• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.119-138
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• 2016

Since the Industrial Revolution, which made the mass production and mass distribution of standardized goods possible, machine-made (manufactured) products have accounted for the majority of the market. However, in recent years, the phenomenon of purchasing even more expensive handmade products has become a noticeable trend as consumers have started to acknowledge the value of handmade products, such as the craftsman's commitment, belief in their quality and scarcity, and the sense of self-esteem from having them,. Consumer interest in these handmade products has shown explosive growth and has been coupled with the recent development of three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies. Etsy.com is the world's largest online handmade platform. It is no different from any other online platform; it provides an online market where buyers and sellers virtually meet to share information and transact business. However, Etsy.com is different in that shops within this platform only deal with handmade products in a variety of categories, ranging from jewelry to toys. Since its establishment in 2005, despite being limited to handmade products, Etsy.com has enjoyed rapid growth in membership, transaction volume, and revenue. Most recently in April 2015, it raised funds through an initial public offering (IPO) of more than 1.8 billion USD, which demonstrates the huge potential of online handmade platforms. After the success of Etsy.com, various types of online handmade platforms such as Handmade at Amazon, ArtFire, DaWanda, and Craft is ART have emerged and are now competing with each other, at the same time, which has increased the size of the market. According to Deloitte's 2015 holiday survey on which types of gifts the respondents plan to buy during the holiday season, about 16% of U.S. consumers chose "homemade or craft items (e.g., Etsy purchase)," which was the same rate as those for the computer game and shoes categories. This indicates that consumer interests in online handmade platforms will continue to rise in the future. However, this high interest in the market for handmade products and their platforms has not yet led to academic research. Most extant studies have only focused on machine-made products and intelligent services for them. This indicates a lack of studies on handmade products and their intelligent services on virtual platforms. Therefore, this study used signaling theory and prior research on the effects of sellers' characteristics on their performance (e.g., total sales and price premiums) in the buyer-seller relationship to identify the key influencing e-Image factors (e.g., reputation, size, information sharing, and length of relationship). Then, their impacts on the performance of shops within the online handmade platform were empirically examined; the dataset was collected from Etsy.com through the application of web harvesting technology. The results from the structural equation modeling revealed that the reputation, size, and information sharing have significant effects on the total sales, while the reputation and length of relationship influence price premiums. This study extended the online platform research into online handmade platform research by identifying key influencing e-Image factors on within-platform shop's total sales and price premiums based on signaling theory and then performed a statistical investigation. These findings are expected to be a stepping stone for future studies on intelligent online handmade services as well as handmade products themselves. Furthermore, the findings of the study provide online handmade platform operators with practical guidelines on how to implement intelligent online handmade services. They should also help shop managers build their marketing strategies in a more specific and effective manner by suggesting key influencing e-Image factors. The results of this study should contribute to the vitalization of intelligent online handmade services by providing clues on how to maximize within-platform shops' total sales and price premiums.

• Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.49-55
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• 2005

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the quality and problems of Web sites for management of childhood and adolescent obesity. Methods: We evaluated 203 Web sites identified from the search engine, Korean Yahoo, using the word of 'childhood and adolescent obesity'. 203 Web sites were classified according to medical institutions, health information Web sites, beauty shops. etc. We surveyed whether childhood and adolescent obesity distinguished with adult obesity was considered, or not. and researched the unique managements of childhood and adolescent obesity including the cardinal treatment. Results: Of the 203 Web sites, 157(77.3%) provided detailed information about treatment of obesity, 46(22.7%) provided only simple information about one. The sites providing detailed information were composed of 52.2% of oriental medicine clinics, 35.0% of clinic & hospitals including pediatric hospitals. Distribution of the sites about management of childhood and adolescent obesity distinguished with adult's one was only 23% of oriental medicine clinics, but 93% of childrens hospitals. Conclusion: Without considering the speciality of childhood obesity, inaccurate information are distributing on internet web sites. It is necessary for concern and development of advertizing system on the internet distributing accurate information about treatment of childhood obesity.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.123-138
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• 2016

