• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.38
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• pp.1-28
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• 2015

The work appeared a featured female character in the Disney animation film begins with 'Snow White' released in 1937. After then, the 11 female characters appeared included 'Tangled' in 2010. Female characters reveal their identity due to obedient, family-oriented and marriage with prince and then gradually develop to heroine who leads to man, and is independent, pioneering, and sometimes saves the nation. Nevertheless, the ending of the Disney animation was still not escape the institutional, traditional discourse. Female characters are followed to meet the featured actor kissing and marriage, or was to show the virtues of sacrifice for the actor. However, Elsa in 'Frozen' is the character with an independent identity compared with the patriarchy, male chauvinism and heterosexual dichotomous discourse given so far in Disney. In this study, it is to explain the change of gender identity in the character of Elsa through Queer theory that deconstructs the distinction between sex and gender, and is constituted by the actions typed and performed the gender concept, and is dismantling the dichotomy itself such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual. The performative of Queer make the boundaries between lesbian-gay, sexuality and heterosexual ambiguous. It can be said that the performative has political nature resisted to the dominant discourse through these parodiable strategy. The performative showed of Elsa is in the boundaries between the sisterhood and the heterosexual. When analyzed in a heterosexual perspective Elsa's identity is to be understood as simply just love the intimacy of a sister and a sister. On the other hand, if you focused on the relationship between women and the relationship between Elsa and Anna is recognized as the point of view of homosexuality. Because if you look at the concept of lesbian continuum, the homosexual love in the female characters of Disney seems like a bond between women, easier than heterosexual love can be hidden sexual desires. Elsa has developed into a performative identity through the expression of performative and the inhibitory of queer identity. And then the her sorcery that was initially contraindicated and the presence of a fear became to the 'lesbian phallus'. The sorcery that can be seen the signifying phallus against to the privileges of heterosexual patriarchy is recognized in the world of Arendal. Elsa is a new women featuring Disney characters. as this character is analysised by Queer theory, this study seeks to expand the area of the various character analysis methods.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2015

Collaborative filtering(CF) algorithm has been popularly used for recommender systems in both academic and practical applications. A general CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and creates recommendation results with the items favored by other people with similar tastes. Thus, it is very important for CF to measure the similarities between users because the recommendation quality depends on it. In most cases, users' explicit numeric ratings of items(i.e. quantitative information) have only been used to calculate the similarities between users in CF. However, several studies indicated that qualitative information such as user's reviews on the items may contribute to measure these similarities more accurately. Considering that a lot of people are likely to share their honest opinion on the items they purchased recently due to the advent of the Web 2.0, user's reviews can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, this study proposes a new hybrid recommender system that combines with users' review mining. Our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and his/her text reviews on the items when calculating similarities between users. In specific, our system creates not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-item review term matrix. Then, it calculates rating similarity and review similarity from each matrix, and calculates the final user-to-user similarity based on these two similarities(i.e. rating and review similarities). As the methods for calculating review similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is to use the frequency of the commonly used terms, and the other one is to use the sum of the importance weights of the commonly used terms in users' review. In the case of the importance weights of terms, we proposed the use of average TF-IDF(Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) weights. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we applied it to the implementation of a recommender system for smartphone applications (hereafter, app). At present, over a million apps are offered in each app stores operated by Google and Apple. Due to this information overload, users have difficulty in selecting proper apps that they really want. Furthermore, app store operators like Google and Apple have cumulated huge amount of users' reviews on apps until now. Thus, we chose smartphone app stores as the application domain of our system. In order to collect the experimental data set, we built and operated a Web-based data collection system for about two weeks. As a result, we could obtain 1,246 valid responses(ratings and reviews) from 78 users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications(VBA) and SAS Text Miner. And, to avoid distortion due to human intervention, we did not adopt any refining works by human during the user's review mining process. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared its performance to the performance of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using average MAE(mean absolute error). The experimental results showed that our proposed system(MAE = 0.7867 ~ 0.7881) slightly outperformed a conventional CF system(MAE = 0.7939). Also, they showed that the calculation of review similarity between users based on the TF-IDF weights(MAE = 0.7867) leaded to better recommendation accuracy than the calculation based on the frequency of the commonly used terms in reviews(MAE = 0.7881). The results from paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system with review similarity calculation using the frequency of the commonly used terms outperformed conventional CF system with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of users' review information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Journal of Agricultural Extension & Community Development
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.1093-1124
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• 2014

