• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
• /
• v.15 no.23
• /
• pp.10121-10128
• /
• 2015

Background: Cancers impose an increasing burden on health of the populations and individuals, but little is known about cancer patient satisfaction with care. The aim of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of the Persian version of European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) In-Patsat32, as a recently developed questionnaire to assess cancer patient satisfaction with care and information provided during hospital admission. Materials and Methods: Complying with EORTC protocols, the Persian version of Inpatsat32 was translated and piloted in a small group of patients, then applied to 380 cancer patients admitted to different oncology wards in Tehran. Validity (convergent, discriminant, and divergent) and reliability of the tool was assessed through using multitrait analysis, factor analysis, intraclass correlations, Chronbach's alpha and test-retest (on a sample of 70 patients). Results: Good acceptance and high sensitivity of the questionnaire with low floor and ceiling effects were recognized, indicating power of the instrument to detect differences between groups with heterogeneous levels of satisfaction. Multitrait scaling analyses supported the convergent validity of the majority of scales (correlation coefficient >0.4) and favorable discriminant validity (item own scale correlation >0.8). There was no correlation between In-patsat32 scales and the EORTC-C30, which measures different concepts, confirming divergent validity of the tool. Internal consistency for all domains was high (${\alpha}$ >0.70) except for the hospital access score and the test-retest reliability was excellent (r=0.86-0.96). There was a weak responsiveness to change except for nurses technical skills. Principle component analysis confirmed five domains with much improved internal consistency (${\alpha}$ >0.9). Conclusions: The Persian version of the EORTC-in-patsat32 module is a reliable and valid instrument to measure cancer patient satisfaction with care received during their hospitalization period and can be utilized in clinical cancer research.

• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
• /
• v.10 no.3
• /
• pp.486-508
• /
• 2007

This study identifies key determinants of participation in UCC services. Incorporating insights from the flow theory, we examine the effects of psychological factors of social presence, self expression, arousal, and challenge as well as web-site characteristics variables of media easiness, contents usability, and immediateness. We have done a sample survey of internet users and collected 260 responses. Using Windows SPSS/PC 12.0 Package, we have performed statistical analyses including a correlation analysis, a factor analysis, and a multiple regression analysis. The result of the study is as follows. Psychological variables of perceived social presence, self expression, arousal, and challenge all show positive significant effect on participation in UCC service. Among web site characteristics, media easiness, which consists of a web structure that is easy-to-use, user friendliness, and personalized service, demonstrates a positive significant effect on participation in UCC services. Immediateness also has a positive significant effect. Some of the practical implications of the result are follows. We should improve user access to platforms of UCC service by opening up platforms. This will heighten perceived challenge which has the strongest influence on participation in UCC services. We need to focus on multimedia services and adjust to the cultural code of netizen who crave for visual expressions and on the spot on-line activities. Also suggested is that contributions made by participants need to be acknowledged through such provisions as profit sharing. Needs for individualized service, which is an aspect of media easiness, should also be addressed. Participants tend to value individuality while at the same time accepting broader trends. Information services need to be customized for individuals. In UCC centered internet businesses, netizen consumers are presumer. They are consumers and producers at the same time, and consumer needs should also be explored for the success of internet businesses.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
• /
• v.36 no.3
• /
• pp.140-148
• /
• 2009

Recent advances in communication and multimedia technologies make it possible to provide video-on-demand(VOD) services and people can access video servers over the Internet at any time using their electronic devices, such as PDA, mobile phone and digital TV. Each device has different processing capabilities, energy budgets, display sizes and network connectivities. To support such diverse devices, multiple versions of videos are needed to meet users' requests. In general cases, VOD servers cannot store all the versions of videos due to the storage limitation. When a device requests a stored version, the server can send the appropriate version immediately, but when the requested version is not stored, the server first converts some stored version to the requested version, and then sends it to the client. We call this conversion process transcoding. If transcoding occurs frequently in a VOD server, the CPU resource of the server becomes insufficient to response to clients. Thus, to admit as many requests as possible, we need to maximize the CPU availability. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to select versions from those stored on disk using a branch and bound technique to maximize the CPU availability. We also explore the impact of these storage management policies on streaming to heterogeneous users.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
• /
• v.37 no.5
• /
• pp.341-353
• /
• 2010

