• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.651-656
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• 2017

Ursolic acid (UA) supplementation was previously shown to improve skeletal muscle function in resistance-trained men. This study aimed to determine, using the same experimental paradigm, whether UA also has beneficial effects on exercise-induced skeletal muscle damage markers including the levels of cortisol, B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP), myoglobin, creatine kinase (CK), creatine kinase-myocardial band (CK-MB), and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) in resistance-trained men. Sixteen healthy participants were randomly assigned to resistance training (RT) or RT+UA groups (n=8 per group). Participants were trained according to the RT program (60~80% of 1 repetition, 6 times/week), and the UA group was additionally given UA supplementation (450 mg/day) for 8 weeks. Blood samples were obtained before and after intervention, and cortisol, BNP, myoglobin, CK, CK-MB, and LDH levels were analyzed. Subjects who underwent RT alone showed no significant change in body composition and markers of skeletal muscle damage, whereas RT+UA group showed slightly decreased body weight and body fat percentage and slightly increased lean body mass, but without statistical significance. In addition, UA supplementation significantly decreased the BNP, CK, CK-MB, and LDH levels (p<0.05). In conclusion, UA supplementation alleviates increased skeletal muscle damage markers after RT. This finding provides evidence for a potential new therapy for resistance-trained men.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.177-183
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• 2005

The effluent quality is directly affected by the separation of biological solids in a final clarifier because the majority of discharged $BOD_5$ and SS are virtually dependent on the results of biological solids in the sedimentation tank effluent. If a final clarifier is effectively designed and operated, the desired goal of clarification for wastewater can be achieved together with the cost reduction in the treatment of wastewater. To this end flow characteristics and the removal efficiency of SS are numerically investigated especially by the change of the inlet position and the installation of baffle to improve the performance of a rectangular final clarifier. The 2-D computer program developed in a rectangular coordinates has been successfully validated against experimental residence time distribution(RTD) curves obtained by tracing radio-isotope. The lowering of the inlet position weakens the density current and induces the settling of SS in the front zone of a clarifier. Thus the decreased traveling distance of the sludge increases the removal efficiency of SS in the effluent. The inlet baffle installed in the front region of clarifier prevents the short circuiting flow and induces to flow into the dense underflow, which eventually improves the effluent quality. In the case of lower inlet position, however, installation of baffle results in degradation of effluent quality. Consequently it is strongly recommended that in-depth numerical study be performed in advance for optimizing a clarifier design and retrofitting to improve effluent quality in a final clarifier.

• Korean Journal of Plant Resources
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.624-637
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• 2020

High-quality and high-phytonutrient watermelon fruits have strong market opportunities besides their health related benefits. Hence, investigating quality and nutritional related traits of watermelon genetic resources could provide important baseline data in breeding for increased lycopene content thereby increasing the marketability of watermelon. To this end, we have examined some fruit morphological traits and lycopene content of 105 genetic resources. Seeds, originally obtained from 22+ countries, were obtained from the National Agrobiodiversity Center, Jeonju, South Korea, grown in an experimental field and harvested at a fully mature stage. The size of pistil scar (SPS), the width of stripes (WS), weight of fruit (WF), length of fruit (LF), width of fruit (WIF), the thickness of pericarp (TP), soluble solids content (SSC), fruit shape in longitudinal section, ground color of skin, the intensity of the green color of skin, fruit shape at the apical part, grooving distribution, conspicuousness of stripes, and main color of the flesh were recorded on the field and inside laboratory and the lycopene was measured using spectrophotometric and HPLC methods. Watermelon fruits have shown a diverse morphological characters. Red and pink fleshed fruits dominated in the entire collections. Fruits with higher thickness of rind were found to exhibit less soluble solid content (SSC). Korean origin fruits were characterized by intermediate SSC while the United States of America (USA), Russia (RUS), Tajikistan (TJK), Turkmenistan (TKM), Taiwan (TWN), and Uruguay (URY) originated fruits had the highest SSC. The lycopene content varied between 41.37 and 182.82 ㎍/g, 2.81 and 163.72 ㎍/g, and 3.54 and 255.47 ㎍/g using HPLC, UV-Vis spectrophotometer, and microplate reader spectrophotometer, respectively. Red- and pink-fleshed fruits had the highest levels of lycopene content compared to the yellow- and orange-fleshed. Lycopene content had a significant positive correlation with SSC, however, no correlations were detected between lycopene and other quantitative fruit morphological characters. Our study demonstrated high diversity exists in fruit morphological traits and lycopene content of the germplasm collections which provide beneficial baseline data for a future breeding program and utilization of watermelon germplasm collections in gene banks for the maintenance and improvement of the current levels of production, marketability, and health-related benefit of watermelon fruits.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Fundamentals of Nursing
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.323-334
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• 2002

