• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.587-601
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• 2013

During the last few decades, it has become evident that the compatibility of the yeast biochemical environment with the ability to process and translate the RNA transcript, along with its capacity to modify a translated protein, are relevant requirements for selecting this host cell for protein expression in several pharmaceutical and clinical applications. In particular, Pichia pastoris is used as an industrial host for recombinant protein and metabolite production, showing a powerful capacity to meet required biomolecular target production levels in high-throughput assays for functional genomics and drug screening. In addition, there is a great advantage to using P. pastoris for protein secretion, even at high molecular weights, since the recovery and purification steps are simplified owing to relatively low levels of endogenous proteins in the extracellular medium. Clearly, no single microexpression system can provide all of the desired properties for human protein production. Moreover, chemical and physical bioprocess parameters, including culture medium formulation, temperature, pH, agitation, aeration rates, induction, and feeding strategies, can highly influence product yield and quality. In order to benefit from the currently available wide range of biosynthesis strategies using P. pastoris, this mini review focuses on the developments and technological fermentation achievements, providing both a comparative and an overall integration analysis. The main aim is to highlight the relevance and versatility of the P. pastoris biosystem to the design of more cost-effective microfactories to meet the increasing demands for recombinant membrane proteins and clinical antibodies for several therapeutic applications.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.43 no.9
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• pp.835-842
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• 2010

This paper attempts to examine households' willingness to pay (WTP) for ground water pollution improvement which can be used in cost-benefit analysis on the project for developing the soil pollution control technique. We applied a contingent valuation (CV) method to obtain at least a preliminary evaluation of the WTP. The CV survey was rigorously designed to comply with the guidelines for best-practiced CV studies. We surveyed a randomly selected sample of 500 households in Seoul metropolitan area and asked respondents questions in person-to-person interviews about how they would be willing to pay for the program. Respondents overall accepted the contingent market and were willing to contribute a significant amount (1,195 to 1,552 won), on average, per household per year. The aggregate value of the project for developing the soil pollution control technique amounts to approximately 20.3 billion won per year. The household values can be the benefits that ensue from the project and compared with the costs of the program to determine whether the project is economically desirable.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.11 no.1 s.53
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• pp.21-27
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• 2007

In this study, an approach that installs seismic isolation bearings was proposed for the seismic retrofit of the existing bridges. The method that replaces all existing bearings with seismic isolators was proposed already. However, in this study, we recommend to utilize the existing bearings for the benefit of safety and cost. According to our proposal, the seismic isolators do not support vertical loads but they Just function as the period shifter and the horizontal damper. To verify this approach experimentally, the real scale bearings and lead rubber bearings far the real highway bridges were designed and fabricated. And the responses of this isolated bridges to the assumed earthquakes were determined by the pseudo dynamic test scheme. The test results were also compared to the responses computed by the well known structural analysis software to check the reliability of the test. From the test results, we found that the retrofitted bridges using the proposed method showed stable performances under earthquakes.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.371-381
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• 1983

This study is aimed at identifying the economic effects of drainage improvement projects. The total area of poor drainage is equivalent to 170,000ha, 13% of the total area of paddy field in Korea. The development of poor drained paddy is an urgent problem considering the low rate of self-sufficiency of food grain and the limitation of farmer's income increase. Rapid development of Korean economy has brought labor shoriage in rural farming sector. Accordingly farm mechanization is an important agricultural policy to hike labor productivity and to save production costs of rice farming. The expected economic benefits of the drainage improvement project are derived from increasing land productivity, expanding double cropped area and farming the farm mechanization base in paddy fields. The economic and financial rate of return of the project are considered very important decision making criteria for project implementation by resource allocation. Therefore this study covered benefit and cost analysis of the sampled area, the estimated financial rate of returns in $Buy{\check{o}}$ and Jinsung are represented 15% and 51% respectively and the economic rate of returns in both project area are also showing 1% and 26% respectively. The rate of return of the projects has showed an outstanding variance according to the locational and natural characteristics of the project area. As showing the above economic rate of return, $Buy{\check{o}}$ is very low Jinsung is very high. But the financial rate of return of both projects are considered comparatively high. Cosequently, the drainage improvement projects should be promoted from the view point of farm income increase to make narrow the income gap between rural and urban incomes and farm mechanization to solve labor shortage in the rural area.

