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Effects of Endocrine Disruptors on the Expression of Estrogen Receptors in Ovary and Uterus from Immature Rats (내분비계 장애물질이 미성숙한 흰쥐의 난소와 자궁에서의 에스트로겐 수용체 발현에 미치는 효과)

  • Lee, Kyeung-Yeup;Lee, Sung-Ho
    • Development and Reproduction
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    • v.10 no.4
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    • pp.255-261
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    • 2006
  • Although some phytoes rogens might have beneficiary rather than adverse effects, most endocrine disrupting compounds(EDCs) are considered to be harmful to human and wildlife health through interfering the endocrine system. Previously we found that prepubertal exposure to genistein(GS), a well-known isoflavone phytoestrogen, could activate the reproductive system of immature female rats resulting precocious puberty. Interestingly, di(2-ethyl hexyl) phthalate(DEHP) exposure brought inverse result, a delayed puberty, in the same experimental regimen. In this study, we examined whether prepubertal exposure to GS or DEHP affect the gene expressions of estrogen receptors($ER\;{\alpha}$ and $ER\;{\beta}$) and LH receptor(LHR) which represent the maturational status of ovary and uterus in immature rats. GS (100 mg/kg/day) was administered daily from postnatal day 25 to the day when the first vaginal opening(VO) was observed, and the animals were sacrificed on the next day(day 32). Similarly, DEHP(l00 mg/kg/day) was administered daily from postnatal day 25 through the day when the first V.O. in control group was observed, and the animals were sacrificed on the next day(day 36). To determine the transcriptional changes in the hormone receptors, total RNAs were extracted from ovary and uterus and were applied to semi-quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction(RT-PCR). In the GS group, the transcriptional activities of $ER\;{\alpha}$, $ER\;{\beta}$ and LHR in uterus and LHR in ovary were significantly increased when compared to those of control group. In the DEHP group, the transcriptional activities of all the hormone receptors measured were significantly lowered when compared to those of control group. These alteration of the reproductive hormone receptor expressions in ovary and uterus might be represent the phenotypic aspects(secondary sexual characteristics) such as tissue weights and reproductive hormone levels during perinatal period in immature female rats.

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Magical Realism of Korean Independent Animation (한국독립애니메이션 <무림일검의 사생활>에 나타난 마술적 사실주의)

  • Cho, Young-Eun;Seo, Chae-Hwan
    • Cartoon and Animation Studies
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    • s.39
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    • pp.59-83
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    • 2015
  • Magical realism, blooming and improving in Latin America, opened the new vision about reality and rationalism, coming out from the out-styled frame of past. While having common points with unrealistic literature, which uses fantastical components, magical realism is different from Surrealism and fantasy literature that is focusing on reality and realizing reality intensely. In the early stage of this research, magical realism was restricted by the characteristics of literature of Latin America, but the research of magical realism is expanding in planning Post-Modernism nowadays. Lately, the influence of magical realism is identified in literatures, arts, films, and animations over the world; according to the research, however, research about magical realism in animations was not done in Korea before. A Korean independent animation "A coffee vending machine and its sword" was evaluated positively in many international film festivals is valuable as the research of magical realism. Throughout this study, this animation "A coffee vending machine and its sword" was analyzed by its narrative and images. The analysis of narrative consists two parts. One is about the form of narrative and the other is about contents through the story. Analysis of Image is also divided into two parts: background image and character image. In this animation, the protagonist is narrating about the fantastic accidents in his life and his own feelings towards it. The narration leads audience to understand his situation and feelings in meta-fiction. On the surface, audience watches the love story of a normal girl and coffee vending machine in this artwork, but deep inside the animation, it is visible that the directors tried to make audiences think about the life of 880,000-won Generation in Korea. The background image was represented as real places in Seoul including the landmark of Seoul, making mimesis of reality in Korea. The character image has two conflicting aspects with reincarnated warrior, Jinyoungyoung and a coffee vending machine. It is a hybrid-character transmogrifying between two characters. Likewise, "A coffee vending machine and its sword" has the characteristics of Korean magical realism through form, content and image. Through analyzing the Korean independent animation "A coffee vending machine and its sword", this research tried to find a way of using factors of fantasy, of representing reality as a dramatic device and of using magical realism of Korean animation for bond of sympathy with audience.