This study investigates intents of acquisitions in information technology industries. Mergers and acquisitions are a strategic decision at corporate-level and have been an important tool for a firm to grow. Plenty of firms in information technology industries have acquired startups to increase production efficiency, expand customer base, or improve quality over the last decades. For example, Google has made about 200 acquisitions since 2001, Cisco has acquired about 210 firms since 1993, Oracle has made about 125 acquisitions since 1994, and Microsoft has acquired about 200 firms since 1987. Although there have been many existing papers that theoretically study intents or motivations of acquisitions, there are limited papers that empirically investigate them mainly because it is challenging to measure and quantify intents of M&As. This study examines the intent of acquisitions by measuring specific intents for M&A transactions. Using our measures of acquisition intents, we compare the intents by four acquisition types: (1) the acquisition where a hardware firm acquires a hardware firm, (2) the acquisition where a hardware firm acquires a software/IT service firm, (3) the acquisition where a software/IT service firm acquires a hardware firm, and (4) the acquisition where a software /IT service firm acquires a software/IT service firm. We presume that there are difference in reasons why a hardware firm acquires another hardware firm, why a hardware firm acquires a software firm, why a software/IT service firm acquires a hardware firm, and why a software/IT service firm acquires another software/IT service firm. Using data of the M&As in US IT industries, we identified major intents of the M&As. The acquisition intents are identified based on the press release of M&A announcements and measured with four categories. First, an acquirer may have intents of cost saving in operations by sharing common resources between the acquirer and the target. The cost saving can accrue from economies of scope and scale. Second, an acquirer may have intents of product enhancement/development. Knowledge and skills transferred from the target may enable the acquirer to enhance the product quality or to expand product lines. Third, an acquirer may have intents of gain additional customer base to expand the market, to penetrate the market, or to enter a foreign market. Fourth, a firm may acquire a target with intents of expanding customer channels. By complementing existing channel to the customer, the firm can increase its revenue. Our results show that acquirers have had intents of cost saving more in acquisitions between hardware companies than in acquisitions between software companies. Hardware firms are more likely to acquire with intents of product enhancement or development than software firms. Overall, the intent of product enhancement/development is the most frequent intent in all of the four acquisition types, and the intent of customer base expansion is the second. We also analyze our data with the classification of production-side intents and customer-side intents, which is based on activities of the value chain of a firm. Intents of cost saving operations and those of product enhancement/development can be viewed as production-side intents and intents of customer base expansion and those of expanding customer channels can be viewed as customer-side intents. Our analysis shows that the ratio between the number of customer-side intents and that of production-side intents is higher in acquisitions where a software firm is an acquirer than in the acquisitions where a hardware firm is an acquirer. This study can contribute to IS literature. First, this study provides insights in understanding M&As in IT industries by answering for question of why an IT firm intends to another IT firm. Second, this study also provides distribution of acquisition intents for acquisition types.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.95-120
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• 1990

The underpricing of new shares of a firm that are offered to the public for the first time (initial offerings) is well known and has puzzled financial economists for a long time since it seems at odds with the optimal behavior of the owners of issuing firms. Past attempts by financial economists to explain this phenomenon have not been successful in the sense that the explanations given by them are either inconsistent with the equilibrium theory or implausible. Approaches by such authors as Welch or Allen and Faulhaber are no exceptions. In this paper, we develop a signalling model of capital investment to explain the underpricing phenomenon and also analyze the efficiency of investment. The model focuses on the information asymmetry between the owners of issuing firms and general investors. We consider a firm that has been owned and operated by a single owner and that has a profitable project but has no capital to develop it. The profit from the project depends on the capital invested in the project as well as a profitability parameter. The model also assumes that the financial market is represented by a single investor who maximizes the expected wealth. The owner has superior information as to the value of the firm to investors in the sense that it knows the true value of the parameter while investors have only a probability distribution about the parameter. The owner offers the representative investor a fraction of the ownership of the firm in return for a certain amount of investment in the firm. This offer condition is equivalent to the usual offer condition consisting of the number of issues to sell and the unit price of a share. Thus, the model is a signalling game. Using Kreps' criterion as the solution concept, we obtained an essentially unique separating equilibrium offer condition. Analysis of this separating equilibrium shows that the owner of the firm with high profitability chooses an offer condition that raises an amount of capital that is short of the amount that maximizes the potential profit from the project. It also reveals that the fraction of the ownership of the firm that the representative investor receives from the owner of the highly profitable firm in return for its investment has a value that exceeds the investment. In other words, the initial offering in the model is underpriced when the profitability of the firm is high. The source of underpricing and underinvestment is the signalling activity by the owner of the highly profitable firm who attempts to convince investors that his firm has a highly profitable project by choosing an offer condition that cannot be imitated by the owner of a firm with low profitability. Thus, we obtained two main results. First, underpricing is a result of a signalling activity by the owner of a firm with high profitability when there exists information asymmetry between the owner of the issuing firm and investors. Second, such information asymmetry also leads to underinvestment in a highly profitable project. Those results clearly show the underpricing entails underinvestment and that information asymmetry leads to a social cost as well as a private cost. The above results are quite general in the sense that they are based upon a neoclassical profit function and full rationality of economic agents. We believe that the results of this paper can be used as a basis for further research on the capital investment process. For instance, one can view the results of this paper as a subgame equilibrium in a larger game in which a firm chooses among diverse ways to raise capital. In addition, the method used in this paper can be used in analyzing a wide range of problems arising from information asymmetry that the Korean financial market faces.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.38 no.5_1
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• pp.627-646
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• 2022