Mobile Internet Device (MID) allows users to flexibly use various forms of wireless internet such as Wi-Fi, GSM, CDMA, and 3G. Using such Internet, MID users can utilize application services. MID usage is expected to grow due to the benefits of portability, Internet accessibility, and other convenience. However, it has resource constraints such as limited CPU power, small memory size, limited battery life, and small screen size. Consequently, MIDs are not capable to hold large-sized complex applications and to process a large amount of data in memory. An effective solution to remedy these limitations is to develop cloud services for the required application functionality, to deploy them on the server side, and to let MID users access the services through internet. A major concern on running cloud services for MIDs is the potential problems with low Quality of Service (QoS) due to the characteristics of MIDs. Even measuring the QoS of such services is more technically challenging than conventional quality measurements. In this paper, we first identify the characteristics of MIDs and cloud services for MIDs. Based on these observations, we derive a number of quality attributes and their metrics for measuring QoS of mobile services. A case study of applying the proposed quality model is presented to show its effectiveness and applicability.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.301-308
• /
• 2009

This paper studied the scheme to realize the manifesto as the method of resolving the side effects after the introduction of the superintendent's election system, a direct election by local residents, in order to implement participative democracy in the educational field. When the superintendent's election system playing an important role in protecting the identity of a state is intruded by the political logic, ideology or factional interest, it leads to the educational crisis such as the damaged independence of the policy and the like. The local educational autonomous system is the institutional arrangement to secure the independence and neutrality of education based on morality and guarantee the democratization and decentralization of educational administration. The scheme to resolve the corrupt aspect of the election of the superintendent is to lead election to the policy-based election. This paper presents the scheme to realize the manifesto movement of the superintendent's electoral campaign to resolve this side effect. All political agents and candidates should be allowed to make free access to diverse information to draw up the manifesto and raise the reliability of the manifesto itself, be guaranteed neutrality, speciality, objectiveness, fairness and the like. In particular, it can be seen that the core task is whether citizens can be involved in the manifesto movement through a shift in their thinking about educational autonomy.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.11 no.5
• /
• pp.685-691
• /
• 2008

Recently with the rapid evolution of the mobile computing and communication technologies, mobile VOD service becomes increasingly important for wireless mobile users. The VOD service is being widely used in various areas of application, such as education, entertainment and business, because it provides users convenience in easily having access to video information at any time in any places. However, in reality, the mobile system has many difficulties in providing the smooth VOD service owing to frequent transfers and cutoffs of clients. The importance of a technique to transmit broadcasting is being stressed as a method for providing stabler mobile VOD service to a large number of clients. This paper is aimed at showing how to reduce demands for server bandwidth and delay of earlier service through performance analysis by suggesting an effective VOD broadcasting transmission technique through channel division in the mobile atmosphere. Many researches have been made about regular broadcasting techniques in particular. This study divides the methods used for assigning channels which have been decided by the size of segments into a group of regular channels and assistant channels using wireless gap-fillers to provide effective VOD services to a large number of clients at the mobile environment using small bandwidth resources. The regular channels transfer regular streams, while assistant channels repeatedly transfer the first segment to reduce early service delay time to receive regular streams. In this way, the study suggests a technique to reduce server bandwidth demand and early service delay time. Through the proposed technique, the server bandwidth demand could be reduced by more than 30 percent and the study continuously shows reduced early service delay time through conducting performance analysis.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
• /
• v.10 no.3
• /
• pp.221-230
• /
• 2004

In general, remote monitoring systems monitor the status of distributed hosts and/or applications in real-time for diverse managerial purposes. However, most of the extant systems have a few undesirable problems. First of all, they are platform-dependent and are not resilient to network and/or host failures. Moreover, they normally focus on the resource usage trends in monitored hosts, rather than on the status change of the applications running on them. We strongly believe that the latter has more direct and profound effect on the resource usage patterns on each host. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the Remote Applications Monitoring System (RAMS) that enables us to effectively manage distributed applications through a real-time monitoring of their respective resource usages. The RAMS is a centralized system that consists of many distributed agents and a single centralized manager. An agent on each host is in charge of collecting and reporting the status of local applications. The manager handles agent registration and provides a central access point to the selection and monitoring of distributed applications. The salient features of the system include robustness and portability The adoption of JINI greatly facilitates an automatic recovery from partial network failure and host failure.

