• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.12
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• pp.41-52
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• 2015

Purpose - Given globalization, the new niche market of medical tourism is likely to experience sustainable growth for various reasons, such as aging populations and a shift in the medical consumerism paradigm toward prevention. Importantly, understanding medical customers' behavior is necessary to benefit from a competitive advantage in this industry. The existing research primarily accessed the key factors of medical quality and costs to explain health customers' behavior but is limited in terms of enabling an understanding of the decision process. This limitation exists because, given the intangibility and greater associated risks in the highly professional industry of international medical tourism, most customers lack the knowledge and experience needed to evaluate the central factors-such as the medical competence of health care countries-before purchases. Therefore, they actively search for useful information through various distributions to reduce uncertainty and to make better choices. Interestingly, most of these information channels are associated with word-of-mouth (WOM). However, no evidence is found in the literature to estimate the effect of WOM in the medical tourism field. Thus, this study focuses on WOM to explore its interaction with key medical characteristic factors and the attractiveness of destinations referred to by sources. This study also affects customers' evaluations and, in turn, influences their intention to seek health care services abroad. Research design, data, and methodology - The literature review addressed an interesting research model for estimating the relations among WOM, medical characteristics, attractiveness, and customers' choice intention regarding international health care. In the key economic regions in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Guangdong, 2,500 survey questionnaires were distributed to potential customers of different ages, education, and income levels. A resulting 1,717 (68.68 percent of the original 2,500) usable surveys were obtained for analysis. Moderated regression analysis was used to determine the effects of WOM in the decision process regarding international health care destinations. Results - The results indicate that WOM is a good moderator of the relationships between the factors evaluated by sources and customers. More importantly, the WOM effects reflect the factors of tie strength, credibility, and vividness. The results also reveal that, given the moderating role of WOM, the intention of potential Chinese customers to seek the referred health care country varies according to the medical characteristics of medical competency and reputation as evaluated by customers. In contrast, the travel attractiveness of the attractions, facilities, accessibility, and social environment are critical determinants of destination choice intention. Conclusions - The moderating role of WOM has been confirmed through the international healthcare destination selection process. Medical tourism managers should user WOM as an effective marketing tool for industry development. Specially, marketers should consider the effects of WOM determinants, such as tie strength, credibility, and vividness, to develop an effective strategy. Furthermore, this study estimates the factors that affect customers' selection of medical tourism destinations. Health care managers or policy makers should consider a broad variety of variables that may attract more Chinese customers to international health care.

• Journal of Climate Change Research
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.13-29
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• 2018

This study presented evaluation procedure for selecting appropriate GCMs and downscaling method by focusing on the climate extreme indices suitable for climate change adaptation. The procedure includes six stages of processes as follows: 1) exclusion of unsuitable GCM through raw GCM analysis before bias correction; 2) calculation of the climate extreme indices and selection of downscaling method by evaluating reproducibility for the past and distortion rate for the future period; 3) selection of downscaling method based on evaluation of reproducibility of spatial correlation among weather stations; and 4) MME calculation using weight factors and evaluation of uncertainty range depending on number of GCMs. The presented procedure was applied to 60 weather stations where there are observed data for the past 30 year period on Korea Peninsula. First, 22 GCMs were selected through the evaluation of the spatio-temporal reproducibility of 29 GCMs. Between Simple Quantile Mapping (SQM) and Spatial Disaggregation Quantile Delta Mapping (SDQDM) methods, SQM was selected based on the reproducibility of 27 climate extreme indices for the past and reproducibility evaluation of spatial correlation in precipitation and temperature. Total precipitation (prcptot) and annual 1-day maximum precipitation (rx1day), which is respectively related to water supply and floods, were selected and MME-based future projections were estimated for near-future (2010-2039), the mid-future (2040-2069), and the far-future (2070-2099) based on the weight factors by GCM. The prcptot and rx1day increased as time goes farther from the near-future to the far-future and RCP 8.5 showed a higher rate of increase in both indices compared to RCP 4.5 scenario. It was also found that use of 20 GCM out of 22 explains 80% of the overall variation in all combinations of RCP scenarios and future periods. The result of this study is an example of an application in Korea Peninsula and APCC Integrated Modeling Solution (AIMS) can be utilized in various areas and fields if users want to apply the proposed procedure directly to a target area.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.119-128
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• 2019