Purpose: This study was designed to verify preemptive effects of intravenous patient-controlled analgesia (IV-PCA) infusion on postoperative pain in women having a total abdominal hysterectomy. Method: The research design was a nonequivalent control group post test only design. The participants in this study were 50 women who were scheduled for a total abdominal hysterectomy at a University affiliated Hospital in Suwon, Korea. The subjects were divided into two groups. For the experimental group, IV-PCA infusion was started before the skin incision and for the control group. IV-PCA infusion was started after the skin was closed. Each group was evaluated in terms of pain score by the visual analogue scale (VAS) and the number of times they pushed the button for IV-PCA at postoperative hours 1, 2, 3, 6, 12, and 24. The data were collected from July 1 to December 10, 2001. Collected data was analyzed by SPSS/PC + program. Result: 1. There was no difference between the two groups, over six points for the number of times the control button for IV-PCA was used. Group differences and interaction effect were not significant. 2. There was no significant difference in pain scores between the two groups, over seven time points. A significant interaction effect was observed between groups and measurement Points in time. 3. There was a significant difference in the requirements for additional analgesia between the two groups, 32% of the control group received additional analgesia. Conclusion: Preemptive analgesics administration may have a better effect in relieving postoperative pain than the usual analgesic treatment which is started after surgery.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.38 no.7
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• pp.455-463
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• 2001

In this Paper, an approximate processing method is proposed and tested. The proposed method uses variable CSD (VCSD) coefficients which approximate filter stopband attenuation by controlling the precision of the CSD coefficient sets. A decimation filter for Audio Codec '97 specifications has been designed having processor architecture that consists of program/data memory, arithmetic unit, energy/level decision, and sinc filter blocks, and fabricated with 0.6${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ CMOS sea-of-gate technology. For the combined two halfband FIR filters in decimation filter, the number of addition operations were reduced to 63.5%, 35.7%, and 13.9%, compared to worst-case which is not an adaptive one. Experimental results show that the total power reduction rate of the filter is varying from 3.8 % to 9.0 % with respect to worst-case. The proposed approximate processing method using variable CSD coefficients is readily applicable to various kinds of filters and suitable, especially, for the speech and audio applications, like oversampling ADCs and DACs, filter banks, voice/audio codecs, etc.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.37-47
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• 2008

Exploitation of address generation units which are typically provided in DSPs plays an important role in DSP code generation since that perform fast address computation in parallel to the central data path. Offset assignment is optimization of memory layout for program variables by taking advantage of the capabilities of address generation units, consists of memory layout generation and address pointer assignment steps. In this paper, we propose an effective address pointer assignment method to minimize the number of address calculation instructions in DSP code generation. The proposed approach reduces the time complexity of a conventional address pointer assignment algorithm with fixed memory layouts by using minimum cost-nodes breaking. In order to contract memory size and processing time, we employ a powerful pruning technique. Moreover our proposed approach improves the initial solution iteratively by changing the memory layout for each iteration because the memory layout affects the result of the address pointer assignment algorithm. We applied the proposed approach to about 3,000 sequences of the OffsetStone benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the our approach. Experimental results with benchmarks show an average improvement of 25.9% in the address codes over previous works.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.1-8
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• 2008

The belief propagation method that has been studied recently yields good performance in disparity extraction. The method in which a target function is modeled as an energy function based on Markov random field(MRF), solves the stereo matching problem by finding the disparity to minimize the energy function. MRF models provide robust and unified framework for vision problem such as stereo and image restoration. the belief propagation method produces quite correct results, but it has difficulty in real time implementation because of higher computational complexity than other stereo methods. To relieve this problem, in this paper, we propose a fast algorithm of the belief propagation method. Energy function consists of a data term and a smoothness tern. The data term usually corresponds to the difference in brightness between correspondences, and smoothness term indicates the continuity of adjacent pixels. Smoothness information is created from messages, which are assigned using four different message arrays for the pixel positions adjacent in four directions. The processing time for four message arrays dominates 80 percent of the whole program execution time. In the proposed method, we propose an algorithm that dramatically reduces the processing time require in message calculation, since the message.; are not produced in four arrays but in a single array. Tn the last step of disparity extraction process, the messages are called in the single integrated array and this algorithm requires 1/4 computational complexity of the conventional method. Our method is evaluated by comparing the disparity error rates of our method and the conventional method. Experimental results show that the proposed method remarkably reduces the execution time while it rarely increases disparity error.

