• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.65-77
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• 2022

Purpose: This study aims to identify factors affecting the adoption of e-commerce by household businesses in Vietnam's food and beverage industry. Research design, data and methodology: The integrated TAM and TOE frameworks and ten hypotheses were developed to test the relationship between relevant factors. A cross-sectional survey was conducted to collect valid data from 992 respondents who run F&B household businesses in Vietnam. Results: The empirical research results confirm all proposed hypotheses that e-commerce adoption is affected by the perceived usefulness, the perceived ease of use, vendor support partners, social expectancy, competitive pressure, subjective norm, and household resources. Meanwhile, technical readiness, environment readiness, and organization readiness are intermediate variables that influence the implementation of e-commerce in food and beverage distribution. Conclusions: The findings suggest effective orientations to foster the food and beverage e-trading practice for household businesses in developing countries. Accordingly, to encourage private household businesses to adopt e-commerce, it is necessary to focus on improving business resources, technology readiness, environment readiness, and organization readiness through raising awareness of usefulness, benefits, perceived ease of use, and increased support of vendor partners. Future research can focus on improving the efficiency of e-commerce applications in F&B distribution for both household businesses and larger-scale enterprises.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Integrative Medicine
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.43-52
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• 2021

Purpose : Chronic neck pain negatively impacts the quality of life and causes various problems in daily life due to pain, insomnia, and sleep disturbances in patients with this condition. Therapeutic interventions to solve these problems in rehabilitation and physical therapy are being introduced; however, the evidence of the efficacy of myofascial release (MFR) is still insufficient. This study aimed to investigate the effects of applying MFR on pain, insomnia, and sleep disturbances in patients with chronic neck pain. Methods : Ten patients with chronic neck pain were randomly selected and grouped into the experimental group (n₁ = 10) and control group (n₂ = 10) by cross-over design. Pain was measured before and after MFR intervention. Moreover, insomnia was measured only after MFR intervention. Polysomnography was performed after MFR intervention. Wilcoxon signed rank test and Mann-Whitney U test were used for the visual analog scale (VAS). Independent sample t-test was separately performed to measure insomnia and sleep. Results : After MFR intervention, the VAS score of the experimental group (p = 0.005) significantly decreased than that of the control group (p = 0.002). The insomnia score of the experimental group significantly decreased than that of the control group (p = 0.001). The total sleep time (p = 0.001), sleep efficiency (p = 0.001), and sleep latency (p = 0.001) of the experimental group significantly increased than those of the control group in the polysomnographic measurement. Conclusion : The application of MFR of the neck and upper trunk may have a positive effect on pain, insomnia, and sleep disturbances in patients with chronic neck pain. It was also suggested that an objective and quantitative polysomnography can be used more often in the field of rehabilitation and physical therapy.

• Journal of Veterinary Science
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.78.1-78.13
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• 2022

Background: Florfenicol might be ineffective for treating Staphylococcus aureus small colony variants (SCVs) mastitis. Objectives: In this study, florfenicol-loaded chitosan (CS)-sodium tripolyphosphate (TPP) composite nanogels were prepared to allow targeted delivery to SCV infected sites. Methods: The formulation screening, the characteristics, in vitro release, antibacterial activity, therapeutic efficacy, and biosafety of the florfenicol composite nanogels were studied. Results: The optimized formulation was obtained when the CS and TPP were 10 and 5 mg/mL, respectively. The encapsulation efficiency, loading capacity, size, polydispersity index, and zeta potential of the optimized florfenicol composite nanogels were 87.3% ± 2.7%, 5.8% ± 1.4%, 280.3 ± 1.5 nm, 0.15 ± 0.03, and 36.3 ± 1.4 mv, respectively. Optical and scanning electron microscopy showed that spherical particles with a relatively uniform distribution and drugs might be incorporated in cross-linked polymeric networks. The in vitro release study showed that the florfenicol composite nanogels exhibited a biphasic pattern with the sustained release of 72.2% ± 1.8% at 48 h in pH 5.5 phosphate-buffered saline. The minimal inhibitory concentrations of commercial florfenicol solution and florfenicol composite nanogels against SCVs were 1 and 0.25 ㎍/mL, respectively. The time-killing curves and live-dead bacterial staining showed that the florfenicol composite nanogels were concentration-dependent. Furthermore, the florfenicol composite nanogels displayed good therapeutic efficacy against SCVs mastitis. Biological safety studies showed that the florfenicol composite nanogels might be a biocompatible preparation because of their non-toxic effects on the renal tissue and liver. Conclusions: Florfenicol composite nanogels might improve the treatment of SCV infections.

