• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.44 no.1
• /
• pp.75-83
• /
• 2024

This study examined the causes and remedies of bid-rigging in the construction industry through a survey of procurement practitioners. The study identified potential problems from the business, construction, and bidding environments, and proposed improvements to the procurement and bidding systems to address these problems. The study found that transparency, fairness, and diversity are important factors in reducing bid-rigging. These factors can be achieved through a variety of measures, such as expanding bidding systems, strengthening fairness standards, and increasing the diversity of participating companies. The study also found that unfair subcontracting regulations are a problem that needs to be addressed. There were differences in the perceptions of the causes of bid-rigging between the general and specialized construction groups. However, there was no difference in the perceptions of improvements to the procurement system between the two groups. This suggests that a consistent solution to bid-rigging can be found. The study's findings are expected to contribute to the resolution and prevention of bid-rigging in the construction industry.

• Journal of the Society of Disaster Information
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.169-176
• /
• 2024

Purpose: In this paper, an experimental study was conducted to analyze the difference in shear strength caused by the problem of excluding coarse particles due to the size of the test specimen in the direct shear test. Method: A large-scale direct shear test was conducted on three weathered soils containing coarse aggregates with a maximum diameter of 50mm. In addition, a small-scale direct shear test was performed using a sample with a maximum diameter of 5 mm, excluding coarse aggregates. Result: In the case of the small-scale direct shear test, compared to the results of the large-scale direct shear test containing large particles, the internal friction angle was about 2.3% smaller, and there was no significant difference. In terms of cohesion, compared to the large-scale direct shear test, the small-scale direct shear test derived about 80.3% smaller value, showing a relatively large difference. Conclusion: In the large-scale direct shear test, it was analyzed that the coarse particles had a greater impact on the cohesion than the internal friction angle. Therefore, granite weathered clay containing coarse particles is judged to have the same shear strength as the cohesive force that is not affected by vertical stress. In this study, it was analyzed that the small-scale direct shear test, which excludes the coarse particles that are commonly used, provides results on the safety side by excluding the effect of coarse particles.

• Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
• /
• v.35
• /
• pp.39.1-39.14
• /
• 2023

Background: Diseases affecting the lungs and airways contribute significantly to the global burden of disease. The problem in low- and middle-income countries appears to be exacerbated by a shift in global manufacturing base to these countries and inadequate enforcement of environmental and safety standards. In Ghana, the potential adverse effects on respiratory function associated with occupational wood dust exposure have not been thoroughly investigated. Methods: Sixty-four male sawmill workers and 64 non-woodworkers participated in this study. The concentration of wood dust exposure, prevalence and likelihood of association of respiratory symptoms with wood dust exposure and changes in pulmonary function test (PFT) parameters in association with wood dust exposure were determined from dust concentration measurements, symptoms questionnaire and lung function test parameters. Results: Sawmill workers were exposed to inhalable dust concentration of 3.09 ± 0.04 mg/m³ but did not use respirators and engaged in personal grooming habits that are known to increase dust inhalation. The sawmill operators also showed higher prevalence and likelihoods of association with respiratory symptoms, a significant cross-shift decline in some PFT parameters and a shift towards a restrictive pattern of lung dysfunction by end of daily shift. The before-shift PFT parameters of woodworkers were comparable to those of non-woodworkers, indicating a lack of chronic effects of wood dust exposure. Conclusions: Wood dust exposure at the study site was associated with acute respiratory symptoms and acute changes in some PFT parameters. This calls for institution and enforcement of workplace and environmental safety policies to minimise exposure at sawmill operating sites, and ultimately, decrease the burden of respiratory diseases.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.109-131
• /
• 2014

