently, although show organizers try to improve their performances using new IT technologies, their visitors have not felt the satisfaction from these efforts. At this point, this study can help them to provide services which can improve the satisfaction of visitors and make them last relationship with visitors. On the other hands, this study suggests that they managers along the using time of booth recommender systems. For example, in the early stage of the adoption, they should focus on the argument quality, perceived ease of use, and serendipity, so that improve the acceptance of booth recommender systems. After these stages, they should bridge the differences between expectation and perception for booth recommender systems, and lead continuous uses of visitors. However, this study has some limitations. We only use four factors which can influence the satisfaction of visitors. Therefore, we should development our model to consider important additional factors. And the exhibition in our experiments has small number of booths so that visitors may not need to booth recommender systems. In the future study, we will conduct experiments in the exhibition environment which has a larger scale.

Effects of Y Chromosome Microdeletion on the Outcome of in vitro Fertilization (남성 불임 환자에서 Y 염색체 미세 결손이 체외 수정 결과에 미치는 영향)

  • Choi, Noh-Mi;Yang, Kwang-Moon;Kang, Inn-Soo;Seo, Ju-Tae;Song, In-Ok;Park, Chan-Woo;Lee, Hyoung-Song;Lee, Hyun-Joo;Ahn, Ka-Young;Hahn, Ho-Suap;Lee, Hee-Jung;Kim, Na-Young;Yu, Seung-Youn
    • Clinical and Experimental Reproductive Medicine
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    • v.34 no.1
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    • pp.41-48
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    • 2007
  • Objective: To determine whether the presence of Y-chromosome microdeletion affects the outcome of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) program. Methods: Fourteen couples with microdeletion in azoospermic factor (AZF)c region who attempted IVF/ICSI or cryopreserved and thawed embryo transfer cycles were enrolled. All of the men showed severe oligoasthenoteratoazoospermia (OATS) or azoospermia. As a control, 12 couples with OATS or azoospermia and having normal Y-chromosome were included. Both groups were divided into two subgroups by sperm source used in ICSI such as those who underwent testicular sperm extraction (TESE) and those used ejaculate sperm. We retrospectively analyzed our database in respect to the IVF outcomes. The outcome measures were mean number of good quality embryos, fertilization rates, implantation rates, $\beta$-hCG positive rates, early pregnancy loss and live birth rates. Results: Mean number of good quality embryos, implantation rates, $\beta$-hCG positive rates, early pregnancy loss rates and live birth rates were not significantly different between Y-chromosome microdeletion and control groups. But, fertilization rates in the Y-chromosome microdeletion group (61.1%) was significantly lower than that of control group (79.8%, p=0.003). Also, the subgroup underwent TESE and having AZFc microdeletion showed significantly lower fertilization rates (52.9%) than the subgroup underwent TESE and having normal Y-chromosome (79.5%, p=0.008). Otherwise, in the subgroups used ejaculate sperm, fertilization rates were showed tendency toward lower in couples having Y-chromosome microdeletion than couples with normal Y-chromosome. (65.5% versus 79.9%, p=0.082). But, there was no significance statistically. Conclusions: In IVF/ICSI cycles using TESE sperm, presence of V-chromosome microdeletion may adversely affect to fertilization ability of injected sperm. But, in cases of ejaculate sperm available for ICSI, IVF outcome was not affected by presence of Y-chromosome AZFc microdeletion. However, more larger scaled prospective study was needed to support our results.