Estimate on the Crustal Thickness from Using Multi-geophysical Data Sets and Its Comparison to Heat Flow Distribution of Korean Peninsula (다양한 지구물리 자료를 통해 얻은 한반도의 지각두께 예측과 지열류량과의 비교)

  • Choi, Soon-Young;Kim, Hyung-Rae;Kim, Chang-Hwan;Park, Chan-Hong;Suh, Man-Chul
    • Economic and Environmental Geology
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    • v.44 no.6
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    • pp.493-502
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    • 2011
  • We study the deep structure of Korean Peninsula by estimating Moho depth and crustal thickness from using land and oceanic topography and free-air gravity anomaly data. Based on Airy-Heiskanen isostatic hypothesis, the correlated components between the terrain gravity effects and free-air gravity anomalies by wavenumber correlation analysis(WCA) are extracted to estimate the gravity effects that will be resulted from isostatic compensation for the area. With the resulting compensated gravity estimates, Moho depth that is a subsurface between the crust and mantle is estimated by the inversion in an iterative method with the constraints of 20 seismic depth estimates by the receiver function analysis, to minimize the uncertainty of non-uniqueness. Consequently, the average of the resulting crustal thickness estimate of Korean Peninsula is 32.15 km and the standard deviation is 3.12 km. Moho depth of South Korea estimated from this study is compared with the ones from the previous studies, showing they are approximately consistent. And the aspects of Moho undulation from the respective study are in common deep along Taebaek Mountains and Sobaek Mountains and low depth in Gyeongsang Basin relatively. Also, it is discussed that the terrain decorrelated free-air gravity anomalies inferring from the intracrustal characteristics of the crust are compared to the heat flow distributions of South Korea. The low-frequency components of terrain decorrelated Free-air gravity anomalies are highly correlated with the heat flow data, especially in the area of Gyeongsang basin where high heat flow causes to decrease the density of the rocks in the lower crust resulting in lowering the Moho depth by compensation. This result confirms that the high heat sources in this area coming from the upper mantle by Kim et al. (2008).

A Study on Developing the List of Actual Condition Research to Improve the Facilities for the handicapped, aged men, pregnant women and nursing mother - a focus on public building - (장애인ㆍ노인ㆍ임산부등의 편의 증진시설 실태조사 리스트 개발연구 -공공건물을 중심으로)

  • 유석종;양우창;유상완;온순기
    • Archives of design research
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.77-88
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    • 2004
  • It was 1988 when people pay attention to an importance of the facilities for the handicapped, with Seoul Paralympics. In early 1990s, regular efforts were made to improve a physical environment for the handicapped, which results in reforming the Welfare Law for the Handicapped all over the surface. However, keeping pace with the expansion of the western universal design concept, it is required to evaluate a new concept in which way the facilities for the handicapped must be installed. That is, any physical environment, which regards the handicapped as an independent subject, tend to isolate them from normal people rather than satisfy their needs. making the handicapped feel more discriminated. All the facilities for the handicapped has to reflect a general idea that the facilities are opened for all the people including the handicapped. Being recently reformed and enacted in order to reflect this essential point, 'the raw of contributing to the convenience of the handicapped, aged men, pregnant women and nursing mother(1998)' even covers the aged men, pregnant women and nursing mother, not to mention of the handicapped. In addition, the law states clearly that all the handicapped can share all the facilities with the normal people, inducing the handicapped to more actively participate in society. Consequently, the handicapped are acquiring their rights by directly demanding for correction of varied discrimination. Though even more facilities have been provided, most of them are deficient in the quality, setting limits to the handicapped person's living field as well as social activities. Especially, most public buildings in our country rarely provide the adequate facilities for the handicapped, aged men, pregnant women and nursing mother. Therefore, this study is focused on developing the list of actual condition research that can effectively detect the inadequacy of facilities in public buildings. Then it will find the aspects to be improved in a systematic and scientific way to propose a practical method to improve the facilities in public buildings.