Studies on the role of agricultural science colleges are mostly divided into agricultural production, which is the primary function of agriculture, and other functions, which have recently begun to be emphasized as a result of social needs. With the green revolution and the aging of the farming population, there is a strong view that the role of agricultural science colleges should remain as it is. However, agriculture is expanding in terms of concept and content by converging with other industries not traditionally associated with agricultural production. Thus, the fields that now need to form part of agricultural science knowledge are becoming more detailed and expansive. The government's perception remains at the level of merely fostering farmers. This was evident in a survey on the employment rate, a factor used to evaluate colleges, in which the role of agricultural science colleges was limited to fostering farmers. Agro- industry fields, other than agriculturalists, include general industries in which the academic fields of agricultural science are combined with other academic fields. Thus, even when someone is employed in an industry that requires background knowledge of agricultural science, there is often a perception that he or she is employed in a field that is irrelevant to the major. This study examines the role of agricultural science colleges in agriculture and farm villages by focusing on the employment of graduates of these colleges within agro-industry. We categorize academic research on agricultural science into 16 fields, based on the medium level of the National Standard Science and Technology Classification Codes. Then, we categorize the employment fields into 168 fields, based on the small classification level of the inter-industry relations classification. Thus, we investigate 220 departments of 37 colleges, nationwide. Our findings show that the average employment rate of graduates of agricultural science colleges is 69.0%. Furthermore, 33.0% of all employees work in agro-industry fields that require background knowledge in agricultural science, which is one out of three job seekers. Then, 3.6% of employees work in business startups in agro-industry. The aforementioned government survey showed that only 0.1% of all college graduates in Korea were employed as agriculturalists in 2013. However, our results showed that 13.3% of graduates were working as agriculturalists, which is significantly different to the results of the government survey. These results confirm that agricultural science colleges contribute greatly to the employment of graduates, including farmers, agro-industry, and business startups in agro-industry fields.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.17 no.8 s.88
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• pp.1121-1128
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• 2007

The fruits of Zanthoxylum piperitum are known as having various physiology vitality, and the abstraction ingredient of the pericarp is also known as having strong antibiotic activities against various bacteria. Therefore, this study was carried out to estimate the effect of physiology vitality when the abstraction ingredient of Z. piperitum was added in soy sauce(Chopi-kanjang) and soybean paste(Chopi-doenjang). For the antibiotic activity against the pathogens of sitotoxism such as Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella typhimurium, Vibrio parahemolyticus, Escherichia coli 0157:H7, the extracts of the Chopi-kanjang was added 1%, 2%, 4% pericarp of Z. piperitum in the manufacturing process of soy source. According to the results, the growth of E. coli 0157:H7 and V. parahemolyticus were respectively inhibited as 70% and 50% by the Chopi-kanjang added 2% of the ingredient. For the antibiotic effects of the aforementioned Chopi-kanjang against Sal. typhimurium and Sta. aureus, the growth of those pathogens was also inhibited between 40% and 60% according to the manufacturing period of Chopi-kanjang. It was confirmed that the antibiotic activity using the mixture of the abstraction ingredient and Chopi-doenjang was lower than those of Chopi-kanjang. In order to estimate the anticancer activity using by caspase-3 activity, the mixture of the abstraction ingredient of the pericarp of Z. piperitum and Chopi-kanjang was treated to leukemia cells. According to the results, the activities of caspase-3 using the mixture added 1%, 2% and 4% of the abstraction ingredient were respectively increased as much as 4, 12, 15 times comparing with the control which was treated with the soy source only. It could be that the mixture of the abstraction ingredient of the pericarp of Z. piperitum and soy source induced apoptosis, and the mixture of the abstraction ingredient and soybean paste had no effect on the activity of caspase-3. In order to find out the death of the aforementioned cells caused by necrosis or apoptosis, DNA fragmentation in the cell was examined. U-937 cells showed apoptotic DNA fragmentation in the incubation with Chopi-kanjang extract.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.331-342
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• 2020