• Journal of Korea Port Economic Association
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.61-73
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• 2007

Creating more efficient and effective intermodal transportation service in Northeast range is a critical issue because of more increased trade volume & demand for intermodal service in the world market and geographical barriers associated with goods transportation, especially in Korea, China and Japan. This study examines the possibility of Rail-ferry introduction and possible route in Northest area which can provide each country mutual economical and logistical satisfaction. But, this study requires more empirical and concrete examination based on the cost & benefit analysis.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.204-211
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• 2015

Probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) has had a significant role in quantitative decision-making by finding design and operational vulnerabilities and evaluating cost-benefit in improving such weak points. In particular, it has been widely used as the core methodology for risk-informed applications (RIAs). Even though the nature of PSA seeks realistic results, there are still "conservative" aspects. One of the sources for the conservatism is the assumptions of safety analysis and the estimation of failure frequency. Surveillance, diagnosis, and prognosis (SDP), utilizing massive databases and information technology, is worth highlighting in terms of its capability for alleviating the conservatism in conventional PSA. This article provides enabling techniques to solidify a method to provide time- and condition-dependent risks by integrating a conventional PSA model with condition monitoring and prognostics techniques. We will discuss how to integrate the results with frequency of initiating events (IEs) and probability of basic events (BEs). Two illustrative examples will be introduced: (1) how the failure probability of a passive system can be evaluated under different plant conditions and (2) how the IE frequency for a steam generator tube rupture (SGTR) can be updated in terms of operating time. We expect that the proposed model can take a role of annunciator to show the variation of core damage frequency (CDF) depending on operational conditions.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.40 no.6 s.111
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• pp.671-693
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• 2005

This paper is to explore critically environmentalism, especially in terms of environmental justice, suggested or implied in theory of liberalism which has been the ideological foundation of contemporary society. It begins with a brief look at liberal perspective in a broad sense, then interprets in-depth the classical liberalism of J. Locke, libertarianism (esp. R. Nozick) and utilitarianism (including cost-benefit analysis) from the environmental point of view. And finally it considers liberal pluralism and other alternative theories of pluralism, especially communitarianism (esp M. Walzer), postmodern pluralism (esp. I. Young), and cultural pluralism (esp. C. Taylor) in order to overcome limitations of liberal environmentalism and to find out some clues for theory of environmental justice. In conclusion, this paper argues that we need to transfer from liberalism (including liberal pluralism) to critical pluralism in oder to develop a proper understanding of environmental problems and to conceptualize a desirable theory of environmental justice.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.20
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• pp.9015-9019
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• 2014

The study aimed to compare the 2 main types of insurance used by colorectal cancer (CRC) patients in a university hospital in Thailand: universal coverage (UC) and 'Civil Servant Medical Benefit Scheme' (CSMBS) in terms of hospital expenditure and survival outcomes. CRC cases in stages I-IV who were operated on and had completed their adjuvant therapy in Songklanagarind Hospital from 2004 through 2013 were retrospectively reviewed regarding their hospital expenditure, focusing on surgical and chemotherapy costs. Of 1,013 cases analyzed, 524 (51.7%) were in the UC group while 489 (48.3%) belonged to the CSMBS group. Cases with stage IV disease were significantly more frequent in the UC group. Average total treatment expenditure (TTE) was 143,780 Thai Baht (THB) (1 US$ =~ 30 THB). The TTE increased with tumor stage and the chemotherapy cost contributed the most to the TTE increment. TTE in the CSMBS group was significantly higher than in the UC group for stage II-III CRCs. The majority of cases in the UC group (65.5%) used deGramont or Mayo as their first line regimen, and the proportion of cases who started with a capecitabine-based regimen (XELOX or $Xeloda^{(R)}$) was significantly higher in the CSMBS group (61.0% compared to 24.5% in the UC group, p-value < 0.01). On survival analysis, overall survival (OS) and progress free survival in the CSMBS group were significantly better than in the UC group. The 5-year OS in the CSMBS and UC groups were 84.3% and 74.6%, respectively (p-value < 0.01). In conclusion, the study indicates that in Thailand, the type of insurance influences resource utilization, especially the choice of chemotherapy, in CRC cases. This disparity in treatment, in turn, results in a gap in treatment outcomes.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.8
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• pp.1460-1465
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• 2016

Lots of costs threaten the sustainability of the national health-guarantee system. Despite research by the national center for disease control and prevention on health care dynamics with its auditing systems, there are still restrictions of time limitation, sample limitation, and, target diseases limitation. Against this backdrop, using huge volume of total data, many technologies could be fully adopted to the preliminary forecasting and its target-disease expanding of health. With structured data from the national health insurance and unstructured data from the social network service, we attempted to design a model to predict disease. The model can enhance national health and maximize social benefit by providing a health warning service. Also, the model can reduce the advent increase of national health cost and predict timely disease occurrence based on Big Data analysis. We researched related medical prediction cases and performed an experiment with a pilot project so as to verify the proposed model.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.673-681
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• 2007

The integration of Quality Circles and Six-Sigma has gained attentions for the attainment of enhanced customer satisfaction, costs reduction, and improved business performance. The purpose of this paper is to verify the benefit from the integration of Quality Circles and Six-Sigma by applying the integrated process for an alcohol manufacturing line. In the integrated process, we used the first three steps of Six-Sigma of Define, Measure, and Analyze(D-M-A) and then applied the concept of Quality Circle, which has good performance in the Improvement and Control(I-C) process. For the selection of the theme of quality circles, Analytic Hierarch Process(AHP) is used, and we also employed the experimental design, which is designed to find an optimal operating condition. Furthermore, the results of the economic analysis confirm that the integration process would be successful in reducing the incidence of defects and the quality cost.