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Change of Perception and New Methodology of Korean Cartoon Exhibition (한국만화전시의 인식변화와 새로운 방법론)

  • Kim, Jeung-Yeun
    • Cartoon and Animation Studies
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    • s.39
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    • pp.413-450
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    • 2015
  • Although cartoons have been recognized for their great potential and value, they have failed to bloom in Korea. This is because wrong perception and irregular distribution of cartoons have been repeated for the last several years. Presently, however, cartoons are escaping from chronic problems they have had for long and welcoming splendid chances now. From the mid- and late-1990's, there have been large-scale events having cartoons as their theme, and social recognition on cartoons is becoming more and more positive. Their contents are diversified, readers are increased, and they are escaping from stereotypes through harmony with other media. Lately, either large or small exhibitions for cartoons are being planned, and Korean cartoons are going overseas and producing exhibitions there. Particularly, visitors' appreciative eye is getting keener, and they begin to see them not as a genre underestimated as low culture like in the past but as a kind of art on which independent research is being actively conducted. One of the biggest factors that have allowed cartoons to be positioned as visual art is the form of exhibitions that combine them with other genres artistically. Especially the cartoon exhibitions being held these days are aggressively introducing various elements of the cartoon genre through the medium of exhibitions not just as a mere tool of seeing to help understand cartoon writers or works. The genre of cartoons is now regarded as an active subject that can reflect its own unique essence in this rapidly changing cultural environment and extend the range of it itself. The latest cartoon exhibitions are characterized by trans-genre and complex aspects in terms of their direction or organization according to the contents, space, or theme. This trend of cartoon exhibitions implies that they are subdividing, analyzing, and planning various factors not in a horizontal way that was centered around image as in the past. It means that cartoon exhibitions are evolving as a form of mobilizing, combining, and reproducing various methods. Although a number of cartoon exhibitions are being held with a variety of themes, there is still lack of research on cartoon exhibitions concerning their forms and contents. Therefore, this researcher sees cartoon exhibitions as a factor that allows cartoons to escape from negative recognition and examines various cartoon exhibitions, from Seoul International Cartoon Animation Festival to the ones that are recently held, to figure out the meaning of Korean cartoon exhibitions. Furthermore, this researcher will find out the factors of planning and popularity in international exhibitions or personal cartoon exhibitions being presently held and figure out new directions and potentials for Korean cartoon exhibitions based on that. To meet the needs of visitors whose expectations have become even higher, it is needed to try not just previous methods but experimental and original planning as well constantly. To realize that, it is necessary to keep providing a field of opportunity where cartoon works, cartoon writers, and visitors can communicate as in an exhibition. It is expected that this study will trigger research on cartoon exhibitions to be performed multilaterally and produce new discourse on cartoon exhibitions afterwards.

Gonadal Development and Reproductive Cycle of the Sand Snail, Umbonium thomasi (서해비단고둥 (Umbonium thomasi)의 생식소 발달과 생식주기)

  • Lee Ju Ha
    • Korean Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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    • v.35 no.6
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    • pp.702-708
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    • 2002
  • Although Umboniunm thomasi is one of marine mollusc (Archaeogastropoda: Trochidae) inhabiting the sands in the intertidal zone of the west coast of Korea, aspects of its reproductive biology are still not too well known. Reproductive cycle, gametogenesis, and first sexual maturity of U. thomasi collected at the west coast of Buan-gun, Jeollabuk-do, Korea were investigated monthly from January to December 1999. U. thomasi was dioecious, and an oviparous. The gonad was placed in the rear of the flesh part in the spiral shell. The external colors of the ripe ovary and testis appeared to be green and milk-white or yellowish white, respectively. Meat weigh rate peaked in July ($37.5\%$). And then the value sharply decreased in September ($28.3\%$), thereafter, gradually increased in November ($31.7\%$). Fully ripe oocytes were approximately 100$\~$110 $/mu$m in diameter, and their cytoplasm contained a great number of yolk Branules. Based on the monthly changes of the Bonadal development, gametogenesis, and meat weight rate, the reproductive cycle of U. thomasi could be devided into five successive stages: early active (November to April), late active (February to May), ripe (April to August), spawning (July to October), and recovery (September to February). Gonadal development and spawning were closely related to the seawater temperature, the main spawning occurred in September when the temperature reached above 24.2$^{\circ}C$. Individuals of 4.4 mm and less in shell height could not take part in reproduction in both sexes. Percentages of first sexual maturity of female and male shells ranging from 5.5 to 6.4 mm were $55.0\%$ and $61.9\%$, respectively, and $100\%$ of those over 7.5 mm in shell heights in both sexes participated in the reproduction.