The suppression of neuroinflammatory responses in microglial cells can be considered a key target for improving the progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), and Huntington's disease (HD). Asparagus cochinchinensis has traditionally been used as a medicine to treat fever, cough, kidney disease, breast cancer, inflammatory diseases, and brain diseases. In this study, we investigated the neuroprotective mechanism of an aqueous extract from A. cochinchinensis root (AEAC), particularly its anti-inflammatory effects on lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-activated BV-2 microglial cells. BV-2 cells were treated with four different concentrations of AEAC. No significant toxicity was detected in BV-2 cells treated with AEAC. Nitric oxide (NO), cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) mRNA, and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) mRNA levels were 21% lower in the AEAC+LPS group than in the Vehicle+LPS group. Lower proinflammatory (TNF-α and IL-1β) and anti-inflammatory cytokine (IL-6 and IL-10) levels were also detected in the AEAC+LPS group than in the Vehicle+LPS group, albeit at varying rates. Moreover, the phosphorylation of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) members after LPS treatment was significantly recovered in the AEAC-pretreated group compared to the Vehicle+LPS group, enhancement of the phosphorylation of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) members after LPS treatment was significantly recovered in the AEAC-pretreated group, while cell cycle arrest at the G2/M phase caused by LPS treatment was less severe in the AEAC+LPS group. The increase in reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation induced by LPS treatment was also lower in the AEAC-pretreated group than in the Vehicle+LPS group. This is the first study to show that AEAC exerts anti-neuroinflammatory activity against LPS stimulation by regulating the MAPK signaling pathway, the cell cycle, and ROS production.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.50-58
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• 2016

The root bark of Ulmus macrocarpa has been used in traditional medicine for the treatment of various diseases such as edema, infection and inflammation. Nevertheless, the biological activities and underlying mechanisms of the immunomodulatory effects remain unclear. In this study, as part of our ongoing screening program to evaluate the immunomodulatory potential of new compounds from traditional medicinal resources, we investigated the effects of U. macrocarpa water extract (UME) on immune modulation in a murine RAW 264.7 macrophage model. As immune response parameters, the productions of as nitric oxide (NO) and cytokines such tumor necrotic factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-1β and IL-10 were evaluated. Although the release of IL-1β remained unchanged in UME-treated RAW 264.7 macrophages, the productions of NO, TNF-α and IL-10 were significantly increased, along with the increased expression of inducible NO synthase, TNF-α and IL-10 expression at concentrations with no cytotoxicity. UME treatment also induced the nuclear translocation of nuclear factor κB (NF-κB), and phosphorylation of Akt and mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) indicating that UME activated macrophages through the activation of NF-κB, phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt and MAPKs signaling pathways in RAW 264.7 macrophages. Furthermore, pre-treatment with UME significantly attenuated the production of NO, but not TNF-α, IL-1β and IL-10, in lipopolysaccharide-stimulated RAW 264.7 cells suggesting that UME may be useful in preventing inflammatory diseases mediated by excessive production of NO. These findings suggest that the beneficial therapeutic effects of UME may be attributed partly to its ability to modulate immune functions in macrophages.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.109-116
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• 2016

Ulmi cortex is the elm bark or root bark of Ulmus macrocarpa Hance and has been used as an ingredient of traditional medicine for anti-inflammatory, analgesic, anti-cancer and wound healing on both the East and the West. This study investigated whether the Ulmus macrocarpa Hance Water extract (UMWE) has the in vivo and in vitro immune activating effect. Animals were orally administrated for 14 days as follows: no treat group with distilled water, cyclophosphamide (CY) group with 120 mg/kg of CY, UMWE 100+CY group with 100 mg/kg of UMWE and 120 mg/kg of CY, UMWE 200+CY group with 200 mg/kg of UMWE and 120 mg/kg of CY, UMWE 100 group with 100 mg/kg of UMWE and UMWE 200 group with 200 mg/kg of UMWE. The immunosuppressive drug CY was intraperitoneally injected to induce immune suppression. Spleen indices showed small changes in CY injected groups but splenocyte indices showed greater decrease in the same groups. However, UMWE appeared to relieve CY’s immunosuppression. UMWE also delayed in vitro splenocyte death increasing its longevity. These data obtained by MTT assay and 7-amino-actinomycin D which stains preferentially dead than live cells. UMWE alone did not show cytotoxicity based on its apoptototic effect on splenocytes in vitro and in vivo. Splenic NK cell activity was maintained by UMWE under the presence of CY in vitro. The data indicated that UMWE protects splenocytes from the immunosuppressive drug CY under in vitro and in vivo conditions.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.293-298
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• 2015