• Journal of Distribution Science
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.105-114
• /
• 2017

Purpose - Recently, domestic pharmaceutical market is growing steadily, but top-tier companies are concentrating on sales growth. In this market, SMEs, which account for more than 80% of the entire market, suffer from the problem of lower margins and increasing inventory costs. According to the government's policy changes related to pharmaceuticals, it is pointed out that the management of existing customers and the control of salespeople are important issues for pharmaceutical companies. This study investigates the effect of the control system on the salesperson in domestic pharmaceutical distribution channel on customer-oriented selling behaviors and sales performance. Research design, data, and methodology - To verify the proposed research model and test hypotheses, the authors selected 244 MR(medical representatives)'s responses which have currently relationship with doctors or pharmacists. This study carefully investigated the reliability, content validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of the proposed model. Results - The authors find out the following results: capacity control, activity control, and self control have positive effects on customer-oriented selling behaviors and customer-oriented selling behaviors have a positive effect on sales performance. In addition, we present alternative model to check the direct effect between the control systems and the sales performance, but control system factors except self control have no direct influence. Conclusions - First of all, competency control and activity control increases the customer-oriented selling behavior of the salesperson. This means that the salesperson's sales skill, negotiation skill, customer access skill, presentation ability, monitoring, direction and evaluation are important and it is also important to control activities to check the number of visits to customers, report preparation, and customer service etiquette. Second, the fact that self-control of salesperson affects the customer-oriented selling behavior suggests that self-control is not controlled by external factors but rather establishes short/long-term goals. Therefore, it is important for sales organization to create an environment in which members can induce persistent incentives for self-control. Finally, output control did not affect customer-oriented sales behavior, which is less likely to form confidence or motivation to MRs when output control is perceived as a means of monitoring, supervising, or controlling rather than providing information to salespeople.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
• /
• v.11D no.5
• /
• pp.1011-1020
• /
• 2004

A lot of work has been done to improve the I/O performance of such a system that store and manage a massive amount of data by distributing them across multiple disks and access them in parallel. Most of the previous work has focused on an efficient mapping from a grid ceil, which is determined bY the interval number of each dimension, to a disk number on the assumption that each dimension is split into disjoint intervals such that entire data space is GRID-like partitioned. However, they have ignored the effects of a GRID partitioning scheme on declustering performance. In this paper, we enhance the performance of mapping function based declustering algorithms by applying a good GRID par-titioning method. For this, we propose an estimation model to count the number of grid cells intersected by a range query and apply a GRID partitioning scheme which minimizes query result size among the possible schemes. While it is common to do binary partition for high-dimensional data, we choose less number of dimensions than needed for binary partition and split several times along that dimensions so that we can reduce the number of grid cells touched by a query. Several experimental results show that the proposed estimation model gives accuracy within 0.5% error ratio regardless of query size and dimension. We can also improve the performance of declustering algorithm based on mapping function, called Kronecker Sequence, which has been known to be the best among the mapping functions for high-dimensional data, up to 23 times by applying an efficient GRID partitioning scheme.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
• /
• v.47 no.6
• /
• pp.715-719
• /
• 2009

The phase change electrode board for the bio-information detection through electrical property response of phase change material was developed in this study. We manufactured the electrode board using Aluminum first that is widely used in conventional semiconductor device process. Without further treatment, these aluminum electrodes tend to contain voids in PETEOS(plasma enhanced tetraethyoxysilane) material that are easily detected by cross-sectional SEM(Scanning Electron Microscope). The voids can be easily attacked and transformed into holes in between PETEOS and electrodes after etch back and washing process. In order to resolve this issue of Al electrode board, we developed a electrode board manufacturing method using low resistivity TiN, which has advantages in terms of the step-coverage of phase change($Ge_2Sb_2Te_5$, GST) thin film as well as thermodynamic stability, without etch back and washing process. This TiN material serves as the top and bottom electrode in PRAM(Phase-change Random Access Memory). The good connection between the TiN electrode and GST thin film was confirmed by observing the cross-section of TiN electrode board using SEM. The resistances of amorphous and crystalline GST thin film on TiN electrodes were also measured, and 1000 times difference between the amorphous and crystalline resistance of GST thin film was obtained, which is well enough for the signal detection.