• Clinical and Experimental Reproductive Medicine
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.185-192
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• 1999

The present study was performed to investigate the efficacy and safety of laser assisted hatching (AH) on mouse embryos. Non-contact $1.48{\mu}m$ diode laser system used to create a precise hole on zona pellucida. 2-cell embryos were collected from the mice (ICR) that had the coitus vaginal plug confirmed at 48 hours after hCG injection. Collected 2-cell embryos were cultured in the HTF medium supplemented with 0.4% BSA. For experiments, embryos at 8-cell stage were used after 18-22 hours in culture. After assisted hatching, the embryos were further cultured in HTF medium containing 0.1% PVP (anti-hatching system) for 3 days. For evaluate efficiency of laser on mouse embryo hatching, the effect of AH methods (acidic tyrode, pronase and laser), the number of artificial holes (1, 2 and 3 hole) and the irradiation time of laser (2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 ms) were examined. Hatching rates of laser AH group (95.2%) was significantly higher than that of control group (50.8%), but there was no differences among the laser (95.2%), acidic tyrode (100%) and pronase (98.5%) groups. Hatching rates of the number of zona pellucida opening by laser, there were no differences among the 1 hole (87.5%),2 hole (92.1%) and 3 hole (85.9%) groups. Developmental and hatching rates of embryos according to laser irradiation time were similar in the treatment groups. Therefore, these results suggest that laser AH using non-contact $1.48{\mu}m$ diode laser is a simple and accurate and effective procedure for AH. Based on these results, laser AH could be use safely for human ART program.

• Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.556-565
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• 2002

Due to the fact that nurses may deal with diverse populations in the work place, it is very important for then to maintain appropriate interpersonal relationships with clients. Nurses should maintain diverse types of relationships appropriately with patients with special needs and their families during crisis, other nursing colleagues and staff on the same team, clients in the school or work place as well as the community. In particular, a hospital is a society with a system and hierarchy, and the importance of interpersonal relationships is much more emphasized. In interpersonal relationships, it is very important for a person to communicate with others in an accurate manner, and when the communication is not achieved appropriately, the person may have troubles and experience distress and conflicts because of the inaccurate communication of thoughts. According to the findings of previous studies, nurses actually experience much distress in the work place because of the miscommunication that they have with others. The purpose of this study was to observe a correlation between Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and assertiveness behavior, and to exam the effects of assertiveness training on the assertiveness behavior and conflict management mode. The subjects of this study included 20 persons in the experimental group and 20 persons the in control group. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was applied before the study. The assertiveness training group received six, 120 minutes sessions over a 3 week period. Pre-test on assertiveness behavior, Communication Conflict Inventory-General, Role Conflict Inventory- General, Conflict Management Mode was achieved for all the subjects prior to the training. Post-test was administered to all the subjects one week following the last session. The data were analyzed using SPSS PC program to obtain findings on mean. standard distribution, t-test, and Pearson correlation. The results are as follows: (1) Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Introvert/Extrovert was correlated to assertive behavior and avoid- response type conflict management mode. (2) The assertiveness training was correlated to assertiveness behavior, communication conflict degree, and avoid- response type conflict management mode. (3) The post-test scores between the training group and the control group were significantly different in assertiveness behavior and avoid-response type conflict management mode. It is suggested that more studies need to be done to differentiate the effects of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and assertiveness training on assertiveness behavior and avoid-response type conflict management mode.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.430-439
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• 2002

The development of reinforcing steel is required in reinforced concrete structures. The standard hooks that have been widely used for the tensile development in the beam-column joints tend to create difficulties of construction such as steel congestion as the member cross sections are becoming smaller due to the use of higher strength concrete and higher grade steel. Using the reinforcing bars with end mechanical anchoring device (headed reinforcement) provides potential economies in construction such as reduction in development lengths, simplified details, and improved responses to cyclic loadings. In this paper, the pullout strengths and behaviors of the headed reinforcement were experimentally studied. In 33 pullout tests performed using D25 deformed reinforcing bars, the test parameters were embedment depth, edge distance, head size, and the use of transverse reinforcement. The pullout strengths determined from tests closely agreed with the pullout strengths predicted using the CCD method. The pullout strengths increased with increasing embedment depths nd edge distances. The strengths tend to increase with the use of larger heads. From the experimental program where the effect of the transverse reinforcement was examined, a modification factor to the CCD was suggested to represent the effect of such reinforcement that is installed across the concrete failure plane on the pullout strengths.