An Analysis of IT Trends Using Tweet Data (트윗 데이터를 활용한 IT 트렌드 분석)

  • Yi, Jin Baek;Lee, Choong Kwon;Cha, Kyung Jin
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.21 no.1
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    • pp.143-159
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    • 2015
  • Predicting IT trends has been a long and important subject for information systems research. IT trend prediction makes it possible to acknowledge emerging eras of innovation and allocate budgets to prepare against rapidly changing technological trends. Towards the end of each year, various domestic and global organizations predict and announce IT trends for the following year. For example, Gartner Predicts 10 top IT trend during the next year, and these predictions affect IT and industry leaders and organization's basic assumptions about technology and the future of IT, but the accuracy of these reports are difficult to verify. Social media data can be useful tool to verify the accuracy. As social media services have gained in popularity, it is used in a variety of ways, from posting about personal daily life to keeping up to date with news and trends. In the recent years, rates of social media activity in Korea have reached unprecedented levels. Hundreds of millions of users now participate in online social networks and communicate with colleague and friends their opinions and thoughts. In particular, Twitter is currently the major micro blog service, it has an important function named 'tweets' which is to report their current thoughts and actions, comments on news and engage in discussions. For an analysis on IT trends, we chose Tweet data because not only it produces massive unstructured textual data in real time but also it serves as an influential channel for opinion leading on technology. Previous studies found that the tweet data provides useful information and detects the trend of society effectively, these studies also identifies that Twitter can track the issue faster than the other media, newspapers. Therefore, this study investigates how frequently the predicted IT trends for the following year announced by public organizations are mentioned on social network services like Twitter. IT trend predictions for 2013, announced near the end of 2012 from two domestic organizations, the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) and the National Information Society Agency (NIA), were used as a basis for this research. The present study analyzes the Twitter data generated from Seoul (Korea) compared with the predictions of the two organizations to analyze the differences. Thus, Twitter data analysis requires various natural language processing techniques, including the removal of stop words, and noun extraction for processing various unrefined forms of unstructured data. To overcome these challenges, we used SAS IRS (Information Retrieval Studio) developed by SAS to capture the trend in real-time processing big stream datasets of Twitter. The system offers a framework for crawling, normalizing, analyzing, indexing and searching tweet data. As a result, we have crawled the entire Twitter sphere in Seoul area and obtained 21,589 tweets in 2013 to review how frequently the IT trend topics announced by the two organizations were mentioned by the people in Seoul. The results shows that most IT trend predicted by NIPA and NIA were all frequently mentioned in Twitter except some topics such as 'new types of security threat', 'green IT', 'next generation semiconductor' since these topics non generalized compound words so they can be mentioned in Twitter with other words. To answer whether the IT trend tweets from Korea is related to the following year's IT trends in real world, we compared Twitter's trending topics with those in Nara Market, Korea's online e-Procurement system which is a nationwide web-based procurement system, dealing with whole procurement process of all public organizations in Korea. The correlation analysis show that Tweet frequencies on IT trending topics predicted by NIPA and NIA are significantly correlated with frequencies on IT topics mentioned in project announcements by Nara market in 2012 and 2013. The main contribution of our research can be found in the following aspects: i) the IT topic predictions announced by NIPA and NIA can provide an effective guideline to IT professionals and researchers in Korea who are looking for verified IT topic trends in the following topic, ii) researchers can use Twitter to get some useful ideas to detect and predict dynamic trends of technological and social issues.