Muscle atrophy, known as a sarcopenia, is defined as a loss of muscle mass resulting from a reduction in the muscle fiber area or density due to a decrease in muscle protein synthesis and an increase in protein breakdown. Schisandrae fructus (SF) extract of the fruits of Schisandra chinensis (Turcz) Baillon has been used as a tonic in traditional medicine for thousands of years. Although a great deal of work has been carried out on the therapeutic potential of SF, its pharmacological mechanisms of action in muscle diseases actions remain unclear. In the present study, we investigated the inhibitory effects of SF ethanol extracts on the production of muscle atrophy factors in C2C12 myotubes stimulated with 5-aminoimidazole-4-carboxamide-ribonucleotide (AICAR), an AMP-activated kinase (AMPK) activator, and sought to determine the underlying mechanisms of action. AICAR upregulated atrophy-related ubiquitin ligase muscle RING finger-1 (MuRF-1) and stimulated the levels of the forkhead box O3a (FoxO3a) transcription factor in the C2C12 myotubes. SF supplementation effectively and concentration- dependently counteracted AICAR-induced muscle cell atrophy and reversed the increased expression of MuRF-1 and FoxO3a. Our study demonstrates that SF can reverse the muscle cell atrophy caused by AICAR through regulation of the AMPK and FoxO3a signaling pathways, followed by inhibition of MuRF-1.

• Applied Biological Chemistry
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.468-472
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• 1995

Substantial amount of caryophyllene oxide (CPO) is present in the essential oils of traditionally-used folk medicinal plants and herbal spices. The CPO, produced via chemical and/or enzymatic reaction of caryophyllene (CP), has largely being used as a flavoring component and exhibited a variety of biological activities. Now, we report the antimutagenic activity of CPO determined by Ames's preincubation test. S-9 fraction was prepared from the liver of rats treated with Arochor 1254. Anatoxin $B_1\;(AFB_1)$ and 2-amino-3-methylimidazo[4,5-f]quinoline (IQ) were used as mutagens. Reduction of mutagenicity of $AFB_1$ or IQ for S. typhimurium TA98 and TA100 by CPO was found to be a dose-dependant manner. CPO (500 ${\mu}g/plate$) reduced mutagenicity of AEB1 for S. typhimurium TA98 and TA100 to 89% and 71%, respectively. For IQ, similar results were observed against S. typhimurium TA98 and TA100, resulting in the inhibition percentage of 77% and 51%, respectively. CP also reduced mutagenicity of AEB1 and IQ for S. typhimurium TA98 and TA100, but the reduction rate was somewhat lowered relative to that of CPO. These results indicate that CPO could be developed as a potent antimutagenic flavoring agent.

• Journal of Life Science
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• v.23 no.11
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• pp.1397-1403
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• 2013

Fructus Sophorae, the dried ripe fruit of Styphnolobium japonicum (L.), is an herbal ingredient used in traditional Oriental medicine. This study was carried out to investigate the effects of Fructus Sophorae extracts (FSE) on immune modulation in a murine RAW 264.7 macrophage model. As immune response parameters, the production of prostaglandin $E_2$ ($PGE_2$) and tumor necrotic $factor-{\alpha}$ ($TNF-{\alpha}$) were evaluated. Our data revealed that FSE increased the macrophage activation and the production of $PGE_2$ and $TNF-{\alpha}$, which was consistently correlated with upregulation of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and $TNF-{\alpha}$ expression at both transcriptional and translational levels. On comparative cytokine protein array, FSE significantly increased several cytokines, which was associated with phosphorylation of mitogen- activated protein kinases (MAPKs), including extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK), p38 MAPK and c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK), and Akt in RAW 264.7 cells. However, each inhibitor of these molecules attenuated the FSE-induced $PGE_2$ production. These results indicate that FSE activated macrophages through the activation of MAPKs and phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt signaling pathways in RAW 264.7 macrophages. These findings suggest that FSE may provide a promising source of an immunoenhancing agent.