• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.39 no.5_3
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• pp.1043-1060
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• 2023

An acceleration of climate change in recent years has led to increased attention towards 'blue carbon' which refers to the carbon captured by the ocean. However, our comprehension of marine ecosystems is still incomplete. This study classified and analyzed global marine eco-provinces using k-means clustering considering carbon cycling. We utilized five input variables during the past 20 years (2001-2020): Carbon-based Productivity Model (CbPM) Net Primary Production (NPP), particulate inorganic and organic carbon (PIC and POC), sea surface salinity (SSS), and sea surface temperature (SST). A total of nine eco-provinces were classified through an optimization process, and the spatial distribution and environmental characteristics of each province were analyzed. Among them, five provinces showed characteristics of open oceans, while four provinces reflected characteristics of coastal and high-latitude regions. Furthermore, a qualitative comparison was conducted with previous studies regarding marine ecological zones to provide a detailed analysis of the features of nine eco-provinces considering carbon cycling. Finally, we examined the changes in nine eco-provinces for four periods in the past (2001-2005, 2006-2010, 2011-2015, and 2016-2020). Rapid changes in coastal ecosystems were observed, and especially, significant decreases in the eco-provinces having higher productivity by large freshwater inflow were identified. Our findings can serve as valuable reference material for marine ecosystem classification and coastal management, with consideration of carbon cycling and ongoing climate changes. The findings can also be employed in the development of guidelines for the systematic management of vulnerable coastal regions to climate change.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.83-102
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• 2021

The government recently announced various policies for developing big-data and artificial intelligence fields to provide a great opportunity to the public with respect to disclosure of high-quality data within public institutions. KSURE(Korea Trade Insurance Corporation) is a major public institution for financial policy in Korea, and thus the company is strongly committed to backing export companies with various systems. Nevertheless, there are still fewer cases of realized business model based on big-data analyses. In this situation, this paper aims to develop a new business model which can be applied to an ex-ante prediction for the likelihood of the insurance accident of credit guarantee. We utilize internal data from KSURE which supports export companies in Korea and apply machine learning models. Then, we conduct performance comparison among the predictive models including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and DNN(Deep Neural Network). For decades, many researchers have tried to find better models which can help to predict bankruptcy since the ex-ante prediction is crucial for corporate managers, investors, creditors, and other stakeholders. The development of the prediction for financial distress or bankruptcy was originated from Smith(1930), Fitzpatrick(1932), or Merwin(1942). One of the most famous models is the Altman's Z-score model(Altman, 1968) which was based on the multiple discriminant analysis. This model is widely used in both research and practice by this time. The author suggests the score model that utilizes five key financial ratios to predict the probability of bankruptcy in the next two years. Ohlson(1980) introduces logit model to complement some limitations of previous models. Furthermore, Elmer and Borowski(1988) develop and examine a rule-based, automated system which conducts the financial analysis of savings and loans. Since the 1980s, researchers in Korea have started to examine analyses on the prediction of financial distress or bankruptcy. Kim(1987) analyzes financial ratios and develops the prediction model. Also, Han et al.(1995, 1996, 1997, 2003, 2005, 2006) construct the prediction model using various techniques including artificial neural network. Yang(1996) introduces multiple discriminant analysis and logit model. Besides, Kim and Kim(2001) utilize artificial neural network techniques for ex-ante prediction of insolvent enterprises. After that, many scholars have been trying to predict financial distress or bankruptcy more precisely based on diverse models such as Random Forest or SVM. One major distinction of our research from the previous research is that we focus on examining the predicted probability of default for each sample case, not only on investigating the classification accuracy of each model for the entire sample. Most predictive models in this paper show that the level of the accuracy of classification is about 70% based on the entire sample. To be specific, LightGBM model shows the highest accuracy of 71.1% and Logit model indicates the lowest accuracy of 69%. However, we confirm that there are open to multiple interpretations. In the context of the business, we have to put more emphasis on efforts to minimize type 2 error which causes more harmful operating losses for the guaranty company. Thus, we also compare the classification accuracy by splitting predicted probability of the default into ten equal intervals. When we examine the classification accuracy for each interval, Logit model has the highest accuracy of 100% for 0~10% of the predicted probability of the default, however, Logit model has a relatively lower accuracy of 61.5% for 90~100% of the predicted probability of the default. On the other hand, Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and DNN indicate more desirable results since they indicate a higher level of accuracy for both 0~10% and 90~100% of the predicted probability of the default but have a lower level of accuracy around 50% of the predicted probability of the default. When it comes to the distribution of samples for each predicted probability of the default, both LightGBM and XGBoost models have a relatively large number of samples for both 0~10% and 90~100% of the predicted probability of the default. Although Random Forest model has an advantage with regard to the perspective of classification accuracy with small number of cases, LightGBM or XGBoost could become a more desirable model since they classify large number of cases into the two extreme intervals of the predicted probability of the default, even allowing for their relatively low classification accuracy. Considering the importance of type 2 error and total prediction accuracy, XGBoost and DNN show superior performance. Next, Random Forest and LightGBM show good results, but logistic regression shows the worst performance. However, each predictive model has a comparative advantage in terms of various evaluation standards. For instance, Random Forest model shows almost 100% accuracy for samples which are expected to have a high level of the probability of default. Collectively, we can construct more comprehensive ensemble models which contain multiple classification machine learning models and conduct majority voting for maximizing its overall performance.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.1-44
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• 1973