This study aims to analyze the research trends on Smart City and to present implications to policy maker, industry professional, and researcher. Cities around globe have undergone the rapid progress in urbanization and the consequent dramatic increase in urban dwellings over the past few decades, and faced many urban problems in such areas as transportation, environment and housing. Cities around the globe are in a hurry to introduce Smart City to pursue a common goal of solving these urban problems and improving the quality of their lives. However, various conceptual approaches to smart city are causing uncertainty in setting policy goals and establishing direction for implementation. The study collected 11,527 papers titled "Smart City(cities)" from the Scopus DB and Springer DB, and then analyze research status, topic, trends based on abstracts and publication date(year) information using the LDA based Topic Modeling approaches. Research topics are classified into three categories(Services, Technologies, and User Perspective) and eight regarding topics. Out of eight topics, citizen-driven innovation is the most frequently referred. Additional topic network analysis reveals that data and privacy/security are the most prevailing topics affecting others. This study is expected to helps understand the trends of Smart City researches and predict the future researches.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.136-143
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• 2018

Cellular automata have been applied to simulations in many fields such as astrophysics, social phenomena, fire spread, and evacuation. Using cellular automata, this study develops a model for consequence analysis of the dispersion of hazardous chemicals, which is required for risk assessments of and emergency responses for frequent chemical accidents. Unlike in cases of detailed plant safety design, real-time accident responses require fast and iterative calculations to reduce the uncertainty of the distribution of damage within the affected area. EPA ALOHA and KORA of National Institute of Chemical Safety have been popular choices for these analyses. However, this study proposes an initiative to supplement the model and code continuously and is different in its development of free software, specialized for small and medium enterprises. Compared to the full-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which requires large amounts of computation time, the relative accuracy loss is compromised, and the convenience of the general user is improved. Using Python open-source libraries as well as meteorological information linkage, it is made possible to expand and update the functions continuously. Users can easily obtain the results by simply inputting the layout of the plant and the materials used. Accuracy is verified against full-scale CFD simulations, and it will be distributed as open source software, supporting GPU-accelerated computing for fast computation.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.267-275
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• 2020

Even ordinary-looking plays can have a profound meaning. Based on this assumption, Eugene Pink (1960) has established an analytical model of play with five elements, namely "delight", "meaning", "community", "rules" and "tools." It was an effort to reflect on the true meaning of play beyond the cortical entertaining nature of play. In this study, it was carried out that all the texts containing images and performance from the EBS character "Pengsu" were selected, since he emerged as a new star in 2019. And also his play structure was analyzed by applying the Pink's model. As a result, Pengsu's play structure was confirmed to be systematic and complete as a play prototype because it was well-organized with five elements of play. It was regarded as a successful character that skillfully attracts participants to the play world. Among the components of the play, "fun" was found to be his funny appearance, sudden and unconventional behavior, "meaning" was the elimination of authoritarianism, self-esteeming and energizing, "community" was a multi-platform media user who crossed off-on-line, analog-digital-line, "rules" was to set his concept fixed as a young stranger with an ego to unreveal his identity, and "tools" was shown as his character itself and continual discourse. It shows that until now, Pengsu has a social net function of quite spreading the positive meaning of encouragement and comfort, advice and guide, consideration and forgiveness, introspection and nirvana to all members of our society, including the youth who are struggling with uncertainty and anxiety by showing rather exaggerated and stimulating performance that precisely combines these play elements.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.275-292
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• 2022

In order to detect climate changes using satellite imagery, the GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) defines requirements such as spatio-temporal resolution, stability by the time change, and uncertainty. Due to limitation of GK-2A sensor performance, the level-2 products can not satisfy the requirement, especially for spatial resolution. In this paper, we found the optimal pan-sharpening algorithm for GK-2A products. The six pan-sharpening methods included in CS (Component Substitution), MRA (Multi-Resolution Analysis), VO (Variational Optimization), and DL (Deep Learning) were used. In the case of DL, the synthesis property based method was used to generate training dataset. The process of synthesis property is that pan-sharpening model is applied with Pan (Panchromatic) and MS (Multispectral) images with reduced spatial resolution, and fused image is compared with the original MS image. In the synthesis property based method, fused image with desire level for user can be produced only when the geometric characteristics between the PAN with reduced spatial resolution and MS image are similar. However, since the dissimilarity exists, RD (Random Down-sampling) was additionally used as a way to minimize it. Among the pan-sharpening methods, PSGAN was applied with RD (PSGAN_RD). The fused images are qualitatively and quantitatively validated with consistency property and the synthesis property. As validation result, the GSA algorithm performs well in the evaluation index representing spatial characteristics. In the case of spectral characteristics, the PSGAN_RD has the best accuracy with the original MS image. Therefore, in consideration of spatial and spectral characteristics of fused image, we found that PSGAN_RD is suitable for GK-2A products.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.4
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• pp.43-71
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• 1975

