• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.625-632
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• 2018

Malaria remains one of the leading health burdens in the developing world, especially in several sub-Saharan Africa countries; and Uganda has some of the highest recorded measures of malaria transmission intensity in the world. It is evident that the prevalence of malaria infection, the incidence of disease, and mortality from severe malaria remain very high in Uganda. Although the recent stable political and economic situation in the last few decades in Uganda supported for a fairly good appreciation of malaria control, the declines in infection, morbidity, and mortality are not sufficient to interrupt transmission and this country is among the top 4 countries with cases of malaria, especially among children under 5 years of age. In fact, Uganda, which is endemic in over 95% of the country, is a representative of challenges facing malaria control in Africa. In this study, we evaluated an active case detection program in 6 randomly selected villages, Uganda. This program covered a potential target population of 5,017 individuals. Our team screened 12,257 samples of malaria by active case detection, every 4 months, from February 2015 to January 2017 in the 6 villages (a total of 6 times). This study assessed the perceptions and practices on malaria control in Kiyuni Parish of Kyankwanzi district, Uganda. Our study presents that the incidence of malaria is sustained high despite efforts to scale-up and improve the use of LLINs and access to ACDs, based on the average incidence confirmed by RDTs.

• Women's Health Nursing
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.315-328
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• 2019

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the components and nature of happiness in middle-aged women in Korea. Methods: Thirty middle-aged women living in metropolitan Seoul and Gyeonggi and Chungcheong provinces agreed to participate in this study. The data were collected through in-depth interviews with the participants in one-on-one settings. The data were analyzed qualitative using Colaizzi's method of phenomenology. Results: The three theme clusters were extracted from the raw data, along with 13 themes and 138 meaningful sentences and phrases. The three happiness theme clusters in middle-aged women were "live healthy for stability," "rule one's mind for harmony," and "activate hopes for self-esteem." The first theme cluster included healthy life, economic stability, physical youth, and positive thought. The second theme cluster included that harmonious family, ruling of mind, my position as invisible person in social relationships, and precious relationships to support. The last theme included the center of one's life is oneself, a sense of accomplishment, self-improvement, recognition of one's worth and rest for one self. The three theme clusters were associated with the existence, relatedness, and growth (ERG) of ERG areas, respectively. Conclusions: We conclude that the core components of happiness in middle-aged women are to live healthy and mind-ruled and activate hope. The nature of happiness is egocentric stability in middle-aged women. The results suggest that theme clusters might be used to develop a scale for measuring happiness in middle-aged women. This will be helpful to assess the psychosocial status of middle-aged women in Korea.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.154-162
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• 2019

Large scale damage has been globally increased due to natural disasters such as earthquake. Although a variety of studies secured seismic performance of buildings, casualties and economic loss have occurred because of poor security of seismic performance in non-structural components. Structure's location on which non-structural components are installed and characteristics of vibration occurring on each position of structures are varied, so a response spectrum is required for each position of structures. In addition, a response spectrum occurring in a structure is different, depending on the form of it and positions on which it is installed. Therefore, selection of a response spectrum is important, so a definite method for calculating the response spectrum which acts on non-structural components is necessary. A method for choosing a response spectrum is suggested in this paper, and a structural analysis was conducted with the suggested method, by selecting a ground response spectrum and a structural system, which may occur in Korea. Moreover, it helps create a response spectrum necessary for a seismic test of non-structural components, by suggesting the method for deduction it, with a simple formula.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.17-32
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of family life stress and family values on marital stability among middle-aged couples. The subjects included a total of 302 men and women aged 45-64 who had been married for more than 20 years and were living in Seoul. The collected data were statistically analyzed with the SPSS 21.0 Package. First, Cronbach's alpha was calculated to measure the reliability of the scale that assessed the variables of the research model. Then, mean and standard deviation were calculated to determine the degrees of family life stress, family values, and marital stability among the subjects. Finally, a hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed to identify factors that affected the subjects' marital stability. The results revealed that the level of family life stress in middle-aged married men and women was slightly higher than the mean value. Of all the sub-scales of family life stress, the subjects were found to experience the most stress from factors related to financial pressure, followed by family relationships, a sense of loss within a family, and work-family compatibility. Therefore, financial problems were one of the critical stressors for middle-aged married couples. Also, for this demographic, the levels of family values and marital stability were higher than the medians. The factors affecting marital stability in middle-aged couples were identified to be family relationship stress, financial stress, subjective economic status, family values, stress related to work-familycompatibility,religion,andage.Thedegreeofmaritalstabilitywashigherinmiddle-agedcouplesa stheirstresslevelsfromfamilyrelationshipsandfinancialproblemswerelower.Moreover,thehigherthes ubjectiveeconomicstatusandthemoretraditionalthefamilyvalues,thehigherthedegreeofmaritalstabili ty.Finally,marriedcoupleswhowerereligioushadalowerlevelofstressfromwork-family compatibility, and the younger the couples, the higher the degree of marital stability.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.359-373
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• 2019

Bursaphelenchus xylophilus(Pine wilt disease) is a serious threat to the pine forest in Korea. However, dead wood observation by Pine wilt disease is based on field survey. Therefore, it is difficult to observe large-scale forests due to physical and economic problems. In this paper, high resolution images were obtained using the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the area where the pine wilt disease recurred. The damaged tree due to pine wilt disease was detected using Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) supervision classification technique. Also, the accuracy of supervised classification results was calculated. After conducting supervised classification on accessible forests, the reliability of the accuracy was verified by comparing the results of field surveys.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.219-224
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• 2019

