• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
• /
• v.7 no.5
• /
• pp.259-268
• /
• 2020

This study aims to provide empirical evidence on the causal relationship between bribery and firm innovation. To this end, we use a micro-dataset of small and medium firms in Vietnam surveyed in 2015. Given the binary nature of the dependent variable, a simple probit regression model is employed. However, as bribery variable is potentially endogenous, a simple probit regression may give biased estimates. We deal with the potential endogeneity by making use of the bivariate probit model. A property of the bivariate probit model is that it can produce efficient estimates of a typical probit model with endogenous binary explanatory variable. A Hausman-like likelihood ratio test is implemented following the estimation to test the existence of endogeneity. We find that bribery significantly undermines firm innovation. Also, firms run by household appear less innovative. The probability of innovation diminishes significantly if firm owners or managers have previous experience in firm products. As expected, larger firms seem to be more innovative. Exporters tend to be more innovative compared to non-exporters. Our findings provide support to the hypothesis that bribery is detrimental to firm innovation and, thus, innovation may be a mediating channel, through which, bribery impedes firm long-term performance.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
• /
• v.21 no.11
• /
• pp.1036-1041
• /
• 2008

According to previous report, aged sleeves of old transmission line showed several defaulted installation patterns, which was biased or corrosive-fractured of steel sleeve installed cases. These defects can cause serious accidents such as rapid increasing of sag or falling out of overhead conductor from sleeves. Consequently, the defects lead to the major power outage. Corrosion of steel sleeve is a typical defect by aging of sleeves. And it occupied almost 25 percent of investigated aged sleeves. This paper studied thermal properties and tension for ACSR conductor in case of fractured steel sleeve model by corrosion. The temperature distribution within overhead conductor has a specific gradient. Thermal properties of splice connectors(sleeve and clamp) showed normal behavior. However, mechanical properties were worse than normal sleeves. The detailed results were presented in the text.

• Journal of Photoscience
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.89-94
• /
• 2004

Motile cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 cells show photomovement with respect to the light stimulus. Under lateral irradiation, Synechocystis displays a phototactic gliding movement toward the light source by a twodimensional random biased walk. Under vertical irradiation, Synechocystis decreased the frequency of mean vectorial gliding speed dependent on the applied fluence rate, whereas the deviation distribution width of the speed increased. This strongly suggests the involvement of photokinesis. Evidence for the cyanobacterial photokinesis was discussed in the previous report (Choi et al., 1999. Photochem. Photobiol. 70, 95-102) demonstrating that the gross scalar speed of vertically irradiating cells increased by about 50% compared with that of dark-adapted cells. In the visible wavelength range, Synechocystis cells showed a maximal photokinetic activity at 420 nm and a second maximal activity at 680 nm. The threshold action spectrum for the photokinesis resembles the absorption spectrum of chlorophyll with major differences in the phototaxis action spectrum at 560 nm and 660 nm. We postulate that the cyanobacterial photokinesis is powered by the energy-generating chlorophyll pigments.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
• /
• v.6 no.2
• /
• pp.45-54
• /
• 2019

This study examines whether auditors restrain the analysts' opportunistic behavior as reviewing the companies' interim reports. Analysts' forecasts show a walkdown pattern in which their optimism has decreased as the earnings announcement date has approached. At the beginning of the year, there is a lack of high-quality benchmark information that enables information users to judge the accuracy of analyst's earnings forecasts. Thus, early in the year, analysts are highly inspired to disseminate optimistic forecasts in order to gain manager's favor. In this study, we examine adequate benchmarks prevent analysts from disclosing optimistically biased forecasts. We conjecture that auditors' efforts might mitigate analysts' walkdown pattern. To test this hypothesis, we use data from Korea, where it is mandatory to disclose auditor's review hours. We find that the analyst forecast's walkdown decreases with the ratio as well as the number of audit hours. It implies that an auditor's effort in reviewing interim financial information has a monitoring function that reduces analysts' opportunistic optimism at the beginning of the year. We conjecture that the tendency will be more pronounced when BIG4 auditors review the interim reports. Consistent with the prediction, BIG4 auditors' interim review effort is more effective in suppressing the analysts' walkdown.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.29 no.1
• /
• pp.153-166
• /
• 2022

Identifying fine cracks in steel bridge facilities is a challenging task of structural health monitoring (SHM). This study proposed an end-to-end crack image segmentation framework based on a one-step Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for pixel-level object recognition with high accuracy. To particularly address the challenges arising from small object detection in complex background, efforts were made in loss function selection aiming at sample imbalance and module modification in order to improve the generalization ability on complicated images. Specifically, loss functions were compared among alternatives including the Binary Cross Entropy (BCE), Focal, Tversky and Dice loss, with the last three specialized for biased sample distribution. Structural modifications with dilated convolution, Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) and Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) were also performed to form a new backbone termed CrackDet. Models of various loss functions and feature extraction modules were trained on crack images and tested on full-scale images collected on steel box girders. The CNN model incorporated the classic U-Net as its backbone, and Dice loss as its loss function achieved the highest mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 0.7571 on full-scale pictures. In contrast, the best performance on cropped crack images was achieved by integrating CrackDet with Dice loss at a mIoU of 0.7670.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.31 no.4
• /
• pp.383-392
• /
• 2023