As the demand of nuclear power plant equipment is continuously growing worldwide, the importance of handling nuclear strategic materials is also increasing. While the number of cases submitted for the exports of nuclear-power commodity and technology is dramatically increasing, preadjudication (or prescreening to be simple) of strategic materials has been done so far by experts of a long-time experience and extensive field knowledge. However, there is severe shortage of experts in this domain, not to mention that it takes a long time to develop an expert. Because human experts must manually evaluate all the documents submitted for export permission, the current practice of nuclear material export is neither time-efficient nor cost-effective. Toward alleviating the problem of relying on costly human experts only, our research proposes a new system designed to help field experts make their decisions more effectively and efficiently. The proposed system is built upon case-based reasoning, which in essence extracts key features from the existing cases, compares the features with the features of a new case, and derives a solution for the new case by referencing similar cases and their solutions. Our research proposes a framework of case-based reasoning system, designs a case-based reasoning system for the control of nuclear material exports, and evaluates the performance of alternative keyword extraction methods (full automatic, full manual, and semi-automatic). A keyword extraction method is an essential component of the case-based reasoning system as it is used to extract key features of the cases. The full automatic method was conducted using TF-IDF, which is a widely used de facto standard method for representative keyword extraction in text mining. TF (Term Frequency) is based on the frequency count of the term within a document, showing how important the term is within a document while IDF (Inverted Document Frequency) is based on the infrequency of the term within a document set, showing how uniquely the term represents the document. The results show that the semi-automatic approach, which is based on the collaboration of machine and human, is the most effective solution regardless of whether the human is a field expert or a student who majors in nuclear engineering. Moreover, we propose a new approach of computing nuclear document similarity along with a new framework of document analysis. The proposed algorithm of nuclear document similarity considers both document-to-document similarity (${\alpha}$) and document-to-nuclear system similarity (${\beta}$), in order to derive the final score (${\gamma}$) for the decision of whether the presented case is of strategic material or not. The final score (${\gamma}$) represents a document similarity between the past cases and the new case. The score is induced by not only exploiting conventional TF-IDF, but utilizing a nuclear system similarity score, which takes the context of nuclear system domain into account. Finally, the system retrieves top-3 documents stored in the case base that are considered as the most similar cases with regard to the new case, and provides them with the degree of credibility. With this final score and the credibility score, it becomes easier for a user to see which documents in the case base are more worthy of looking up so that the user can make a proper decision with relatively lower cost. The evaluation of the system has been conducted by developing a prototype and testing with field data. The system workflows and outcomes have been verified by the field experts. This research is expected to contribute the growth of knowledge service industry by proposing a new system that can effectively reduce the burden of relying on costly human experts for the export control of nuclear materials and that can be considered as a meaningful example of knowledge service application.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.219-240
• /
• 2018

Sentiment analysis, which is one of the text mining techniques, is a method for extracting subjective content embedded in text documents. Recently, the sentiment analysis methods have been widely used in many fields. As good examples, data-driven surveys are based on analyzing the subjectivity of text data posted by users and market researches are conducted by analyzing users' review posts to quantify users' reputation on a target product. The basic method of sentiment analysis is to use sentiment dictionary (or lexicon), a list of sentiment vocabularies with positive, neutral, or negative semantics. In general, the meaning of many sentiment words is likely to be different across domains. For example, a sentiment word, 'sad' indicates negative meaning in many fields but a movie. In order to perform accurate sentiment analysis, we need to build the sentiment dictionary for a given domain. However, such a method of building the sentiment lexicon is time-consuming and various sentiment vocabularies are not included without the use of general-purpose sentiment lexicon. In order to address this problem, several studies have been carried out to construct the sentiment lexicon suitable for a specific domain based on 'OPEN HANGUL' and 'SentiWordNet', which are general-purpose sentiment lexicons. However, OPEN HANGUL is no longer being serviced and SentiWordNet does not work well because of language difference in the process of converting Korean word into English word. There are restrictions on the use of such general-purpose sentiment lexicons as seed data for building the sentiment lexicon for a specific domain. In this article, we construct 'KNU Korean Sentiment Lexicon (KNU-KSL)', a new general-purpose Korean sentiment dictionary that is more advanced than existing general-purpose lexicons. The proposed dictionary, which is a list of domain-independent sentiment words such as 'thank you', 'worthy', and 'impressed', is built to quickly construct the sentiment dictionary for a target domain. Especially, it constructs sentiment vocabularies by analyzing the glosses contained in Standard Korean Language Dictionary (SKLD) by the following procedures: First, we propose a sentiment classification model based on Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM). Second, the proposed deep learning model automatically classifies each of glosses to either positive or negative meaning. Third, positive words and phrases are extracted from the glosses classified as positive meaning, while negative words and phrases are extracted from the glosses classified as negative meaning. Our experimental results show that the average accuracy of the proposed sentiment classification model is up to 89.45%. In addition, the sentiment dictionary is more extended using various external sources including SentiWordNet, SenticNet, Emotional Verbs, and Sentiment Lexicon 0603. Furthermore, we add sentiment information about frequently used coined words and emoticons that are used mainly on the Web. The KNU-KSL contains a total of 14,843 sentiment vocabularies, each of which is one of 1-grams, 2-grams, phrases, and sentence patterns. Unlike existing sentiment dictionaries, it is composed of words that are not affected by particular domains. The recent trend on sentiment analysis is to use deep learning technique without sentiment dictionaries. The importance of developing sentiment dictionaries is declined gradually. However, one of recent studies shows that the words in the sentiment dictionary can be used as features of deep learning models, resulting in the sentiment analysis performed with higher accuracy (Teng, Z., 2016). This result indicates that the sentiment dictionary is used not only for sentiment analysis but also as features of deep learning models for improving accuracy. The proposed dictionary can be used as a basic data for constructing the sentiment lexicon of a particular domain and as features of deep learning models. It is also useful to automatically and quickly build large training sets for deep learning models.

