• Journal of Dental Anesthesia and Pain Medicine
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.323-338
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• 2022

Burning mouth syndrome (BMS) is a chronic oral disorder of unknown etiology which presents therapeutic challenges. Alpha-lipoic acid (ALA) has been studied as a potential treatment for BMS. The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to evaluate the effectiveness of ALA compared to that of placebo or other interventions in individuals with BMS. Randomized controlled trials (RCT) using ALA to treat BMS were identified from MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, and Web of Science up to February 3, 2021. The assessment of the risk of bias in the included studies was based on the Cochrane guidelines. The primary outcome evaluated was the visual analog scale (VAS) pain intensity. ALA was compared with placebo, clonazepam, gabapentin, pregabalin, ALA plus gabapentin, capsaicin, Biotène^®, and laser therapy. Altogether, 137 records were scanned for inclusion/exclusion, and nine RCTs (two unclear and seven at high risk of bias) were included in the qualitative and quantitative analyses, with a total of 594 patients with BMS included in this review. All studies reported an improvement in VAS pain scores ranging from -0.72 to -2.77. Meta-analysis results showed a non-significant reduction in pain intensity for ALA (P = 0.616) compared to that of placebo on a VAS of 0-10. Patients taking ALA were 1.923 times more likely to show an improvement in self-reported BMS symptoms (P = 0.031) than those in the placebo group. Clonazepam and pregabalin showed a significant VAS pain reduction of 4.08 and 4.68 (P < 0.001), respectively, compared to that with ALA. Although ALA intervention provided a non-significant improvement in the pain score and was more likely to produce a reduction in BMS symptoms, the evidence was of low quality. Further research is needed to establish clear guidelines for the use of ALA for BMS treatment.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.667-674
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• 2022

In this study, the correlation between the damage type and operating conditions of the sleepers was analyzed based on the design data and visual inspection results for the concrete sleepers of the sleeper floating track (STEDEF) that have been in operation for more than 20 years. It appeared in the form of cracks, breakages, and breaks in the concrete at the center and tie bar contact and buried areas. As a result of the numerical analysis, it was analyzed that the change in the left and right spring stiffness of the sleeper resilience pad increases the maximum stress, tensile stress, compressive stress, and displacement of the concrete sleeper, and stress concentration in the concrete at the tie bar contact area. It was proved analytically that the sleeper resilience pad can affect the damage of the concrete sleeper. Therefore, damage of concrete sleepers in the sleeper floating track in urban transit could be caused by changes in spring stiffness of sleeper resilience pads. It was reviewed that preventive maintenance such as improvement and timely replacement of sleeper resilience pads was necessary.

• The Korean Journal of Coaching Psychology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.93-114
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there was a difference between men and women in conceptualizing a calling in childrearing through social network analysis. The results are as follows. IAs a result of the study, it was found that mothers showed significantly larger networks and higher density than fathers did, indicating that mothers, more than fathers do, experience parenting and child-rearing based more on a concept of calling in childrearing. Parents directly linked responsibility, children's growth, direction, commitment, and parental character to a calling in childrearing. In addition, mothers also linked a sense of identity and parental growth to it. In the case of fathers, only four concepts were directly connected with a calling in childrearing. This shows that mothers, in comparison to fathers, connect essential self-concepts, such as identity as a parent and themes of growth, to a calling in childrearing. In centrality, similar concepts also were evaluated as important. The common parental closeness centrality is composed of responsibility, child growth, direction, and belief starting from the center. In the case of fathers, child growth, responsibility, and belief were evaluated in order, and in the case of mothers, responsibility, parental growth, and identity were evaluated as relatively important concepts.

• Women's Studies Review
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.73-108
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• 2009

In the post-industrial society, concerns about the body have devoted to extend the concept of body from its physical level to the spiritual and corporeal level. Now body is not only an instrument which expresses one's personal character, but also an abstract concept which shows one's identity. Through this tendency, body image as a representation becomes notable as much as physical body itself. This tendency has been exaggerated especially for women and the socio-cultural common notion is forcing them to internalize it by presenting several stereotypes of body image. The concept of body image, a rising academic subject becoming a socio-cultural matter of interest, bears an epistemological base about spirit, body, and individual/social character. As the discussion about body develops in the field of women's studies, deepened discussions about body image are in progress. In this article interaction between the making of stereotypes of the female body in the socio-cultural circumstance and the process of internalization of these stereotypes is analyzed. For the analysis, the hypothesis was established that this interaction constructs the making process of body image. The analyzed materials are images and texts for advertisements, and other materials for public relations which are posted on the homepage of body-line consulting company M. The results of this analysis are to summarize as follows; the stereotypes of the female body image in Korea are very similar to those of westerners, and male gaze plays a big role in the construction of female body image through the internationalization of the gaze by women. According to these results, it is necessary to consider the effort that women should strive to produce and to develop healthy female body images.