The Development of the Korean Evaluation Scale for Hearing Handicap (KESHH) for the Geriatric Hearing Los (노인성난청을 위한 청각장애평가지수(KESHH)의 개발)

  • Ku, Ho-Lim;Kim, Jin-Sook
    • 한국노년학
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    • v.30 no.3
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    • pp.973-992
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    • 2010
  • The hearing impairment is the representative disorder that affects the quality of the routine life of the aged period. This study was aimed to develop the Korean evaluation scale for hearing handicap(KESHH) with which we can evaluate social and psychological effects of the hearing impairment. Applying this scale clinically, we can analyze the geriatric hearing loss specifically and improve the quality of the aural rehabilitation that can help the hardness of the hearing impairment. Data were collected from 288 participants(176 hearing aid users and 112 non-hearing aid users) and the average age of the participants was 67.4 years old ( 60.15 for the hearing aids users and 78.9 for the non hearing users). The composition ratio of the male and female participants were 58.0% and 42.0% and extrovert and introvert personality were 49.3% and 50.7% showing balanced formation. The tentative draft of KESHH measurements were produced with 30 items and following 5 subscales. Using factor analysis, 6 items were erased and 4 subscales - social effect, psycho/emotional effect, interpersonal effect, and perception of hearing aids - were identified. As each subscale consisted of 6 items, 24 items were corrected and remained totally. Conclusively, the KESHH was developed with 24 items and 4 subscales including 6 items on each subscale. In addition, the KESHH was divided into type-1 and 2 depending on hearing aid users and non hearing aid users. The results of this study can be summarized as the following 5 parts. Firstly, the reliabilities of the KESHH were proved to be high because the subscales' Cronbach alpha values were from 0.723 through 0.895. Secondly, the KESHH showed systematically increasing score as the hearing impairment increased. The lowest score was 24 and the highest score was 117 and the average scores of the hearing impaired and non-hearing impaired are 72.06(SD=15.67) and 66.98(SD=20.94) showing 5.08 increased score for the hearing impaired. Depending on the degree of the hearing loss, the scores recorded 52.63 at the below of the mild hearing loss, 67.29 for the moderate hearing loss, 71.89 for the moderately severe hearing loss, and 75.57 for the severe hearing loss The comparison of the scores by hearing levels indicated that the higher the hearing levels were, the higher the scores of the KESHH with statistical significance(p<0.001). Thirdly, the correlation among 4 subscales was 0.384~0.880(p<0.001). Also, the pure tone average, personality, and the four subscales correlations showed statistical significance with 0.148~0.880 except for the pure tone average and personality and the pure tone average and perception of hearing aids. Fourthly, the total variances explained for the independent subscles were analyzed with multiple regression. The social effect was explained 17.4% with pure tone average, personality, and the status of hearing aid use variances. The psycho/emotional effect was explained 14.4% with puretone average, personality, and age variances. The interpersonal effect was explained 11.2% with pure tone average, personality, and the status of hearing aid use variances. The perception of hearing aids effect was explained 2.2% with only personality. Finally, test-retest reliability was proved to be high with 0.791(p<0.001). Conclusively, the KESHH that was developed considering Korean culture can be a useful instrument for expressing the hearing handicaps of the Korean aged hearing impaired in scores for both hearing aid users and non-users. Also, it is thought that the KESHH is useful clinically for identifying the changes of the hearing handicap scores before and after wearing hearing aids and aural rehabilitation at diverse situations.

Seasonal Variations of Water Quality in the Lower Part of the Nagdong River (낙동강 하류수질의 계절적 변화)