Operations research has developed rapidly since its origins in World War II. Practitioners of O. R. have contributed to almost every aspect of government and business. More recently, a number of operations researchers have turned their attention to library and information systems, and the author believes that significant research has resulted. It is the purpose of this essay to introduce the library audience to some of these accomplishments, to present some of the author's hypotheses on the subject of library management to which he belives O. R. has great potential, and to suggest some future research directions. Some problem areas in librianship where O. R. may play a part have been discussed and are summarized below. (1) Library location. It is usually necessary to make balance between accessibility and cost In location problems. Many mathematical methods are available for identifying the optimal locations once the balance between these two criteria has been decided. The major difficulties lie in relating cost to size and in taking future change into account when discriminating possible solutions. (2) Planning new facilities. Standard approaches to using mathematical models for simple investment decisions are well established. If the problem is one of choosing the most economical way of achieving a certain objective, one may compare th althenatives by using one of the discounted cash flow techniques. In other situations it may be necessary to use of cost-benefit approach. (3) Allocating library resources. In order to allocate the resources to best advantage the librarian needs to know how the effectiveness of the services he offers depends on the way he puts his resources. The O. R. approach to the problems is to construct a model representing effectiveness as a mathematical function of levels of different inputs(e.g., numbers of people in different jobs, acquisitions of different types, physical resources). (4) Long term planning. Resource allocation problems are generally concerned with up to one and a half years ahead. The longer term certainly offers both greater freedom of action and greater uncertainty. Thus it is difficult to generalize about long term planning problems. In other fields, however, O. R. has made a significant contribution to long range planning and it is likely to have one to make in librarianship as well. (5) Public relations. It is generally accepted that actual and potential users are too ignorant both of the range of library services provided and of how to make use of them. How should services be brought to the attention of potential users? The answer seems to lie in obtaining empirical evidence by controlled experiments in which a group of libraries participated. (6) Acquisition policy. In comparing alternative policies for acquisition of materials one needs to know the implications of each service which depends on the stock. Second is the relative importance to be ascribed to each service for each class of user. By reducing the level of the first, formal models will allow the librarian to concentrate his attention upon the value judgements which will be necessary for the second. (7) Loan policy. The approach to choosing between loan policies is much the same as the previous approach. (8) Manpower planning. For large library systems one should consider constructing models which will permit the skills necessary in the future with predictions of the skills that will be available, so as to allow informed decisions. (9) Management information system for libraries. A great deal of data can be available in libraries as a by-product of all recording activities. It is particularly tempting when procedures are computerized to make summary statistics available as a management information system. The values of information to particular decisions that may have to be taken future is best assessed in terms of a model of the relevant problem. (10) Management gaming. One of the most common uses of a management game is as a means of developing staff's to take decisions. The value of such exercises depends upon the validity of the computerized model. If the model were sufficiently simple to take the form of a mathematical equation, decision-makers would probably able to learn adequately from a graph. More complex situations require simulation models. (11) Diagnostics tools. Libraries are sufficiently complex systems that it would be useful to have available simple means of telling whether performance could be regarded as satisfactory which, if it could not, would also provide pointers to what was wrong. (12) Data banks. It would appear to be worth considering establishing a bank for certain types of data. It certain items on questionnaires were to take a standard form, a greater pool of data would de available for various analysis. (13) Effectiveness measures. The meaning of a library performance measure is not readily interpreted. Each measure must itself be assessed in relation to the corresponding measures for earlier periods of time and a standard measure that may be a corresponding measure in another library, the 'norm', the 'best practice', or user expectations.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.85-116
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• 2016