• Journal of the Korean Applied Science and Technology
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.355-362
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• 2023

Characters in visual media have different symbolic meanings depending on their orientations or roles. 『山海經』 is a fantasy novel written around the 3rd or 4th century BC., and the characters in the classical Chinese novel have various meanings and symbols, such as disasters, wealth, diseases, etc., according to their types. The symbolism of animals that the Chinese think of, the symbolism of characters in fantasy novels, and the morphological analysis are necessary elements in the development of characters and the film industry in China. This study analyzed the images of characters as follows, focusing on classical Chinese fantasy novels 『山海经』, 『山海经圖象全體』, and 『山海經圖』 and the fantasy novels of the Qing Dynasty 『山海经存』 and 『山海经圖錄』. First, the shapes of characters are slightly different in illustration images. Second, Among 453 characters in 山海經, there are a total of 8 characters related to flood damage, such as floods, rainy season, etc.: 'Jangwoo', 'Hapyu', 'Hwasa', 'Yeongryeong', 'Buje', 'Seungwoo', 'Manman', and 'Naeo' Third, it can be seen that the characters are creative ones that are combined with objects and animals and plants, apart from the symbolic meanings of real animals and characters in 山海經. It is believed that the continuous analysis of the characters in 山海經 will enable them to be widely used in the film industry.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.102-111
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• 2023

As one of the image symbols, the second frame has rich symbolic metaphor. In previous studies, second frames are mostly presented in physical forms such as doors, windows, but in <The Power of the Dog>, there are various forms of second frames, providing more types for the study of second frames. Panofsky's Iconology has put forward a rigorous research method on how to interpret the meaning of image symbols in the picture. This study aims to use Panofsky's Iconology to analyze the second frame in <the Power of the dog>. The purpose is to expand the methodology of film image research and break through the problem that the Iconology analysis of film image stays in narrative analysis (iconographical analysis). It can be seen from the results of this study that the second frame has different visual presentation according to the requirements of narrative. In the narrative of the film, it symbolizes the depressed tone of the film and the stressful relationship between different characters. What director Campion wants to show through the second frame is that in the film industry where the problem of women is getting better, the motif of feminist film creation has changed from the expression of female appeals in binary opposition to the expression of the appeals of diverse groups in "decentralization."

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.6D
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• pp.761-770
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• 2009

The energy efficiency and environment-friendly aspect of the railway system would be superior to other on-land ransportation systems. In a preliminary feasibility study stage and selection of optimal railway route, the energy efficiency and problems related to environment are usually considered. For the selection of optimal railway route, geographical features and facility of management are generally considered. Environment effect factors for the selection of environment-friendly railway router are focused and studied in this paper. In this study, various analysis of opinion of specialists (railway, environment, transport, urban planning, survey) and the guideline for construction of environment-friendly railway were accomplished. From these results of various analysis, 7 major categories (topography/geology, flora and fauna, Nature Property, air quality, water quality, noise/vibration, visual impact/cultural assets) were extracted. To select environment friendly railway route, many alternatives should be compared optimal route must be selected by a comprehensive assessment considering these 7 categories. To solve this problem, the selected method was AHP which simplifies the complex problems utilizing hierarchy, quantifying qualitative problems through 1:1 comparison, and extracting objective conclusions by maintaining consistency. As a result, a GUIbased program was developed which provides basic values of weighted parameters of each category defined by specialists, and a quantification of detailed assessment guidelines to ensures consistency.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.4D
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• pp.553-557
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• 2006

The traffic flow of a vehicle is an essential existence in a city, and is a part of a living aiming at the city citizen's activity. Hereafter, this flow will increase gradually, thus even a proper countermeasure against this will be required to arrange for. However, it will need to present a proper countermeasure against a threat of the roads surrounding a residential area where is a living space of the city citizen, being occurred according to this. It aims to maximize the effect of Traffic Calming technique through maintaining the special environment and facilities being possessed only by our country's living roads. This study did carry out and consider the analysis of a primary factor through a field survey, an experiment and SPSS, in relation to an issue of which influence of factors as for the domestic traffic environment different from a foreign country has on introducing and applying the technique of Traffic Calming to the domestic nation. As the results through the evaluation experiment and the primary-factor analysis, it could be seen being influenced largely by six factors such as a pedestrian's safety facilities which influence on the traffic environment in case of applying Traffic Calming, a mechanical factor to lower speed, a factor as to a street scene, a factor as to a pedestrian's passing condition given, a factor of a pedestrian's convenience and environment, and a visual factor of a vehicle's deceleration.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.498-511
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• 2023