Post-earthquake building condition assessment is crucial for subsequent rescue and remediation and can be automated by emerging computer vision and deep learning technologies. This study is based on an endeavour for the 2nd International Competition of Structural Health Monitoring (IC-SHM 2021). The task package includes five image segmentation objectives - defects (crack/spall/rebar exposure), structural component, and damage state. The structural component and damage state tasks are identified as the priority that can form actionable decisions. A multi-task Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed to conduct the two major tasks simultaneously. The rest 3 sub-tasks (spall/crack/rebar exposure) were incorporated as auxiliary tasks. By synchronously learning defect information (spall/crack/rebar exposure), the multi-task CNN model outperforms the counterpart single-task models in recognizing structural components and estimating damage states. Particularly, the pixel-level damage state estimation witnesses a mIoU (mean intersection over union) improvement from 0.5855 to 0.6374. For the defect detection tasks, rebar exposure is omitted due to the extremely biased sample distribution. The segmentations of crack and spall are automated by single-task U-Net but with extra efforts to resample the provided data. The segmentation of small objects (spall and crack) benefits from the resampling method, with a substantial IoU increment of nearly 10%.

• Mycobiology
• /
• v.50 no.5
• /
• pp.326-344
• /
• 2022

The fungal-like family Saprolegniaceae (Oomycota), also called "water mold," includes mostly aquatic saprophytes as well as notorious aquatic animal pathogens. Most studies on Saprolegniaceae have been biased toward pathogenic species that are important to aquaculture rather than saprotrophic species, despite the latter's crucial roles in carbon cycling of freshwater ecosystems. Few attempts have been made to study the diversity and ecology of Saprolegniaceae; thus, their ecological role is not well-known. During a survey of oomycetes between 2016 and 2021, we investigated the diversity and distribution of culturable Saprolegniaceae species in freshwater ecosystems of Korea. In the present study, members of Saprolegniaceae were isolated and identified at species level based on their cultural, morphological, and molecular phylogenetic analyses. Furthermore, substrate preference and seasonal dynamics for each were examined. Most of the species were previously reported as animal pathogens; however, in the present study, they were often isolated from other freshwater substrates, such as plant debris, algae, water, and soil sediment. The relative abundance of Saprolegniaceae was higher in the cold to cool season than that in the warm to hot season of Korea. This study enhances our understanding of the diversity and ecological attributes of Saprolegniaceae in freshwater ecosystems.

• Journal of the Korean Magnetics Society
• /
• v.15 no.5
• /
• pp.265-269
• /
• 2005

Exchange bias effect of a various layered thin films were studied by FMR measurment. In plane angular dependence of a resonance field distribution which measured by FMR was analysed as a combined effect of an unidirectional anisotropy and an uniaxial anisotropy. Exchange biased NiFe/IrMn, IrMn/NiFe/IrMn, and NiFe/IrMn/CoFe thin films showed larger unidirectional anisotropy field and uniaxial anisotropy field with compared to that of an unbiased NiFe single thin film. In case of NiFe/Cu/IrMn, the film with thick Cu layer exhibited a similar trend to the unbiased NiFe thin film. NiFe/IrMn/CoFe thin film showed two resonance field distribution due to different ferromagnetic layers. In additon to the resonance field, the line width was also analysed with related to exchange bias effect.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.39 no.6
• /
• pp.869-875
• /
• 2019

The service level of the roundabout is estimated through an analytic model using the geometrical characteristics and parameter values obtained from the observations. Although a lot of researches have been conducted on the rotational intersection through an analytical model, the case of variable combinations is enormous, suggesting the range and service level of appropriate traffic volume according to the case study or limited characteristics through simulation. Therefore, in this study, the roundabout analysis model was constructed by using Visual Basic Application to make variable adjustment more easily. The constructed model analyzes traffic conditions according to various situations and analyzes the characteristics of roundabouts. As the result of analysis, the more the ratio of left turn and U-turn, the more the traffic distribution of each approached road was biased to one side, the limit traffic volume of the roundabout decreased and congestion appeared quickly. In particular, the more uneven the distribution of traffic was, the less the Saturation traffic volume was affected by the turnover rate.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.97-107
• /
• 2001

In this paper, an illuminant estimation algorithm of a chromatic digital images proposed. The proposed illumination estimation method has two phases. First, the surface spectral reflectances are recovered. In this case, the surface spectral reflectances recovered are limited to the maximum highlight region (MHR) which is the most achromatic and highly bright region of an image after applying intermediate color constancy process using a modified gray world algorithm. Next, the surface reflectances of the maximum highlight region are estimated using the principal component analysis method along with a set of given Munsell samples. Second, the spectral distribution of reflected lights of MHR is selected from the spectral database. That is a color difference is compared between the reflected lights of the MHR and the spectral database that is the set of reflected lights built by the given Munsell samples and a set of illuminants. Then the closest colors from the spectral database are selected. Finally, the illuminant of an image can be calculated dividing the average spectral distributions of reflected lights of MHR by the average surface reflectances of the MHR. In order to evaluate the proposed algorithm, experiments with artificial and real captured color-biased scenes were performed and numerical comparison examined. The proposed method was effective in estimating the spectral of the given illuminant sunder various illuminants.