• Korean Journal of Soil Science and Fertilizer
• /
• v.43 no.3
• /
• pp.315-321
• /
• 2010

Greenhouse soil cultivated with excessive compost and chemical fertilizer has been an issue to deteriorate soil and water quality in the environment. The objective of this study was to evaluate the nutrient outflow by desalting method, flooding soil surface, after vegetable cropping in greenhouse soils. Field experiment from July to September 2008, was conducted to quantify greenhouse locations, i.e. alluvial plain and local valley. The changes of desalinization in both locations were higher as the amounts of irrigated and drained water were increased. Particularly, the ratio of desalinization in alluvial plain was much higher (66.7%) than the one in local valley (45.6%). However, $NH_4$-N contents of local valley soil during the flooding were higher than in those of alluvial plain. This was caused by high total nitrogen and organic matter in local valley soil than those in alluvial plain soil. With comparing to the input and output loads of T-N and T-P in greenhouses with local valley and alluvial plain soils, the output loads of nutrients were larger than the input loads of nutrients. This result showed that the flooding soil surface can be a good treatment to desalinize greenhouse soils. However, this conclusion remained that the flooding water containing high N and P concentrations might cause the secondary effect on the quality of streams and groundwater since excessive nutrient concentrations can be the main cause of eutrophication problem in aquatic environment.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
• /
• v.44 no.2
• /
• pp.52-69
• /
• 2016

The fishing port was once the foothold of production as well as the stronghold of communities but with the declining of the fishing industry, ports became abandoned space. Jeju Special Self-Governing Province has continued its effort to vitalize marine tourism since 2010. Shinyang Port in particular is designated as a Prearranged Marina Port Development Zone, and planning for the Jeju Ocean Marina City project is underway. Nevertheless, fishing port remodeling projects implemented on Jeju so far have focused only on civil engineering such as renovating old facilities. In addition, most Marina Port Development Projects have been irrelevant to local communities. Leading projects by the local government mostly suffer from a lack of funding, which results in the renovation of old facilities and improper maintenance, while private sector investment projects do not lead to benefit sharing with the community. Shinyang Port, also renovated in 2008, ended up with outer breakwater extension construction that neither solved the fundamental problem of the site nor gave benefits to residents. To arrange a way to solve problems for civil engineering focused development project, improper maintenance, and benefit sharing with community, first, this study proposes a development plan that connects with the outlying areas near the ports. The plan reflects existing topography, Jeju traditional stonewalls, narrow paths on the master plan and programs by reading the regional context. In this way, this paper suggests a space development plan reflecting the local landscape and characteristic factors. Second, it satisfies various needs by using existing and new Marine Tourism Resources. Third, it examines sustainable operation and management measures through residents' participation. The proposal is significant in two key ways: it is a fresh attempt at connecting the fishing port with its outlying areas from a landscape perspective; and it considers environmental, social, economic issues, and suggests participation for local communities. Thus, the model can be used in future fishing-port remodeling plans for revitalizing unused space, including invaluable traditional landscapes, and for boosting the marine-leisure industry.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
• /
• v.8 no.2
• /
• pp.203-211
• /
• 1981