Objective: To evaluate the diagnostic performance of chest computed tomography (CT)-based qualitative and radiomics models for predicting residual axillary nodal metastasis after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) for patients with clinically node-positive breast cancer. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study included 226 women (mean age, 51.4 years) with clinically node-positive breast cancer treated with NAC followed by surgery between January 2015 and July 2021. Patients were randomly divided into the training and test sets (4:1 ratio). The following predictive models were built: a qualitative CT feature model using logistic regression based on qualitative imaging features of axillary nodes from the pooled data obtained using the visual interpretations of three radiologists; three radiomics models using radiomics features from three (intranodal, perinodal, and combined) different regions of interest (ROIs) delineated on pre-NAC CT and post-NAC CT using a gradient-boosting classifier; and fusion models integrating clinicopathologic factors with the qualitative CT feature model (referred to as clinical-qualitative CT feature models) or with the combined ROI radiomics model (referred to as clinical-radiomics models). The area under the curve (AUC) was used to assess and compare the model performance. Results: Clinical N stage, biological subtype, and primary tumor response indicated by imaging were associated with residual nodal metastasis during the multivariable analysis (all P < 0.05). The AUCs of the qualitative CT feature model and radiomics models (intranodal, perinodal, and combined ROI models) according to post-NAC CT were 0.642, 0.812, 0.762, and 0.832, respectively. The AUCs of the clinical-qualitative CT feature model and clinical-radiomics model according to post-NAC CT were 0.740 and 0.866, respectively. Conclusion: CT-based predictive models showed good diagnostic performance for predicting residual nodal metastasis after NAC. Quantitative radiomics analysis may provide a higher level of performance than qualitative CT features models. Larger multicenter studies should be conducted to confirm their performance.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.107-120
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• 2014

This study proposes a novel recommender system using the structural hole analysis to reflect qualitative and emotional information in recommendation process. Although collaborative filtering (CF) is known as the most popular recommendation algorithm, it has some limitations including scalability and sparsity problems. The scalability problem arises when the volume of users and items become quite large. It means that CF cannot scale up due to large computation time for finding neighbors from the user-item matrix as the number of users and items increases in real-world e-commerce sites. Sparsity is a common problem of most recommender systems due to the fact that users generally evaluate only a small portion of the whole items. In addition, the cold-start problem is the special case of the sparsity problem when users or items newly added to the system with no ratings at all. When the user's preference evaluation data is sparse, two users or items are unlikely to have common ratings, and finally, CF will predict ratings using a very limited number of similar users. Moreover, it may produces biased recommendations because similarity weights may be estimated using only a small portion of rating data. In this study, we suggest a novel limitation of the conventional CF. The limitation is that CF does not consider qualitative and emotional information about users in the recommendation process because it only utilizes user's preference scores of the user-item matrix. To address this novel limitation, this study proposes cluster-indexing CF model with the structural hole analysis for recommendations. In general, the structural hole means a location which connects two separate actors without any redundant connections in the network. The actor who occupies the structural hole can easily access to non-redundant, various and fresh information. Therefore, the actor who occupies the structural hole may be a important person in the focal network and he or she may be the representative person in the focal subgroup in the network. Thus, his or her characteristics may represent the general characteristics of the users in the focal subgroup. In this sense, we can distinguish friends and strangers of the focal user utilizing the structural hole analysis. This study uses the structural hole analysis to select structural holes in subgroups as an initial seeds for a cluster analysis. First, we gather data about users' preference ratings for items and their social network information. For gathering research data, we develop a data collection system. Then, we perform structural hole analysis and find structural holes of social network. Next, we use these structural holes as cluster centroids for the clustering algorithm. Finally, this study makes recommendations using CF within user's cluster, and compare the recommendation performances of comparative models. For implementing experiments of the proposed model, we composite the experimental results from two experiments. The first experiment is the structural hole analysis. For the first one, this study employs a software package for the analysis of social network data - UCINET version 6. The second one is for performing modified clustering, and CF using the result of the cluster analysis. We develop an experimental system using VBA (Visual Basic for Application) of Microsoft Excel 2007 for the second one. This study designs to analyzing clustering based on a novel similarity measure - Pearson correlation between user preference rating vectors for the modified clustering experiment. In addition, this study uses 'all-but-one' approach for the CF experiment. In order to validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we apply three comparative types of CF models to the same dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the other comparative models. In especial, the proposed model significantly performs better than two comparative modes with the cluster analysis from the statistical significance test. However, the difference between the proposed model and the naive model does not have statistical significance.