• Membrane Journal
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.209-217
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• 2022

Ion exchange membrane (IEM) is an important class of membrane applied in batteries, fuel cells, chloride-alkali processes, etc to separate various mono and multivalent ions. The membrane process is based on the electrically driven force, green separation method, which is an emerging area in desalination of seawater and water treatment. Electrodialysis (ED) is a technique in which cations and anions move selectively along the IEM. Anion exchange membrane (AEM) is one of the important components of the ED process which is critical to enhancing the process efficiency. The introduction of cross-linking in the IEM improves the ion-selective separation performance due to the reduction of free volume. During the desalination of seawater by reverse osmosis (RO) process, there is a lot of dissolved salt present in the concentrate of RO. So, the ED process consisting of a monovalent cation-selective membrane reduces fouling and improves membrane flux. This review is divided into three sections such as electrodialysis (ED), anion exchange membrane (AEM), and cation exchange membrane (CEM).

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.391-411
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• 2023

Aggregates play the skeleton and supporting role in the construction field, high-precision measurement and high-efficiency analysis of aggregates are frequently employed to evaluate the project quality. Aiming at the unbalanced operation time and segmentation accuracy for multi-class segmentation algorithms of aggregate images, a Chaotic Sparrow Search Algorithm (CSSA) is put forward to optimize it. In this algorithm, the chaotic map is combined with the sinusoidal dynamic weight and the elite mutation strategies; and it is firstly proposed to promote the SSA's optimization accuracy and stability without reducing the SSA's speed. The CSSA is utilized to optimize the popular multi-class segmentation algorithm-Multiple Entropy Thresholding (MET). By taking three METs as objective functions, i.e., Kapur Entropy, Minimum-cross Entropy and Renyi Entropy, the CSSA is implemented to quickly and automatically calculate the extreme value of the function and get the corresponding correct thresholds. The image adaptive multi-class segmentation model is called CSSA-MET. In order to comprehensively evaluate it, a new parameter I based on the segmentation accuracy and processing speed is constructed. The results reveal that the CSSA outperforms the other seven methods of optimization performance, as well as the quality evaluation of aggregate images segmented by the CSSA-MET, and the speed and accuracy are balanced. In particular, the highest I value can be obtained when the CSSA is applied to optimize the Renyi Entropy, which indicates that this combination is more suitable for segmenting the aggregate images.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• Korean Medical Education Review
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.45-54
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• 2023

We investigated the work-life balance of clinical professors in charge of patient care, research, and education at medical schools and the demand for work-life balance support according to position (professor, associate professor, or assistant professor). In total, 163 clinical professors completed the consent form and participated in the study. They filled out an online survey consisting of questions about essential characteristics, a work-life balance test, stress, burnout, work-life satisfaction, and work-life balance support needs. We analyzed the results by analysis of variance and cross-tabulation using IBM SPSS ver. 23.0. Differences were found in work-life balance, stress, burnout, and satisfaction with life and work by position. The requirements for support for work-life balance also varied by professional status. Professors had a higher balance between life and work than associate professors or assistant professors. The specific requirements for work-life balance support were also slightly different for each position. Overall, there was a high demand for work process simplification and efficiency for work support, flexible working hours and sabbatical years for family and leisure, and career management consulting and training support for growth. Assistant professors and associate professors had a lower level of work-life balance than professors, as well as higher levels of stress and burnout. Professors' job satisfaction was also higher than that of the other groups. Based on the results of this study, we hope that a healthy work environment can be established through work-life balance support suitable for clinical professors' positions.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.47-57
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• 2006