Needless to say, the management of national forest in all countries is very important in view of the national mission and management purposes. Korean national forest is also in particular significant in promoting national economy for the continuous increasing of the demand for wood, conservation of the land and social welfare. But there's no denying the fact that the leading aim of the Korean forest policy has been based upon the conservation of forest resources and recovery of land conservation function instead of improvement of the forest productive capacity. Therefore, the management of national forest should be aimed as an industry in the chain of the Korean national economy. And the increment of the forest productive capacity based on rationalized forest management is also urgently needed. Not only the increment of the timber production but also the establishment of the good forest in quality and quantity are to bring naturally many functions of conservation and other public benefits. In 1908 Korean national forest was historically established for the first time as a result of the notification for ownership, and was divided into two kinds in 1911-1924, such as indisposable national forest for land conservation, forest management, scientific research and public welfare, and the other national forest to be disposed. Indisposable forest is mostly under the jurisdiction of national forest stations (Chungbu, Tongbu, Nambu), and the tother national forests are under custody of respective cities and provinces, and under custody of the other government authorities. As of the end of 1971, national forest land is 19.5% (1,297,708 ha) of the total forest land area, but growing stock is 50.1% ($35,406,079m^3$) of the total forest growing stock, and timber production of national forest is 23.6% ($205,959m^3$) of the year production of total timber in Korea. Accordingly, it is the important fact that national forest occupies the major part of Korean forestry. The author positively affirms that success or failure of the management of national forest controls rise or fall of forestry in Korea. All functions of forest are very important, but among others the function of timber production is most important especially in Korea, that unavoidably imports a large quantity of foreign wood every year (in 1971 import of foreign wood-$3,756,000m^3$, 160,995,000 dollars). So, Korea urgently needs the improvement of forest productive capacity in national forest. But it is difficult that wood production meets the rapid increase of demand for wood to the development of economy, because production term of forestry is long, so national forest management should be rationalized by the effective investment and development of forestry techniques in the long view. Although Korean national forest business has many difficulties in the budget, techniques and the lack of labour due to outflow of rural village labour by development of national economy, and the increase of labour wages and administrative expenses etc. the development of national forest depends on adoption of the suitable forest techniques and management adapted for social and economical development. In this view point the writer has investigated and analyzed the status of the management of national forest in Korea to examine the irrational problems and suggest an improvement plan. The national forestry statistics cited in this study is based on the basic statistics and the statistics of the forest business as of the end of 1971 published by Office of Forestry, Republic of Korea, and the other depended on the data presented by the national forest stations. The writer wants to propose as follows (seemed to be helpful in improvement of Korean national forest management). 1) In the organization of national forest management, more national forest stations should be established to manage intensively, and the staff of working plan officials should be strengthened because of the importance of working plan. 2) By increasing the staff of protection officials, forest area assigned for each protection official should be decreased to 1,000-2,000 ha. 3) The frequent personnel changes of supervisor of national forest station(the responsible person on-the-spot) obstructs to accomplish the consistent management plan. 4) In the working plan drafting for national forest, basic investigations should be carefully practiced with sufficient expenditure and staff not to draft unreal working plan. 5) The area of working-unit should be decreased to less than 2,000 ha on the average for intensive management and the principle of a working-unit in a forest station should be realized as soon as possible. 6) Reforestation on open land should be completed in a short time with a debt of the special fund(a long term loan), and the land on which growing hardwood stands should be changed with conifers to increase productivity per unit area, and at the same time techical utilization method of hardwood should be developed. 7) Expenses of reforestation should be saved by mechanization and use of chemicals for reforestation and tree nursery operation providing against the lack of labour in future. 8) In forest protection, forest fire damage is enormous in comparison with foreign countries, accordingly prevention system and equipment should be improved, and also the minimum necessary budget should be counted up for establishment and manintenance of fire-lines. 9) Manufacture production should be enlarged to systematize protection, processing and circulation of forest business, and, by doing this, mich benefit is naturally given for rural people. 10) Establishment and arrangement of forest road networks and erosion control work are indispensable for the future development of national forest itself and local development. Therefore, these works should be promoted by the responsibility of general accounting instead of special accounting. 11) Mechanization of forest works should be realized for exploiting hinterlands to meet the demand for timber increased and for solving lack of labour, consequently it should promote import of forest machines, home production, training for operaters and careful adminitration. 12) Situation of labour in future will grow worse. Therefore, the countermeasure to maintain forest labourers and pay attention to public welfare facilities and works should be considered. 13) Although the condition of income and expenditure grows worse because of economical change, the regular expenditure should be fixed. So part of the surplus fund, as of the end of 1971, should be established for the fund, and used for enlarging reforestation and forest road networks(preceding investment in national forest).

• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.19
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• pp.224-242
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• 2003

The author believes that the main task of study in international trade usage and practice is the management of transactional risks involved in international sale of goods. They are foreign exchange risks, transportation risks, credit risk, risk of miscommunication, etc. In most cases, these risks are more serious and enormous than those involved in domestic sales. Historically, the merchant adventurers organized the voyage abroad, secured trade finance, and went around the ocean with their own or consigned cargo until around the $mid-19^{th}$ century. They did business faceto-face at the trade fair or the open port where they maintained the local offices, so-called "Trading House"(商館). Thererfore, the transactional risks might have been one-sided either with the seller or the buyer. The bottomry seemed a typical arrangement for risk sharing among the interested parties to the adventure. In this way, such organizational arrangements coped with or bore the transactional risks. With the advent of ocean liner services and wireless communication across the national border in the $19^{th}$ century, the business of merchant adventurers developed toward the clear division of labor; sales by mercantile agents, and ocean transportation by the steam ship companies. The international banking helped the process to be accelerated. Then, bills of lading backed up by the statute made it possible to conduct documentary sales with a foreign partner in different country. Thus, FOB terms including ocean freight and CIF terms emerged gradually as standard trade terms in which transactional risks were allocated through negotiation between the seller and the buyer located in different countries. Both of them did not have to go abroad with their cargo. Instead, documentation in compliance with the terms of the contract(plus an L/C in some cases) must by 'strictly' fulfilled. In other words, the set of contractual documents must be tendered in advance of the arrival of the goods at port of discharge. Trust or reliance is placed on such contractual paper documents. However, the container transport services introduced as international intermodal transport since the late 1960s frequently caused the earlier arrival of the goods at the destination before the presentation of the set of paper documents, which may take 5 to 10% of the amount of transaction. In addition, the size of the container vessel required the speedy transport documentation before sailing from the port of loading. In these circumstances, computerized processing of transport related documents became essential for inexpensive transaction cost and uninterrupted distribution of the goods. Such computerization does not stop at the phase of transportation but extends to cover the whole process of international trade, transforming the documentary sales into less-paper trade and further into paperless trade, i.e., EDI or E-Commerce. Now we face the other side of the coin, which is data security and paperless transfer of legal rights and obligations. Unfortunately, these issues are not effectively covered by a set of contracts only. Obviously, EDI or E-Commerce is based on the common business process and harmonized system of various data codes as well as the standard message formats. This essential feature of E-Commerce needs effective coordination of different divisions of business and tight control over credit arrangements in addition to the standard contract of sales. In a few word, information does not alway invite "trust". Credit flows from people, or close organizational tie-ups. It is our common understanding that, without well-orchestrated organizational arrangements made by leading companies, E-Commerce does not work well for paperless trade. With such arrangements well in place, participating E-business members do not need to seriously care for credit risk. Finally, it is also clear that E-International Commerce must be linked up with a set of government EDIs such as NACCS, Port EDI, JETRAS, etc, in Japan. Therefore, there is still a long way before us to go for E-Commerce in practice, not on the top of information manager's desk.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.95-105
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• 2013