  • KIM Yong-Gwan;SHIM Hye-Kung;CHO Hak-Rae;YOU Sun-Jae
    • Korean Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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    • v.17 no.6
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    • pp.511-522
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    • 1984
  • The Nagdong is one of the biggest rivers in Korea, which is very important water source not only for tap water of Pusan city but also for the industrial water. Therefore, authors tried to check the water quality year by year. In this experiment one hundred and twenty water samples collected from August 1983 to July 1984 were analyzed bacteriologically and physiologically. Fifteen sampling stations were established between near Samrangjin and estuary of the river. To evaluate the water quality, temperature, pH, chloride ion, salinity, chemical oxygen demand (COD), electrical conductivity, nutrients, total coliform, fecal coliform, fecal streptococcus, viable cell count and bacterial flora were observed. The variation of water temperature was ranged $-1.5{\sim}29.0^{\circ}C$ (Mean value $13.9{\sim}16.5^{\circ}C$), it in spring was higher as $10{\sim}15^{\circ}C$ about $10^{\circ}C$ than in winter and it in autumm was very stabilized as about $20^{\circ}C$ at each station. The pH variation of the samples was ranged $6.68{\sim}9.15$. The range of concentration of chloride ion and salinity varied $7.4{\sim}l,020.5$ mg/l and $1.05{\sim}33.0\%0$, respectively. Especially, salinity of the 3rd water war was the higher than others as $25.76{\sim}31.58\%0$. COD was ranged $1.45{\sim}14.94$ mg/l and the lower part of the Nagdong River was heavily contaminated by domesitc sewage and waste water from the adjacent factor area. The range of electrical conductivity was $1.360{\times}10^2{\sim}5.650{\times}10^4{\mu}{\mho}/cm$ and that was by far higher the estuary than the upper. Concentration of nutrients were $0.008{\sim}0.040$ mg/l (Mean value $0.019{\sim}0.068$ mg/l) for $NO_2-N,\;0.038{\sim}5.253$ mg/l ($0.351{\sim}2.347$ mg/l) for $NO_3-N,\;0.100{\sim}2.685$ mg/l($0.117{\sim}1.380$ mg/l) for $NH_4-N,\;0.003{\sim}0.084$ mg/l($0.014{\sim}0.065$ mg/l) for $PO_4-P$ and $0.154{\sim}6.123$ mg/l ($1.165{\sim}3.972$ mg/l) for $SiO_2-Si$, respectively. Usually nutrients contents of the water in the upper part(included station 1 to 5) were higher than those of the estuarine area. The bacterial density of the samples ranged 7.3 to 460,000/100 ml for total coliforms, 3.6 to 460,000/100 ml for fecal coliform, $0{\sim}46,000/100ml$ for fecal streptococcus and $<30{\sim}1.2{\times}10^5/ml$ for viable cell count. Composition of coliform was $28\%$ Escherichia coli group, $18\%$ Citrobacter freundii group, $31\%$ Enterobacter aerogenes group and $22\%$ others. Predominant species among the 659 strains isolated from the samples were Pseudomonas spp. ($42\%$), Flavobacterium spp. ($20\%$) and Moraxella spp. ($12\%$).

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Incorporating Social Relationship discovered from User's Behavior into Collaborative Filtering (사용자 행동 기반의 사회적 관계를 결합한 사용자 협업적 여과 방법)