The shear wave velocity is related with the stiffness of granular skeleton and mass density. The shear stiffness of the granular skeleton remains unaffected by the presence of the fluid. Bender elements are convenient shear wave transducers for instrumenting soil cells due to optimal soil-transducer coupling. This study addresses the principles of the shear wave, the design and implementation of bender elements including electromagnetic coupling prevention, directivity, resonant frequency, detection of first arrival, and near field effects. It is shown that electromagnetic coupling effects can be minimized using parallel-type bender elements. Thus, the in-plane S-wave directivity is quasi-circular. The resonant frequency of bender element installations depends on the geometry of the bender element, the anchor efficiency and the soil stiffness. One of the most cumbersome parts in the bender element test is near field effects, which affect the selection of arrival time. The selection of the first arrival within the near field Is effectively solved by the multiple reflection technique and signal matching technique. Bender elements, which requires several considerations, may be effective tools for the subsurface characterization by using S-wave.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.129-136
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• 2023

Natural ventilation has proven to be an effective passive strategy in improving energy efficiency and providing healthy environments. However, such a strategy has not been commonly adopted to tall office buildings that traditionally rely on single-skin façades (SSFs), due to the high wind pressure that creates excessive air velocities and occupant discomfort at upper floors. Double-skin façades (DSFs) can provide an opportunity to facilitate natural ventilation in tall office buildings, as the fundamental components such as the additional skin and openings create a buffer to regulate the direct impact of wind pressure and the airflow around the buildings. This study investigates the impact of modified multi-story type DSFs on indoor airflow in a 60-story, 780-foot (238 m) naturally ventilated tall office building under isothermal conditions. Thus, the performance of wind effect related components was assessed based on the criteria (e.g., air velocity and airflow distribution), particularly with respect to opening size. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was utilized to simulate outdoor airflow around the tall office building, and indoor airflow at multiple heights in case of various DSF opening configurations. The simulation results indicate that the outer skin opening is the more influential parameter than the inner skin opening on the indoor airflow behavior. On the other hand, the variations of inner skin opening size help improve the indoor airflow with respect to the desired air velocity and airflow distribution. Despite some vortexes observed in the indoor spaces, cross ventilation can occur as positive pressure on the windward side and negative pressure on the other sides generate productive pressure differential. The results also demonstrate that DSFs with smaller openings suitably reduce not only the impact of wind pressure, but also the concentration of high air velocity near the windows on the windward side, compared to SSFs. Further insight on indoor airflow behaviors depending on DSF opening configurations leads to a better understanding of the DSF design strategies for effective natural ventilation in tall office buildings.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
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• 2022.10a
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• pp.20-20
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• 2022

A traditional wheat breeding program needs more than 12-13 years to develop a new cultivar. In recent years, 'Speed breeding (SB)' system, which uses extremely extended photoperiod (22 h), enabled up to 4-6 generations of spring wheat per year. However, since almost 70% of wheat cultivars are winter type, and over 95% of total cultivation area is for winter wheat in Korea, optimized vernalization treatment was essential for improving the SB system. Several vernalization temperatures and durations were tested with various genotypes, and the 4 weeks of 8-10 ℃ vernalization treatment was the most effective to develop 4 generations per year, for both spring and winter type wheat cultivars. This 'Speed vernalization (SV)' system followed by SB, allowed developing a new F₆ recombinant inbred lines (RILs) within 2 years. Among the 184 RILs, which derived from a cross between Jokoyung and Joongmo2008, two outstanding lines were selected for yield trial test, and then named Milyang52 and Milyang53. Compared to the traditional wheat breeding program, over 60% of the time was saved to develop these two lines. Marker-assisted selection and backcross were also combined with the SV system. YW3215-2B-1 (Jokoyung*3/Gamet), which has similar agronomic traits with Jokyoung and the same Glu-B1 allele with Garnet, was developed within 2.5 years. Thus, the SV system combined with molecular breeding technology would help breeders to make a new cultivar with less time and high efficiency.