Recently, SME's Collaboration activities have become one of a vital factor for sustaining competitive edge. This is because of the rapidly changing and competitive market environment, and also to leverage performance by overcoming obstacles of having limited internal resources. Discussing about the effects and relationships of the firm's collaboration activities and its outputs are not new. However, as ICT and various technologies have been diffused into the traditional industries, boundaries and practice capabilities within the industries are becoming ambiguous. Thus contents of the products/services and their development methods are also go and come over the industries. Although many researchers suggested the relations of SME's collaboration activities and innovation performances, most of the previous literatures are focusing on broad perspectives of firm's environmental factors rather than considering various SME's idiosyncrasy factors such as their major product and customer types at once. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze how SME(Small Medium Enterprise)'s external collaboration activities by their idiosyncrasy act as an input to types of innovation performance. In order to analyze collaboration effects in detail, we defined factors that can represent the SME's business environment - Perceived importance of using external resources, Perceived importance of external partnership, Collaboration and Collaboration levels of Major Product types, Customer types and lastly the Firm Sizes. We have also specifically divided the performance of innovation types as product innovation and process innovation based on existing research. In this study, the empirical analysis is based on Probit Regression Model to observe the correlations with the impact of each SME's business environment and their activities. For the empirical data, 497 samples were collected which, this sample data was extracted from the 'Korean Open Innovation Survey' performed by ETRI(Korean Electronics Telecommunications Research Institute) in 2010. As a result, empirical test results indicated that the impact of collaboration varies depend on the innovation types (Product and Process Innovation). The Impact of the collaboration level for the product innovation tend to be more effective when SMEs are developing for a final product, targeting on for individual customers (B2C). But on the other hand, the analysis result of the Process innovation tend to be higher than the product innovation, when SMEs are developing raw materials for their partners or to other firms targeting on for manufacturing industries(B2B). Also perceived importance of using external resources has effected to both product and process innovation performance. But Perceived importance of external partnership was statistically insignificant. Interesting finding was that the service product has negative effects on for the process innovation performance. And Relationship between size of the firms and their external collaboration activities with their performance of the innovations indicated that the bigger firms(over 100 of employees) tend to have better for both product and process innovations. Finally, implications of the results can be suggested as performance of innovation can be varied depends on firm's unique business idiosyncrasy as well as levels of external collaboration activities. The Implication of this research can be considered for firms in selecting an appropriate strategy as well as for policy makers.

• Korean Security Journal
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• no.9
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• pp.69-98
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• 2005