  • Thay, Setha;Ha, Inay;Jo, Geun-Sik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.19 no.2
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    • pp.1-20
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    • 2013
  • Nowadays, social network is a huge communication platform for providing people to connect with one another and to bring users together to share common interests, experiences, and their daily activities. Users spend hours per day in maintaining personal information and interacting with other people via posting, commenting, messaging, games, social events, and applications. Due to the growth of user's distributed information in social network, there is a great potential to utilize the social data to enhance the quality of recommender system. There are some researches focusing on social network analysis that investigate how social network can be used in recommendation domain. Among these researches, we are interested in taking advantages of the interaction between a user and others in social network that can be determined and known as social relationship. Furthermore, mostly user's decisions before purchasing some products depend on suggestion of people who have either the same preferences or closer relationship. For this reason, we believe that user's relationship in social network can provide an effective way to increase the quality in prediction user's interests of recommender system. Therefore, social relationship between users encountered from social network is a common factor to improve the way of predicting user's preferences in the conventional approach. Recommender system is dramatically increasing in popularity and currently being used by many e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com, Last.fm, eBay.com, etc. Collaborative filtering (CF) method is one of the essential and powerful techniques in recommender system for suggesting the appropriate items to user by learning user's preferences. CF method focuses on user data and generates automatic prediction about user's interests by gathering information from users who share similar background and preferences. Specifically, the intension of CF method is to find users who have similar preferences and to suggest target user items that were mostly preferred by those nearest neighbor users. There are two basic units that need to be considered by CF method, the user and the item. Each user needs to provide his rating value on items i.e. movies, products, books, etc to indicate their interests on those items. In addition, CF uses the user-rating matrix to find a group of users who have similar rating with target user. Then, it predicts unknown rating value for items that target user has not rated. Currently, CF has been successfully implemented in both information filtering and e-commerce applications. However, it remains some important challenges such as cold start, data sparsity, and scalability reflected on quality and accuracy of prediction. In order to overcome these challenges, many researchers have proposed various kinds of CF method such as hybrid CF, trust-based CF, social network-based CF, etc. In the purpose of improving the recommendation performance and prediction accuracy of standard CF, in this paper we propose a method which integrates traditional CF technique with social relationship between users discovered from user's behavior in social network i.e. Facebook. We identify user's relationship from behavior of user such as posts and comments interacted with friends in Facebook. We believe that social relationship implicitly inferred from user's behavior can be likely applied to compensate the limitation of conventional approach. Therefore, we extract posts and comments of each user by using Facebook Graph API and calculate feature score among each term to obtain feature vector for computing similarity of user. Then, we combine the result with similarity value computed using traditional CF technique. Finally, our system provides a list of recommended items according to neighbor users who have the biggest total similarity value to the target user. In order to verify and evaluate our proposed method we have performed an experiment on data collected from our Movies Rating System. Prediction accuracy evaluation is conducted to demonstrate how much our algorithm gives the correctness of recommendation to user in terms of MAE. Then, the evaluation of performance is made to show the effectiveness of our method in terms of precision, recall, and F1-measure. Evaluation on coverage is also included in our experiment to see the ability of generating recommendation. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperform and more accurate in suggesting items to users with better performance. The effectiveness of user's behavior in social network particularly shows the significant improvement by up to 6% on recommendation accuracy. Moreover, experiment of recommendation performance shows that incorporating social relationship observed from user's behavior into CF is beneficial and useful to generate recommendation with 7% improvement of performance compared with benchmark methods. Finally, we confirm that interaction between users in social network is able to enhance the accuracy and give better recommendation in conventional approach.

Factors affecting the final adult height in survivors of childhood brain tumors (소아 뇌종양 환자의 최종 성인키에 영향을 미치는 인자)

  • Yun, Kyong-Ah;Lee, Young Ah;Shin, Choong Ho;Yang, Sei Won;Shin, Hee Young;Ahn, Hyo Seop;Kim, Il Han
    • Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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    • v.50 no.1
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    • pp.65-73
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    • 2007
  • Purpose : Short stature is an important complication that impairs the quality of life in survivors of childhood brain tumors. We studied their final adult height (FAH) to evaluate risk factors for short stature. Methods : We reviewed the medical data of 95 survivors of childhood brain tumors (64 males and 31 females) who had been followed up from 1982 to 2006, reached FAH, and had a more than five year-disease-free survival. Results : Final adult height standard deviation score (FAHTSDS: $mean{\pm}SD$) of the patients was lower than those of general population ($-1.15{\pm}1.72$), HTSDS at diagnosis ($-0.13{\pm}1.57$), and target HTSDS ($-0.49{\pm}0.69$). FAHTSDS of craniopharyngioma patients did not decrease ($0.57{\pm}1.17$), but those of germ cell tumor and medulloblastoma patients were significantly reduced ($-1.20{\pm}1.45$, $-2.70{\pm}1.46$; P<0.05). The patients treated with craniospinal radiation or chemotherapy had lower FAHTSDS ($-1.93{\pm}1.58$, $-2.27{\pm}1.44$; P<0.01). In the spinal irradiation group, the younger the age at diagnosis was, the more the loss of FAH (r=0.442, P<0.01). Growth hormone replacement (GHR) didn't improve FAHTSDS, but starting GHR under 12 years was an independent factor for improving FAH once treatment methods were taken into account (P=0.01). Conclusion : The younger age at diagnosis, spinal radiation and chemotherapy were all important risk factors of height loss, and height gain was expected in patients who received GHR under the age of 12 years. Therefore, regular check-ups of growth and early intervention with growth hormones are needed for high risk groups to improve FAH.