The present study aims to explore the causes of employment difficulty on the basis of job applicant's interest from P-E (person-environment) fit perspective. Our approach relied on a textual analytic method to reveal insights from their situational interests in a job search during the change of labor market. Thus, to investigate the type of major interests and psychological responses, user-generated texts in a social community were collected for analysis between January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2015 by crawling the online-community in regard to job seeking and sharing information and opinions. The results of topic analysis indicated user's primary interests were divided into four types: perception of vocation expectation, employment pre-preparation behaviors, perception of labor market, and job-seeking stress. Specially, job applicants put mainly concerns of monetary reward and a form of employment, rather than their work values or career exploration, thus youth job applicants expressed their psychological responses using contextualized language (e.g., slang, vulgarisms) for projecting their unstable state under uncertainty in response to environmental changes. Additionally, they have perceived activities in the restricted preparation (e.g., certification, English exam) as determinant factors for success in employment and suffered form job-seeking stress. On the basis of these findings, current unemployment matters are totally attributed to the absence of pursing the value of vocation and job in individuals, organizations, and society. Concretely, job seekers are preoccupied with occupational prestige in social aspect and have undecided vocational value. On the other hand, most companies have no perception of the importance of human resources and have overlooked the needs for proper work environment development in respect of stimulating individual motivation. The attempt in this study to reinterpret the effect of environment as for classifying job applicant's interests in reference to linguistic and psychological theories not only helps conduct a more comprehensive meaning for understanding social matters, but guides new directions for future research on job applicant's psychological factors (e.g., attitudes, motivation) using topic analysis.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.53-84
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• 2013

With rapid development of ICT (Information and Communications Technology), new services by the convergence of mobile network and application technology began to appear. Today, smart phone with new ICT convergence network capabilities is exceedingly popular and very useful as a new tool for the development of business opportunities. Previous studies based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) suggested critical factors, which should be considered for acquiring new customers and maintaining existing users in smart phone market. However, they had a limitation to focus on technology acceptance, not value based approach. Prior studies on customer's adoption of electronic utilities like smart phone product showed that the antecedents such as the perceived benefit and the perceived sacrifice could explain the causality between what is perceived and what is acquired over diverse contexts. So, this research conceptualizes perceived value as a trade-off between perceived benefit and perceived sacrifice, and we need to research the perceived value to grasp user's continuous intention to use of smart phone. The purpose of this study is to investigate the structured relationship between benefit (quality, usefulness, playfulness) and sacrifice (technicality, cost, security risk) of smart phone users, perceived value, and continuous intention to use. In addition, this study intends to analyze the differences between two subgroups of smart phone users by the degree of personal innovativeness. Personal innovativeness could help us to understand the moderating effect between how perceptions are formed and continuous intention to use smart phone. This study conducted survey through e-mail, direct mail, and interview with smart phone users. Empirical analysis based on 330 respondents was conducted in order to test the hypotheses. First, the result of hypotheses testing showed that perceived usefulness among three factors of perceived benefit has the highest positive impact on perceived value, and then followed by perceived playfulness and perceived quality. Second, the result of hypotheses testing showed that perceived cost among three factors of perceived sacrifice has significantly negative impact on perceived value, however, technicality and security risk have no significant impact on perceived value. Also, the result of hypotheses testing showed that perceived value has significant direct impact on continuous intention to use of smart phone. In this regard, marketing managers of smart phone company should pay more attention to improve task efficiency and performance of smart phone, including rate systems of smart phone. Additionally, to test the moderating effect of personal innovativeness, this research conducted multi-group analysis by the degree of personal innovativeness of smart phone users. In a group with high level of innovativeness, perceived usefulness has the highest positive influence on perceived value than other factors. Instead, the analysis for a group with low level of innovativeness showed that perceived playfulness was the highest positive factor to influence perceived value than others. This result of the group with high level of innovativeness explains that innovators and early adopters are able to cope with higher level of cost and risk, and they expect to develop more positive intentions toward higher performance through the use of an innovation. Also, hedonic behavior in the case of the group with low level of innovativeness aims to provide self-fulfilling value to the users, in contrast to utilitarian perspective, which aims to provide instrumental value to the users. However, with regard to perceived sacrifice, both groups in general showed negative impact on perceived value. Also, the group with high level of innovativeness had less overall negative impact on perceived value compared to the group with low level of innovativeness across all factors. In both group with high level of innovativeness and with low level of innovativeness, perceived cost has the highest negative influence on perceived value than other factors. Instead, the analysis for a group with high level of innovativeness showed that perceived technicality was the positive factor to influence perceived value than others. However, the analysis for a group with low level of innovativeness showed that perceived security risk was the second high negative factor to influence perceived value than others. Unlike previous studies, this study focuses on influencing factors on continuous intention to use of smart phone, rather than considering initial purchase and adoption of smart phone. First, perceived value, which was used to identify user's adoption behavior, has a mediating effect among perceived benefit, perceived sacrifice, and continuous intention to use smart phone. Second, perceived usefulness has the highest positive influence on perceived value, while perceived cost has significant negative influence on perceived value. Third, perceived value, like prior studies, has high level of positive influence on continuous intention to use smart phone. Fourth, in multi-group analysis by the degree of personal innovativeness of smart phone users, perceived usefulness, in a group with high level of innovativeness, has the highest positive influence on perceived value than other factors. Instead, perceived playfulness, in a group with low level of innovativeness, has the highest positive factor to influence perceived value than others. This result shows that early adopters intend to adopt smart phone as a tool to make their job useful, instead market followers intend to adopt smart phone as a tool to make their time enjoyable. In terms of marketing strategy for smart phone company, marketing managers should pay more attention to identify their customers' lifetime value by the phase of smart phone adoption, as well as to understand their behavior intention to accept the risk and uncertainty positively. The academic contribution of this study primarily is to employ the VAM (Value-based Adoption Model) as a conceptual foundation, compared to TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) used widely by previous studies. VAM is useful for understanding continuous intention to use smart phone in comparison with TAM as a new IT utility by individual adoption. Perceived value dominantly influences continuous intention to use smart phone. The results of this study justify our research model adoption on each antecedent of perceived value as a benefit and a sacrifice component. While TAM could be widely used in user acceptance of new technology, it has a limitation to explain the new IT adoption like smart phone, because of customer behavior intention to choose the value of the object. In terms of theoretical approach, this study provides theoretical contribution to the development, design, and marketing of smart phone. The practical contribution of this study is to suggest useful decision alternatives concerned to marketing strategy formulation for acquiring and retaining long-term customers related to smart phone business. Since potential customers are interested in both benefit and sacrifice when evaluating the value of smart phone, marketing managers in smart phone company has to put more effort into creating customer's value of low sacrifice and high benefit so that customers will continuously have higher adoption on smart phone. Especially, this study shows that innovators and early adopters with high level of innovativeness have higher adoption than market followers with low level of innovativeness, in terms of perceived usefulness and perceived cost. To formulate marketing strategy for smart phone diffusion, marketing managers have to pay more attention to identify not only their customers' benefit and sacrifice components but also their customers' lifetime value to adopt smart phone.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.46 no.8
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• pp.821-831
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• 2013