The security industry for civilians (Private Security), was first introduced to Korea via the US army's security system in the early 1960's. Shortly after then, official police laws were enforced in 1973, and private security finally started to develop with the passing of the 'service security industry' law in 1976. Korea's Private Security industry grew rapidly in the 1980's with the support of foreign funds and products, and now there are thought to be approximately 2000 private security enterprises currently running in Korea. However, nowadays the majority of these enterprises are experiencing difficulties such as lack of funds, insufficient management, and lack of control over employees, as a result, it seems difficult for some enterprises to avoid the low production output and bankruptcy. As a result of this these enterprises often settle these matters illegally, such as excessive dumping or avoiding problems by hiring inappropriate employees who don't have the right skills or qualifications for the jobs. The main problem with the establishment of this kind of security service is that it is so easy to make inroads into this private service market. All these hindering factors inhibit the market growth and impede qualitative development. Based on these main reasons, I researched this area, and will analyze and criticize the present condition of Korea's private security. I will present a possible development plan for the private security of Korea by referring to cases from the US and Japan. My method of researching was to investigate any related documentary records and articles and to interview people for necessary evidence. The theoretical study, involves investigation books and dissertations which are published from inside and outside of the country, and studying the complete collection of laws and regulations, internet data, various study reports, and the documentary records and the statistical data of many institutions such as the National Police Office, judicial training institute, and the enterprises of private security. Also, in addition, the contents of professionals who are in charge of practical affairs on the spot in order to overcomes the critical points of documentary records when investigating dissertation. I tried to get a firm grasp of the problems and difficulties which people in these work enterprises experience, this I thought would be most effective by interviewing the workers, for example: how they feel in the work places and what are the elements which inpede development? And I also interviewed policemen who are in charge of supervising the private escort enterprises, in an effort to figure out the problems and differences in opinion between domestic private security service and the police. From this investigation and research I will try to pin point the major problems of the private security and present a developmental plan. Firstly-Companies should unify the private police law and private security service law. Secondly-It is essential to introduce the 'specialty certificate' system for the quality improvement of private security service. Thirdly-must open up a new private security market by improving old system. Fourth-must build up the competitive power of the security service enterprises which is based on an efficient management. Fifth-needs special marketing strategy to hold customers Sixth-needs positive research based on theoretical studies. Seventh-needs the consistent and even training according to effective market demand. Eighth-Must maintain interrelationship with the police department. Ninth-must reinforce the system of Korean private security service association. Tenth-must establish private security laboratory. Based on these suggestions there should be improvement of private security service.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.79-94
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• 2013

Recently, the high value added business is steadily growing in the culture and art area. To generated high value from a performance, the satisfaction of audience is necessary. The flow in a critical factor for satisfaction, and it should be induced from audience and measures. To evaluate interest and emotion of audience on contents, producers or investors need a kind of index for the measurement of the flow. But it is neither easy to define the flow quantitatively, nor to collect audience's reaction immediately. The previous studies of the group flow were evaluated by the sum of the average value of each person's reaction. The flow or "good feeling" from each audience was extracted from his face, especially, the change of his (or her) expression and body movement. But it was not easy to handle the large amount of real-time data from each sensor signals. And also it was difficult to set experimental devices, in terms of economic and environmental problems. Because, all participants should have their own personal sensor to check their physical signal. Also each camera should be located in front of their head to catch their looks. Therefore we need more simple system to analyze group flow. This study provides the method for measurement of audiences flow with group synchronization at same time and place. To measure the synchronization, we made real-time processing system using the Differential Image and Group Emotion Analysis (GEA) system. Differential Image was obtained from camera and by the previous frame was subtracted from present frame. So the movement variation on audience's reaction was obtained. And then we developed a program, GEX(Group Emotion Analysis), for flow judgment model. After the measurement of the audience's reaction, the synchronization is divided as Dynamic State Synchronization and Static State Synchronization. The Dynamic State Synchronization accompanies audience's active reaction, while the Static State Synchronization means to movement of audience. The Dynamic State Synchronization can be caused by the audience's surprise action such as scary, creepy or reversal scene. And the Static State Synchronization was triggered by impressed or sad scene. Therefore we showed them several short movies containing various scenes mentioned previously. And these kind of scenes made them sad, clap, and creepy, etc. To check the movement of audience, we defined the critical point, ${\alpha}$and ${\beta}$. Dynamic State Synchronization was meaningful when the movement value was over critical point ${\beta}$, while Static State Synchronization was effective under critical point ${\alpha}$. ${\beta}$ is made by audience' clapping movement of 10 teams in stead of using average number of movement. After checking the reactive movement of audience, the percentage(%) ratio was calculated from the division of "people having reaction" by "total people". Total 37 teams were made in "2012 Seoul DMC Culture Open" and they involved the experiments. First, they followed induction to clap by staff. Second, basic scene for neutralize emotion of audience. Third, flow scene was displayed to audience. Forth, the reversal scene was introduced. And then 24 teams of them were provided with amuse and creepy scenes. And the other 10 teams were exposed with the sad scene. There were clapping and laughing action of audience on the amuse scene with shaking their head or hid with closing eyes. And also the sad or touching scene made them silent. If the results were over about 80%, the group could be judged as the synchronization and the flow were achieved. As a result, the audience showed similar reactions about similar stimulation at same time and place. Once we get an additional normalization and experiment, we can obtain find the flow factor through the synchronization on a much bigger group and this should be useful for planning contents.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.36 no.10
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• pp.741-747
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• 2003