A Study on the Women's Need during early Postpartum (산욕 초기 여성의 간호 요구에 관한 연구)

  • Yoo, Eun-Kwang;Lee, Mi-Young;Kim, Jin-Hee;Sin, Chu-Kyung;Yoo, Soon-Jae;Ji, Soo-Kyung
    • Women's Health Nursing
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    • v.6 no.3
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    • pp.439-452
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    • 2000
  • This study sought to figure out women's needs during early postpartum for developing adequate nursing intervention toward postpartal women's healthy adaptation. A convenience sample of 89 women who are in the early postpartal period and admitted in a university hospital located in Seoul, Korea was studied from July 1, 1999 to August 13. 1999. 1. The age group of 26-30 years was 52.8% and the level of education above high school 91%. 67.6% of women had no job, 62.9% had experienced one time of delivery, and 52.8% had no experience of abortion. 2. 31.5% of women received prenatal education, 44.9% only postpartal education. 77.5% of women planned breast-feeding, and 53.9% of women had an experience of breast-feeding during hospital stay. For the feeling of confidence related to the self-care, 27% only expressed 'yes. I have' and 59.5% 'just a little bit'. For the feeling of confidence related to the baby rearing, 29.2% only expressed 'yes. I have' and 60.7% 'just a little bit'. 3. The rate of postpartal women's mother as a preferred non-professional care giver was the highest, 75.3%. The rate of the style of Sanhujori highly preferred and planned at this time was at postpartal women's maiden home or her home with mother, 58.4%, 47.7% respectively. It shows that women still wish to have traditional Sanhuiori at home. 4. The mean of nursing need of postpartal women was 4.25% and it means that universally the degree of nursing need during postpartum is still high. General nursing need (4.29) was higher than that of traditional Sanhujori (4.09), however, the need of Sanhujori is still high. 5. Specifically, the degree of nursing need according to the category of needs was 'educational need for baby rearing,' 4.43; 'emotional-psychological care', 4.41; 'environmental care,' 4.31; 'self-care,' 4.14; and 'physical care,' 3.85 in rank. The educational need core of the specific method about Sanhuiori (4.35) was second to the highest among 15 items of self-care. 6. The related factors to the degree of nursing need were age to physical care; educational level, plan of breast feeding and experience of breast feeding during hospital stay to emotional-psychological care; and the feeling of confidence in baby rearing to environmental care. 7. There was highly positive correlation between the degree of traditional Sanhujori need and general care need(r=.77). This result strongly reflects that there is a necessity of professional care givers' capability to consider the integrative care reflecting the socio-cultural need for women's healthy adaptation during postpartum. It provides a challenge to the professional care givers to research further on the effects of Sanhuiori on the health status, health recovery after abortion or delivery from the various aspects through the cross-sectional and longitudinal research for the refinement of the reality of Sanhuiori not only as cultural phenomenon but as an inseparable factor influencing on women's postpartal healthy adaptation and for the appropriateness of intervention and quality of care for desirable health outcome.