Recently image velocimetries, including particle image velocimetry (PIV) and surface image velocimetry (SIV), are often used to measure flow velocities in laboratories and rivers. The most difficult point in using image velocimetries may be how to determine the sizes of the interrogation areas and the measurement uncertainties. Especially, it is a little hard for unskilled users to use these instruments, since any standardized measuring techniques or measurement uncertainties are not well evaluated. Sometimes the user's skill and understanding on the instruments may make a wide gap between velocity measurement results. The present study aims to evaluate image velocimetry's uncertainties due to the changes in the sizes of interrogation areas and searching areas with the error analyses. For the purpose, we generated 12 series of artificial images with known velocity fields and various numbers and sizes of particles. The analysis results showed that the accuracy of velocity measurements of the image velocimetry was significantly affected by the change of the size of interrogation area. Generally speaking, the error was reduced as the size of interrogation areas became small. For the same sizes of interrogation areas, the larger particle sizes and the larger number of particles resulted smaller errors. Especially, the errors of the image velocimetries were more affected by the number of particles rather than the sizes of them. As the sizes of interrogation areas were increased, the differences between the maximum and the minimum errors seemed to be reduced. For the size of the interrogation area whose average errors were less than 5%, the differences between the maximum and the minimum errors seemed a little large. For the case, in other words, the uncertainty of the velocity measurements of the image velocimetry was large. In the viewpoint of the particle density, the size of the interrogation area was small for large particle density cases. For the cases of large number of particle and small particle density, however, the minimum size of interrogation area became smaller.