Recently, the seriousness of climate change-related problems caused by global warming is growing, and the average temperature is also rising. As a result, it is affecting the environment in which various temperature-sensitive creatures and creatures live, and changes in the ecosystem are also being detected. Seasons are one of the important factors influencing the types, distribution, and growth characteristics of creatures living in the area. Among the most popular and easily recognized plant seasonal phenomena among the indicators of the climate change impact evaluation, the blooming day of flower and the peak day of autumn leaves were modeled. The types of plants used in the modeling were forsythia and cherry trees, which can be seen as representative plants of spring, and maple and ginkgo, which can be seen as representative plants of autumn. Weather data used to perform modeling were temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation observed through the ASOS Observatory of the Korea Meteorological Administration. As satellite data, MODIS NDVI was used for modeling, and it has a correlation coefficient of about -0.2 for the flowering date and 0.3 for the autumn leaves peak date. As the model used, the model was established using multiple regression models, which are linear models, and Random Forest, which are nonlinear models. In addition, the predicted values estimated by each model were expressed as isopleth maps using spatial interpolation techniques to express the trend of plant seasonal changes from 2003 to 2020. It is believed that using NDVI with high spatio-temporal resolution in the future will increase the accuracy of plant phenology modeling.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.1-17
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• 2014

Research was initiated to investigate early establishment characteristics and germination pattern of Kentucky bluegrass (KB, Poa pratensis L.) under natural room temperature and to analyze differences between alternative and natural conditions for a practical application. Fifteen cultivars of KB were evaluated in the study. Daily and cumulative germination pattern were measured and analyzed on a daily basis. Differences were observed in germination percentage, germination pattern, days to the first germination and days to 75% germination. Germination percentage was variable with cultivars at the end of study. It was 75.75 to 90.25% under natural condition. There were considerable variations in early germination characteristics and germination pattern among KB cultivars according to germination conditions. The first germination in all entries tested was initiated between 6 and 9 DAS (days after seeding) under ISTA (International Seed Testing Association) condition. But it was observed between 9 and 12 DAS under natural condition, being 3 to 5 days later as compared with ISTA condition. On the first date of a germinating process, the germination rate was 0.25% to 25.00% under ISTA condition, while 0.50% to 13.25% under natural condition. Days to the 75% germination were 15.08 to 28.80 DAS under ISTA condition and 17.78 to 28.75 DAS under natural condition. Midnight II, Excursion and Midnight were the fastest cultivars under ISTA condition, while Odyssey the fastest one under natural condition. Regardless of germination condition, the slowest cultivar was Voyager II, being over 4 weeks to 75% germination percentage. For the most cultivars, days to 75% germination under natural room temperature condition were 1 to 8 days slower than under ISTA condition. From this study information on differences in germination characteristics and pattern among cultivars would be usefully applied for KB establishment such as golf course construction. Prior to on-site seeding, a comprehensive germination test is practically recommended due to a possible decline in germination capability during domestic distribution and storage after import.