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A Study on the Food Habits and Attitudes of Cerebrovascular Accident Patients in Daegu S Medical Center (대구 S병원 뇌졸중 환자의 생활 습관 및 식습관에 관한 조사 연구)

  • Lee, Seung-A;Jeon, Seon-Min;Kim, Hye-Jin;Do, Gyeong-Min;Jung, You-Mi;Choi, Myoung-Sook
    • Journal of the East Asian Society of Dietary Life
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.436-445
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    • 2008
  • Stroke is a serious disease despite recent improvements in the medical treatments available. Thirty-six stroke patients were interviewed as case and 36 non-stroke patients were interviewed as controls between February 2005 and August 2005 at Daegu S Medical Center. Information regarding the subjects' food habits was collected using the recall method from 5 years before the onset of stroke. Using interview techniques, we investigated how dietary habits and attitude influence nutrient intake. These results were analyzed by the $X^2$, Student's t-test and Chi-square test using the SPSS 12.0 program. This case-control study was performed to demonstrate the relationships among general quality factors (BMI, WHR, and family history of stroke) and lifestyle factors (smoking, exercise and alcohol drinking). The results were as follows. Analysis of the percentage of nutrient intake in terms of meal pattern showed that WHR was significantly higher in the case group than in the control group. Hypertension and diabetes were the most common preceding diseases associated with the risk of stroke. The frequencies of smoking, alcohol consumption (p<0.001) and exercise (p<0.05) were higher in the cases than in the controls. Thus, the findings of this study are consistent with those of previous studies and suggest that people should be advised to control hypertension, smoking, alcohol drinking and obesity in order to prevent the occurrence of stroke as these factors are major risk factors for stroke.

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Environmental Studies in the Lower Part of the Han River Vl. The Statistical Analysis of Eutrophication Factors (한강 하류의 환경학적 연구 Vl. 부영양 요인의 통계적 해석)

  • Jung, Seung-Won;Hue, Hoi-Kwon;Lee, Jin-Hwan
    • Korean Journal of Ecology and Environment
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    • v.37 no.1 s.106
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    • pp.78-86
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    • 2004
  • In order to reveal the relationship between the concentration of chlorophyll- a and the environmental factors affecting eutrophication, the present study was biweekly conducted at G stations in the lower part of the Han river during the period from Feb. 24,2001 to Feb. 9,2002. Water temperature was changed from $0.5^{\circ}C$ to $26.4^{\circ}C$, pH was 5.77${\sim}$8.99, DO 3.15${\sim}$14,36 mg $L^{-1}$, BOD 0.90${\sim}$7.45 mg $L^{-1}$, and COD 1.16${\sim}$9.13 mg $L^{-1}$. TN and TP were ranged from 1.68${\sim}$20.96 mg $L^{-1}$, and 0.02 ${\sim}$ 1.17 mg $L^{-1}$, respectively. $NH_4\;^+$-N, $NO_3\;^-$-N, and $PO_4\;^{3-}$-P were ranged from 0.56${\sim}$3.60 mg $L^{-1}$, 0.03${\sim}$7.29 mg $L^{-1}$, and 0.002${\sim}$0.754 mg $L^{-1}$. Chlorophyll- a was extensively changed from 2.29 ${\mu}g\;L^{-1}$ to 136.28 ${\mu}g\;L^{-1}$ by month and stations. Results of nutrients indicated the eutrophic level in this area and water quality was the gradual worsening in the lower stations than those of upper stations during the period studied. The Pearson correlation analysis between the concentration of chlorophyll- a and the environmental factors indicated that BOD, COD, pH, $NH_4\;^+$-N, TP, TN, conductivity and $PO_4\;^{3-}$-P were positive correlation, but $NO_3\;^-$-N was negative. The environmental factors investigated using the principal component method could be triparted. The first factor group included conductivity, BOD, COD, TN, TP, $NH_4\;^+$-N, $PO_4\;^{3-}$-P and SS, the second WT and DO, and the third pH and $NO_3\;^-$-N. Using the stepwise regression analysis, chlorophyll- a was under the influence of conductivity, $PO_4\;^{3-}$-P, $>NO_3\;^-$-N and $NH_4\;^+$-N Chlorophyll-a = 0.3661 ${\times}$ (Conductivity) - 0.3592 ${\times}$ ($PO_4\;^{3-}$-P) - 0.3449 ${\times}$ ($NO_3\;^-$-N)+0.4362 ${\times}$ ($NH_4\;^+$-N.