The number of solar power installation companies including domestic small scale (50kW or less) is increasing rapidly, but the efficient operation system and management are insufficient. Therefore, a new type of operating system is needed as a maintenance management aspect to maximize the generation amount in the current state rather than the additional function which causes the increase of the generation cost. In this paper, we utilize Big Data and sensor network to maximize the operating efficiency of solar power plant and analyze the expert system to develop power generation prediction technology, module unit fault detection technology, life prediction of inverter components and report technology, maintenance optimization And to develop a smart monitoring system that enables optimal operation of photovoltaic power plants such as development of algorithms and economic analysis.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.65-73
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• 2019

This study performed Panel Regression Analysis (PRA) with the debt ratio as a dependent variable and the ROE (return on equity), sales volume, current ratio, total capital, and Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI) as an independent variable. According to the GLS analysis, the current ratio to liabilities ratio was negative, and for sales, the ratio of liabilities was positive. Capital totals also had a negative impact on the debt ratio. However, ROE, unlike the hypothesis, had negative effects on the liability ratio, and the SCFI index was not significant. As implications of this research, the company confirmed that its sales increased as the debt ratio of global shipping companies rose, achieving economies of scale. However, it was confirmed that the actual size of the economy through the injection of other capital would help increase sales but not affect net profit. Shipping companies should expand their business power and secure large container vessels to secure credibility of shippers. In the future research, an analysis considering exchange rate, global economic growth rate, and manufacturing production index is needed.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.19-30
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• 2021

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is one of common chronic diseases leading to severe health complications that may cause death. The disease influences individuals, community, and the government due to the continuous monitoring, lifelong commitment, and the cost of treatment. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers Saudi Arabia as one of the top 10 countries in diabetes prevalence across the world. Since most of the medical services are provided by the government, the cost of the treatment in terms of hospitals and clinical visits and lab tests represents a real burden due to the large scale of the disease. The ability to predict the diabetic status of a patient without the laboratory tests by performing screening based on some personal features can lessen the health and economic burden caused by diabetes alone. The goal of this paper is to investigate the prediction of diabetic and prediabetic patients by considering factors other than the laboratory tests, as required by physicians in general. With the data obtained from local hospitals, medical records were processed to obtain a dataset that classified patients into three classes: diabetic, prediabetic, and non-diabetic. After applying three machine learning algorithms, we established good performance for accuracy, precision, and recall of the models on the dataset. Further analysis was performed on the data to identify important non-laboratory variables related to the patients for diabetes classification. The importance of five variables (gender, physical activity level, hypertension, BMI, and age) from the person's basic health data were investigated to find their contribution to the state of a patient being diabetic, prediabetic or normal. Our analysis presented great agreement with the risk factors of diabetes and prediabetes stated by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and other health institutions worldwide. We conclude that by performing class-specific analysis of the disease, important factors specific to Saudi population can be identified, whose management can result in controlling the disease. We also provide some recommendations learnt from this research.

• Current Photovoltaic Research
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.59-73
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• 2021

The purpose of this study is to develop a business model that efficiently converts diesel power generation systems to renewable energy microgrids (MG) in large-scale islands. Most of the previous studies on the conversion of renewable energy MG in islands had limitations dealing with efficiency from the perspective of suppliers. However, the microgrid has the characteristic of getting benefits through the interaction between the consumer and the supplier. In addition, the efficient MG business model from the perspective of new institutional economics is a structure in which consumers and suppliers jointly participate. Therefore, this study assumed that the MG business model in which the supplier's MG and the consumer's community solar participated would benefit all participants, and verified the assumptions using domestic island data. In terms of supplier investment, the cost of power supply (LCOE) of assumed model was calculated to be 14.0% lower than that of the diesel model and 3.7% lower than that of the supplier-only MG model. From the perspective of consumer investment, electricity bills are expected to be reduced by more than 200,000 won per household per year through self-generation of solar power. Social benefits are expected to reduce external environmental costs. The CO₂ emissions of the assumed model were calculated to be 39.5% lower than the diesel model and 1.5% lower than the supplier-only MG model. Therefore, the MG business model with consumer participation proposed in this study is expected to be an efficient alternative to renewable energy MG conversion in domestic islands, and is meaningful as an energy plan that improves the benefits of local residents.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.1-9
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• 2020

Large-scale industrial facility structures continue to deteriorate due to the effects of operating and environmental conditions. The problems of these industrial facilities are potentially causing economic losses, environmental pollution, casualties, and national losses. Accordingly, in order to prevent disaster accidents of large structures in advance, the necessity of diagnosing structures using non-destructive inspection techniques is being highlighted. The defect occurrence, location and defect type of the structure are important parameters for predicting the remaining life of the structure, so continuous defect observation is very important. Recently, many researchers have been actively researching real-time monitoring technology to solve these problems. Structure Health Monitoring Inspection is a technology that can identify and respond to the occurrence of defects in real time, but there is a limit to check the degree of defects and the direction of growth of defects. In order to compensate for the shortcomings of these technologies, the importance of defect imaging techniques is emerging, and in order to find defects in large structures, a method of inspecting a wide range using guided ultrasonic is effective. The work presented here introduces a calculation for the shape factor for evaluation of the damaged area, as well as a variable β parameter technique to correct a damaged shape. Also, we perform research in modeling simulation and an experiment for comparison with a suggested inspection method and verify its validity. The curved structure image obtained by the advanced RAPID algorithm showed a good match between the defect area and the shape.