Background: Coronary artery bypass graf t (CABG) has been settled as most safe surgery among the open heart surgeries. However, in patients with cardiogenic shock, the emergency CABG has higher mortality than elective CABG. We analyzed thirty four patients who underwent emergency CABG and report the middle and long-term results. Material and Method: From June 1994 to December 2001, 34 patients who underwent emergency CABG at Kang-dong Sacred Heart Hospital were include in this study. On the basis of hospital databases and Out Patient Department (OPD) follow up data, preoperative diagnosis, risk factor, coronary artery anatomy, operation technique, postoperative mortality, complication, recurrence of symptom, and mid and long term mortality were analyzed retrospectively. Result: Indications for emergency CABG were 29 cardiogenic shocks (85.3%), 4 intractable chest pains (11.8%), and 1 polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (2.9%). Preoperative angiographic diagnoses were triple vessel disease in 16 (47.1%) and left main disease in 8 (23.5%) patients. We used saphenous vein grafts in 81 and left internal thoracic artery grafts in 14 anastomosis. The mean number of grafts per patients was 2.8$\pm$0.8. The mean aortic cross clamp time was 91.9$\pm$34.6 minutes and the mean cardiopulmonary bypass time was 262.7$\pm$198.3 minutes. Early mortality was 50% and the most common cause of early mortality was low cardiac output in 7 (20.6%) patients. The mean follow-up period was 30.9$\pm$35.7 months. There were no recurrences of symptom and late mortality. Conclusion: In the case of emergency operation, aggressive and proper management with drugs and IABP should be done for preoperative hemodynamic stability and early surgical intervention is the most important factor for patient salvage.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.207-228
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• 2007