The Role of Social Capital and Identity in Knowledge Contribution in Virtual Communities: An Empirical Investigation (가상 커뮤니티에서 사회적 자본과 정체성이 지식기여에 미치는 역할: 실증적 분석)

  • Shin, Ho Kyoung;Kim, Kyung Kyu;Lee, Un-Kon
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.22 no.3
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    • pp.53-74
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    • 2012
  • A challenge in fostering virtual communities is the continuous supply of knowledge, namely members' willingness to contribute knowledge to their communities. Previous research argues that giving away knowledge eventually causes the possessors of that knowledge to lose their unique value to others, benefiting all except the contributor. Furthermore, communication within virtual communities involves a large number of participants with different social backgrounds and perspectives. The establishment of mutual understanding to comprehend conversations and foster knowledge contribution in virtual communities is inevitably more difficult than face-to-face communication in a small group. In spite of these arguments, evidence suggests that individuals in virtual communities do engage in social behaviors such as knowledge contribution. It is important to understand why individuals provide their valuable knowledge to other community members without a guarantee of returns. In virtual communities, knowledge is inherently rooted in individual members' experiences and expertise. This personal nature of knowledge requires social interactions between virtual community members for knowledge transfer. This study employs the social capital theory in order to account for interpersonal relationship factors and identity theory for individual and group factors that may affect knowledge contribution. First, social capital is the relationship capital which is embedded within the relationships among the participants in a network and available for use when it is needed. Social capital is a productive resource, facilitating individuals' actions for attainment. Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1997) identify three dimensions of social capital and explain theoretically how these dimensions affect the exchange of knowledge. Thus, social capital would be relevant to knowledge contribution in virtual communities. Second, existing research has addressed the importance of identity in facilitating knowledge contribution in a virtual context. Identity in virtual communities has been described as playing a vital role in the establishment of personal reputations and in the recognition of others. For instance, reputation systems that rate participants in terms of the quality of their contributions provide a readily available inventory of experts to knowledge seekers. Despite the growing interest in identities, however, there is little empirical research about how identities in the communities influence knowledge contribution. Therefore, the goal of this study is to better understand knowledge contribution by examining the roles of social capital and identity in virtual communities. Based on a theoretical framework of social capital and identity theory, we develop and test a theoretical model and evaluate our hypotheses. Specifically, we propose three variables such as cohesiveness, reciprocity, and commitment, referring to the social capital theory, as antecedents of knowledge contribution in virtual communities. We further posit that members with a strong identity (self-presentation and group identification) contribute more knowledge to virtual communities. We conducted a field study in order to validate our research model. We collected data from 192 members of virtual communities and used the PLS method to analyse the data. The tests of the measurement model confirm that our data set has appropriate discriminant and convergent validity. The results of testing the structural model show that cohesion, reciprocity, and self-presentation significantly influence knowledge contribution, while commitment and group identification do not significantly influence knowledge contribution. Our findings on cohesion and reciprocity are consistent with the previous literature. Contrary to our expectations, commitment did not significantly affect knowledge contribution in virtual communities. This result may be due to the fact that knowledge contribution was voluntary in the virtual communities in our sample. Another plausible explanation for this result may be the self-selection bias for the survey respondents, who are more likely to contribute their knowledge to virtual communities. The relationship between self-presentation and knowledge contribution was found to be significant in virtual communities, supporting the results of prior literature. Group identification did not significantly affect knowledge contribution in this study, inconsistent with the wealth of research that identifies group identification as an important factor for knowledge sharing. This conflicting result calls for future research that examines the role of group identification in knowledge contribution in virtual communities. This study makes a contribution to theory development in the area of knowledge management in general and virtual communities in particular. For practice, the results of this study identify the circumstances under which individual factors would be effective for motivating knowledge contribution to virtual communities.

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