Improving Performance of Recommendation Systems Using Topic Modeling (사용자 관심 이슈 분석을 통한 추천시스템 성능 향상 방안)

  • Choi, Seongi;Hyun, Yoonjin;Kim, Namgyu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.21 no.3
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    • pp.101-116
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    • 2015
  • Recently, due to the development of smart devices and social media, vast amounts of information with the various forms were accumulated. Particularly, considerable research efforts are being directed towards analyzing unstructured big data to resolve various social problems. Accordingly, focus of data-driven decision-making is being moved from structured data analysis to unstructured one. Also, in the field of recommendation system, which is the typical area of data-driven decision-making, the need of using unstructured data has been steadily increased to improve system performance. Approaches to improve the performance of recommendation systems can be found in two aspects- improving algorithms and acquiring useful data with high quality. Traditionally, most efforts to improve the performance of recommendation system were made by the former approach, while the latter approach has not attracted much attention relatively. In this sense, efforts to utilize unstructured data from variable sources are very timely and necessary. Particularly, as the interests of users are directly connected with their needs, identifying the interests of the user through unstructured big data analysis can be a crew for improving performance of recommendation systems. In this sense, this study proposes the methodology of improving recommendation system by measuring interests of the user. Specially, this study proposes the method to quantify interests of the user by analyzing user's internet usage patterns, and to predict user's repurchase based upon the discovered preferences. There are two important modules in this study. The first module predicts repurchase probability of each category through analyzing users' purchase history. We include the first module to our research scope for comparing the accuracy of traditional purchase-based prediction model to our new model presented in the second module. This procedure extracts purchase history of users. The core part of our methodology is in the second module. This module extracts users' interests by analyzing news articles the users have read. The second module constructs a correspondence matrix between topics and news articles by performing topic modeling on real world news articles. And then, the module analyzes users' news access patterns and then constructs a correspondence matrix between articles and users. After that, by merging the results of the previous processes in the second module, we can obtain a correspondence matrix between users and topics. This matrix describes users' interests in a structured manner. Finally, by using the matrix, the second module builds a model for predicting repurchase probability of each category. In this paper, we also provide experimental results of our performance evaluation. The outline of data used our experiments is as follows. We acquired web transaction data of 5,000 panels from a company that is specialized to analyzing ranks of internet sites. At first we extracted 15,000 URLs of news articles published from July 2012 to June 2013 from the original data and we crawled main contents of the news articles. After that we selected 2,615 users who have read at least one of the extracted news articles. Among the 2,615 users, we discovered that the number of target users who purchase at least one items from our target shopping mall 'G' is 359. In the experiments, we analyzed purchase history and news access records of the 359 internet users. From the performance evaluation, we found that our prediction model using both users' interests and purchase history outperforms a prediction model using only users' purchase history from a view point of misclassification ratio. In detail, our model outperformed the traditional one in appliance, beauty, computer, culture, digital, fashion, and sports categories when artificial neural network based models were used. Similarly, our model outperformed the traditional one in beauty, computer, digital, fashion, food, and furniture categories when decision tree based models were used although the improvement is very small.

Attention to the Internet: The Impact of Active Information Search on Investment Decisions (인터넷 주의효과: 능동적 정보 검색이 투자 결정에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구)