Measuring Information Technology(IT) organizations' activities have been limited to mainly measure financial indicators for a long time. However, according to the multifarious functions of Information System, a number of researches have been done for the new trends on measurement methodologies that come with financial measurement as well as new measurement methods. Especially, the researches on IT Balanced Scorecard(BSC), concept from BSC measuring IT activities have been done as well in recent years. BSC provides more advantages than only integration of non-financial measures in a performance measurement system. The core of BSC rests on the cause-and-effect relationships between measures to allow prediction of value chain performance measures to allow prediction of value chain performance measures, communication, and realization of the corporate strategy and incentive controlled actions. More recently, BSC proponents have focused on the need to tie measures together into a causal chain of performance, and to test the validity of these hypothesized effects to guide the development of strategy. Kaplan and Norton[2001] argue that one of the primary benefits of the balanced scorecard is its use in gauging the success of strategy. Norreklit[2000] insist that the cause-and-effect chain is central to the balanced scorecard. The cause-and-effect chain is also central to the IT BSC. However, prior researches on relationship between information system and enterprise strategies as well as connection between various IT performance measurement indicators are not so much studied. Ittner et al.[2003] report that 77% of all surveyed companies with an implemented BSC place no or only little interest on soundly modeled cause-and-effect relationships despite of the importance of cause-and-effect chains as an integral part of BSC. This shortcoming can be explained with one theoretical and one practical reason[Blumenberg and Hinz, 2006]. From a theoretical point of view, causalities within the BSC method and their application are only vaguely described by Kaplan and Norton. From a practical consideration, modeling corporate causalities is a complex task due to tedious data acquisition and following reliability maintenance. However, cause-and effect relationships are an essential part of BSCs because they differentiate performance measurement systems like BSCs from simple key performance indicator(KPI) lists. KPI lists present an ad-hoc collection of measures to managers but do not allow for a comprehensive view on corporate performance. Instead, performance measurement system like BSCs tries to model the relationships of the underlying value chain in cause-and-effect relationships. Therefore, to overcome the deficiencies of causal modeling in IT BSC, sound and robust causal modeling approaches are required in theory as well as in practice for offering a solution. The propose of this study is to suggest critical success factors(CSFs) and KPIs for measuring performance for IT organizations and empirically validate the casual relationships between those CSFs. For this purpose, we define four perspectives of BSC for IT organizations according to Van Grembergen's study[2000] as follows. The Future Orientation perspective represents the human and technology resources needed by IT to deliver its services. The Operational Excellence perspective represents the IT processes employed to develop and deliver the applications. The User Orientation perspective represents the user evaluation of IT. The Business Contribution perspective captures the business value of the IT investments. Each of these perspectives has to be translated into corresponding metrics and measures that assess the current situations. This study suggests 12 CSFs for IT BSC based on the previous IT BSC's studies and COBIT 4.1. These CSFs consist of 51 KPIs. We defines the cause-and-effect relationships among BSC CSFs for IT Organizations as follows. The Future Orientation perspective will have positive effects on the Operational Excellence perspective. Then the Operational Excellence perspective will have positive effects on the User Orientation perspective. Finally, the User Orientation perspective will have positive effects on the Business Contribution perspective. This research tests the validity of these hypothesized casual effects and the sub-hypothesized causal relationships. For the purpose, we used the Partial Least Squares approach to Structural Equation Modeling(or PLS Path Modeling) for analyzing multiple IT BSC CSFs. The PLS path modeling has special abilities that make it more appropriate than other techniques, such as multiple regression and LISREL, when analyzing small sample sizes. Recently the use of PLS path modeling has been gaining interests and use among IS researchers in recent years because of its ability to model latent constructs under conditions of nonormality and with small to medium sample sizes(Chin et al., 2003). The empirical results of our study using PLS path modeling show that the casual effects in IT BSC significantly exist partially in our hypotheses.

• Journal of Chest Surgery
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.226-232
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• 2009

Background: Blunt chest trauma accounts for 90% of all chest traumas in Europe and the United States and this causes 20% of all trauma-related deaths. The major cause of morbidity and mortality after blunt chest trauma is undetected injuries. For this reason, chest computerized tomography has gained popularity for the evaluation of trauma, but it is expensive and it exposes patients to radiation. This study identified the clinical features associated with the diagnosic information obtained on a CT chest scan, as compared with a standard chest X-ray, for patients who sustained blunt trauma to the chest. This study also evaluated the role of a routine computed tomographic (CT) scan for these patients. The patients who had chest computed tomography done after the initial chest x-ray were analyzed separately for the presence of occult injuries. Material and Method: We studied 100 consecutive patients from November 2006 to July 2007: 74 patients after motor vehicle crashes and 26 patients after a fall from a height >2m. Simultaneous with the initial clinical evaluation, an anteroposterior chest radiograph and a helical chest CT scan were obtained for all the patients. The data extracted from the medical record included the vital signs, the interventions and the type and severity of injury (RTS). Result: Among the 100 cases, 79 patients showed at least more than one pathologic sign on their chest radiograph, and 21 patients had a normal chest radiograph. For 17 of the patients who had a normal chest X ray, the CT scan showed multiple injuries, which were pneumothorax, hemothorax, lung contusion, sternal fracture etc. This represents that a CT scan is statistically superior to a chest radiograph to diagnose the pathologic signs. But on the other hand, as for treatment, only 31 patients were diagnosed by CT scan and they were treated with chest tube insertion ect. 42 patients needed ony conservative management without invasive thoracosurgical treatment such as chest tube insertion or open thoracotomy. 27 patients were treated based on the diagnosis made by the chest radiograph and physical examination. Conclusion: Chest computerized tomography was significantly more effective than routine chest X-ray for detecting lung contusion, pneumothorax and mediastinal hematoma, as well as fractured ribs, scapula and, sternum. Although the occult findings increased, the number of patients who needed treatment was small. Therefore, we suggest making selective use of a CT scan to avoid its overuse in ERs.