Mechanization of rice transplanting operation is very important project not only to solve the labor shortage problem at the so-called labor demand peak seasons of the rice transplanting, but also to reduce the production cost of rice by reducing the labor requirements. For these reasons this study was carried out to find the basic data for encourage the project of mechanization of rice transplanting. 381 sample farms were surveyed with questionaries and interviewed with a considerable number of relative personels about the operation, selecting and ownership trend of the rice transplanter. Collected data was analized by computer of Chungnam National University computer center applied to frequencies, cross- tabulation, $x^2$-test. The analized results of this survey are summarized as follows; 1. About 76.09% of the farmers interviewed was individual ownership of rice transplanter but about 52.27% of the farmers who wanted to purchase it in 2 or 3 years supported the cooperative ownership and utilization. This fact suggested that cooperative system of village level should be thoroghly studied. 2. The 93.33% of respondents gave the answer that the yield of rice was not affected by the planting methods between machine and manual. 3. The farmers who had a rice transplanter owned 4- row type rice transplanter with mat type seedling but the 25% of the farmers wanted to purchase it in 2 or 3 years wanted to own a 4 row type rice transplanter with band type seedling. Therefore the introduction of the 4-row type rice transplanter with band type seedling to rural area should be considered again. 4. The percent of farmers who wanted the cooperative system of village level was 49.57-57.83% of the farmers who had it already and wanted to own it in near future. It was strengthened by this fact that seedling nursely work was technically supported by the governmental level.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
• /
• v.29 no.6
• /
• pp.407-410
• /
• 2018

As the operating frequency of an electromagnetic wave increases, the maximum output and wavelength of the wave decreases, so that the size of the circuit cannot be reduced. As a result, the fabrication of a circuit with high power (of the order of or greater than kW range) and terahertz wave frequency band is limited, due to the problem of circuit size, to the order of ${\mu}m$ to mm. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose a source design technique for 0.1 THz~0.3 GW level with cylindrical shape (diameter ~2.4 cm). Modeling and computational simulations were performed to optimize the design of the high-power electromagnetic sources based on Cherenkov radiation generation technology using the principle of plasma wakefield acceleration with ponderomotive force and artificial dielectrics. An effective design guideline has been proposed to facilitate the fabrication of high-power terahertz wave vacuum devices of large diameter that are less restricted in circuit size through objective verification.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
• /
• 2016.02a
• /
• pp.284-284
• /
• 2016

Topological insulator (TI) is a bulk-insulating material with topologically protected Dirac surface states in the band gap. In particular, $Bi_2Se_3$ attracted great attention as a model three-dimensional TI due to its simple electronic structure of the surface states in a relatively large band gap (~0.3 eV). However, experimental efforts using $Bi_2Se_3$ have been difficult due to the abundance of structural defects, which frequently results in the bulk conduction being dominant over the surface conduction in transport due to the bulk doping effects of the defect sites. One promising approach in avoiding this problem is to reduce the structural defects by heteroepitaxially grow $Bi_2Se_3$ on a substrate with a compatible lattice structure, while also preventing surface degradation by encapsulating the pristine interface between $Bi_2Se_3$ and the substrate in a clean growth environment. A particularly promising choice of substrate for the heteroepitaxial growth is hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), which has the same two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) layered structure and hexagonal lattice symmetry as $Bi_2Se_3$. Moreover, since h-BN is a dielectric insulator with a large bandgap energy of 5.97 eV and chemically inert surfaces, it is well suited as a substrate for high mobility electronic transport studies of vdW material systems. Here we report the heteroepitaxial growth and characterization of high quality topological insulator $Bi_2Se_3$ thin films prepared on h-BN layers. Especially, we used molecular beam epitaxy to achieve high quality TI thin films with extremely low defect concentrations and an ideal interface between the films and substrates. To optimize the morphology and microstructural quality of the films, a two-step growth was performed on h-BN layers transferred on transmission electron microscopy (TEM) compatible substrates. The resulting $Bi_2Se_3$ thin films were highly crystalline with atomically smooth terraces over a large area, and the $Bi_2Se_3$ and h-BN exhibited a clear heteroepitaxial relationship with an atomically abrupt and clean interface, as examined by high-resolution TEM. Magnetotransport characterizations revealed that this interface supports a high quality topological surface state devoid of bulk contribution, as evidenced by Hall, Shubnikov-de Haas, and weak anti-localization measurements. We believe that the experimental scheme demonstrated in this talk can serve as a promising method for the preparation of high quality TI thin films as well as many other heterostructures based on 2D vdW layered materials.