  • Chang, Young Bong;Kwon, YoungOk;Cho, Wooje
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.21 no.3
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    • pp.117-129
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    • 2015
  • As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, a large volume of information is posted on the Internet with exponential growth every day. Accordingly, it is not unusual that investors in stock markets gather and compile firm-specific or market-wide information through online searches. Importantly, it becomes easier for investors to acquire value-relevant information for their investment decision with the help of powerful search tools on the Internet. Our study examines whether or not the Internet helps investors assess a firm's value better by using firm-level data over long periods spanning from January 2004 to December 2013. To this end, we construct weekly-based search volume for information technology (IT) services firms on the Internet. We limit our focus to IT firms since they are often equipped with intangible assets and relatively less recognized to the public which makes them hard-to measure. To obtain the information on those firms, investors are more likely to consult the Internet and use the information to appreciate the firms more accurately and eventually improve their investment decisions. Prior studies have shown that changes in search volumes can reflect the various aspects of the complex human behaviors and forecast near-term values of economic indicators, including automobile sales, unemployment claims, and etc. Moreover, search volume of firm names or stock ticker symbols has been used as a direct proxy of individual investors' attention in financial markets since, different from indirect measures such as turnover and extreme returns, they can reveal and quantify the interest of investors in an objective way. Following this line of research, this study aims to gauge whether the information retrieved from the Internet is value relevant in assessing a firm. We also use search volume for analysis but, distinguished from prior studies, explore its impact on return comovements with market returns. Given that a firm's returns tend to comove with market returns excessively when investors are less informed about the firm, we empirically test the value of information by examining the association between Internet searches and the extent to which a firm's returns comove. Our results show that Internet searches are negatively associated with return comovements as expected. When sample is split by the size of firms, the impact of Internet searches on return comovements is shown to be greater for large firms than small ones. Interestingly, we find a greater impact of Internet searches on return comovements for years from 2009 to 2013 than earlier years possibly due to more aggressive and informative exploit of Internet searches in obtaining financial information. We also complement our analyses by examining the association between return volatility and Internet search volumes. If Internet searches capture investors' attention associated with a change in firm-specific fundamentals such as new product releases, stock splits and so on, a firm's return volatility is likely to increase while search results can provide value-relevant information to investors. Our results suggest that in general, an increase in the volume of Internet searches is not positively associated with return volatility. However, we find a positive association between Internet searches and return volatility when the sample is limited to larger firms. A stronger result from larger firms implies that investors still pay less attention to the information obtained from Internet searches for small firms while the information is value relevant in assessing stock values. However, we do find any systematic differences in the magnitude of Internet searches impact on return volatility by time periods. Taken together, our results shed new light on the value of information searched from the Internet in assessing stock values. Given the informational role of the Internet in stock markets, we believe the results would guide investors to exploit Internet search tools to be better informed, as a result improving their investment decisions.

Critical Analysis about Environmental Ethics and Moral Position of Landscape Architecture - Focusing on Eugen C. Hargrove's 'Weak Anthropocentrism' - (조경의 환경윤리에 대한 비판적 해석과 도덕적 위치 - 유진 하그로브의 '약한 인간중심주의'를 중심으로 -)

  • Oh, Chang-Song
    • Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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    • v.43 no.2
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    • pp.105-113
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    • 2015
  • The theory of landscape architecture applies environmental ethics in order to secure an ecological status. However, environmental ethics that focus on nature conservation excludes landscape architecture as artifacts. In the process, it is hard to identify what landscape architecture insists on as the middle position between humans and nature. Rather, landscape architecture pretends to be an 'agent of nature' and pushes the traditional moral values 'for people.' Therefore, the purpose of this study is to reestablish the anthropocentrism moral position of landscape architecture through critical analysis. Hargrove's weak anthropocentrism' of several environmental ethics branches accepts natural aesthetics(such as landscape architecture) as an ethical virtue. But environmental ethics makes landscape architecture a critical target. For that reason, this study looked into critical contents and objects that in a position to moral, aesthetic and landscape architecture. Critical details are as follows: First, nature is an absolute as an aesthetic and moral value, but landscape architecture is an imitation and takes a relaxed attitude about nature. Second, nature is full of aesthetic substance because it is self-creative, but landscape architecture is designed nature covered human flaws through imagination. Third, environmental management granting techniques in nature generate a moral nihilism. As an argument, environmental ethics overlooked the moral practices of landscape architecture beyond nature another moral aspect of creation and the imagination-and moral aspects of environmental management as 'care' because they rule out 'moral autonomy' and simplify what is considered 'good.' As a result, conservation cannot be the only virtue why the problem of nature in reality cannot be separated from human life. The moral position of landscape architecture based on a 'good life' is more appropriate under anthropocentrism than as a middle position.