• Journal of Society of Preventive Korean Medicine
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.35-46
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• 2015

Objective : This study aims to investigate legal and regulatory status of traditional and complementary medicine (T&CM) focusing on regulation on health practitioners and health practice in 33 countries. Method : 33 countries were selected based on several factors such as interest of Korean medical doctors, strategic importance, and distribution over the world. The questionnaire was distributed to Korean embassies in 33 countries in March 2014 through Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the answers from those countries were collected from April to September. 24 countries that provided sufficient information were included in the analysis. Results : 18 countries have law or regulation on T&CM. Only five countries regulate T&CM practitioners as medical personnel or health practitioner by law, and 12 countries have regulation on license or certificate. Half of 24 countries recognize license of T&CM practitioners issued abroad. There are nine countries that recognize T&CM practice as medical practice, and four of them regulate acupuncture as medical practice by western medical doctors or a few health practitioners recognized by the government. There are six countries that do not recognize T&CM practice as medical practice by law, but regulate it as practice that affect public health, and these countries have law or regulation on T&CM. Conclusion : As T&CM have great impact on public health, many countries have recently legislated law or regulation on T&CM. Rapid change in regulatory status of T&CM affects globalization of Korean medicine. Thus, development of timely strategies will be essential for it.

• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.245-254
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• 2008

According to the $7^{th}$ reform of high school education curriculum, contents on probability and statistics in mathematics of high school curriculum have been expanded compared to the previous curriculum. Thus if the curriculum contains the contents to achieve the goals for probability and statistics, more efficient education on statistics is expected to meet the needs of information age. In this thesis, we studied through network analysis if contents on probability and statistics in mathematics of high school curriculum are composed to achieve the goals. We reviewed contents on probability and statistics in mathematics of the $7^{th}$ reform of high school curriculum whether they are conformed the purpose and direction of the reform or not. As a result, the concept of probability distribution and statistical estimation with a random variable was described clearly. But, census and sample survey were not connected with other items. In a part, there were expressional mistakes.

• Journal of the Korean Dietetic Association
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.372-386
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• 2002

The purposes of this study were to find factor which influence on the selection criteria of food supplier. Questionnaire were distributed to 52 general hospitals with more than 400 beds located in Seoul and Kyongin province, and responded questionnaires were collected from 44 dietetic departments (84.6%) and 18 purchasing departments (34.6%). The main results of this study can be summarized as follows: (1) supplier selection criteria include quality, service, cost and supplier competency. (2) With having been met with tight competition and market opening, hospitals plan a strategy to improve quality, service and they tend to have more interest in various supplier selection criteria. (3) Purchasing departments estimate more highly the rate of reflection in considering supplier selection criteria than the rate of importance about cost criteria, which reveals that purchasing departments sensitively respond to cost cutdown. (4) When selecting suppliers, a significant(p<.01) influence of stability of supplier industry environment on the selecting criteria such as the importances of quality, service, and supplier quality are recognized only after recognizing the stability of food delivery industry. Food supplier industry secures stability more quickly through major companies' participation in food distribution industry and this will reveal the importance of supplier selection criteria. (5) Suppliers which are selected by the quality criteria, service criteria, supplier quality criteria make efforts to communicate with foodservice departments, to give more proper information about substitute food, new product, and to make commitments, while suppliers which are decided by cost criteria do not establish supportive relationships with foodservice departments.

• Journal of Korean Port Research
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.155-166
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• 1999

The construction of the coastal structures and reclamation work causes the circulation reduced in the semi-closed inner water area and the unbalanced sediment budget of beach results in an alteration of beach topography. Among the various fluid motions in the nearshore zone water particle motion due to wave and wave-induced currents are the most responsible for sediment movement. Therefore it is needed to predict the effect of the environmental change because of development and so the prediction of wave transformation dose. The purpose of this study is to introduce the relation between waves wave-induced currents and sediment movement. In this study we will show numerical method using energy conservation equation involving reflection diffraction and reflection and the surfzone energy dissipation term due to wave breaking is included in the basic equation. For the wave-induced current the momentum equation was combined with radiation stresses lateral mixing and friction Various information is required in the prediction of wave-induced current depending on the prediction tool. We can predict changes in wave-induced current from the distribution of wave especially near the wave breaking zone. To evaluate these quantities we have to know the local condition of waves mean sea level and so on. The results from the wave field and wave-induced current field deformation models are used as input data of the sediment transport and bottom change model. Numerical model were established by a finite difference method then were applied to the development plan of the eastern Pusan coastal zone Yeonhwa-ri and Daebyun fishing port. We represented the result with 2-D graphics and made comparison between before and after development.