• The Korean Journal of Franchise Management
• /
• v.13 no.4
• /
• pp.39-48
• /
• 2022

Purpose: COVID-19 has negatively influenced the financial performance of restaurant firms. Previous literature suggests that the franchising strategy effectively helps restaurant firms recover from difficult business conditions through various methods for expanding business size and enhancing business efficiency. According to risk-sharing theory, restaurant franchisors may minimize operational risks by sharing the risks with their franchisees. For instance, restaurant franchisors could generate more stable cash flow using franchise fees from their franchisees. However, research on the effect of franchise's risk reduction factor on business performance during pandemic is scarce. Thus, this study aims to examine the positive moderating effect of franchising between COVID-19 and restaurants' financial performance. Research design, data, and methodology: Panel data including financial information and franchising status of restaurant firms were collected for analysis. In order to control for unobserved firm-specific factors, generalized least squared estimation in fixed effects model was conducted. Huber-White robust standard errors were used to deal with heteroscedasticity issues. Results: It was found that COVID-19 pandemic has a negative effect on the restaurants' financial performance such as ROA (return on assets), ROE (return on equity), and PM (profit margins), which confirms the findings from existing literature. More importantly, results show that the degree of franchising has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between COVID-19 and financial performance of restaurant firms. This suggests that more active engagement in franchising may decrease negative impacts of COVID-19 on the restaurants' financial performance. Conclusions: The study supports existing literature related to risk-sharing theory, by confirming that pandemics, such as COVID-19, negatively affect financial performance of the restaurants. Furthermore, it was found that franchising strategy can help lessen negative impacts of pandemics on the firm performance. These findings can contribute to the franchise and restaurant management literature by suggesting the role of franchising in reducing business risks, thereby positively affecting financial performance. Moreover, this study offers business managers of franchisors and franchisees insights for utilizing franchising in restaurant risk management. Policymakers may also gain information on aiding restaurant firms during global crisis, such as COVID-19.

• The Korea Journal of Herbology
• /
• v.34 no.3
• /
• pp.31-36
• /
• 2019

Objectives : In this animal study, we performed the single oral dose toxicity test of Standardized Cornus officinalis Sieb. et Zucc. and Psoralea corylifolia L. 30% ethanol extract (SCP) in Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats owing to aims for verifying approximate lethal dose (ALD). Methods : According to OECD guidelines for the testing of chemicals section 4 health effects test No. 420 acute oral toxicity study - fixed dose procedure (17 December 2001), single oral dose toxicity test was performed. Animals were divided into two groups: Group 1, vehicle-treated rats (Control); Group 2, SCP 5000 mg/kg treated rats. SCP is composed of two medicinal herbs: Cornus officinalis Sieb. et Zucc. (650 g) and Psoralea corylifolia L. (350 g) in 30% ethanol. SCP was once orally administered to female and male SD rats at dose levels of 5000 mg/kg. Animals were monitored on the mortality, clinical signs, body weight changes and necropsy findings for 14 days. Results : After single oral treatment of SCP, we could not find any mortality up to 5000 mg/kg. Compared with the control group, there were also no significant differences in clinical sign, weight change, weight gain and gross abnormalities in SCP 5000 mg/kg-treated group. Conclusions : Taken together, these results suggest that the ALD of SCP in both female and male SD rats were considered as over 5000 mg/kg. Results from this study provide scientific evidence for the safety of SCP.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
• /
• v.22 no.10
• /
• pp.1905-1919
• /
• 2000

The main motivation of this research is to develop an intelligent control strategy for Activated Sludge Process (ASP). ASP is a complex and nonlinear dynamic system because of the characteristic of wastewater, the change in influent flow rate, weather conditions, and etc. The mathematical model of ASP also includes uncertainties which are ignored or not considered by process engineer or controller designer. The ASP is generally controlled by a PID controller that consists of fixed proportional, integral, and derivative gain values. The PID gains are adjusted by the expert who has much experience in the ASP. The ASP model based on $Matlab^{(R)}5.3/Simulink^{(R)}3.0$ is developed in this paper. The performance of the model is tested by IWA(International Water Association) and COST(European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) data that include steady-state results during 14 days. The advantage of the developed model is that the user can easily modify or change the controller by the help of the graphical user interface. The ASP model as a typical nonlinear system can be used to simulate and test the proposed controller for an educational purpose. Various control methods are applied to the ASP model and the control results are compared to apply the proposed intelligent control strategy to a real ASP. Three control methods are designed and tested: conventional PID controller, fuzzy logic control approach to modify setpoints, and fuzzy-PID control method. The proposed setpoints changer based on the fuzzy logic shows a better performance and robustness under disturbances. The objective function can be defined and included in the proposed control strategy to improve the effluent water quality and to reduce the operating cost in a real ASP.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
• /
• v.24 no.8
• /
• pp.1164-1172
• /
• 2011

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the efficacy of Trichoderma reesei derived phytase for pigs fed diets with fixed calcium to total phosphorus ratios (1.5:1). In Exp. 1, 280 weaned pigs (initial BW of $10.32{\pm}1.94$ kg) were allocated to one of five dietary treatments on the basis of weight and gender in a randomized complete block design. Treatments were the low phosphorus (0.6% Ca, 0.4% total P and 0.23% available P) diets supplemented with 0, 250, 1,000, or 2,000 FTU phytase/kg of diet and a positive control diet (PC; 0.85% Ca, 0.58% total P and 0.37% available P). The treatments were applied to seven pens with eight pigs per pen, half male and half female. In Exp. 2, six barrows fitted with ileal T-cannula (initial BW = $35.1{\pm}1.6$ kg) were assigned to three dietary treatments with a double $3{\times}3$ Latin square design. The dietary treatments were the low-phosphorus diet (0.53% Ca, 0.34% total P and 0.14% available P), the low phosphorus diet plus 1,000 FTU phytase/kg and a positive control diet (0.77% Ca, 0.50% total P and 0.30% available P). In Exp. 1, there were linear increases (p<0.01) in weight gain, phosphorus absorption, bone strength, calcium and phosphorus content of fat-free dried bone and plasma phosphorus concentrations with increasing dose rate of phytase. The performance of pigs fed the diets with 250, 1,000, or 2,000 FTU of phytase/kg did not differ from pigs fed the PC diet. Pigs fed diets with 1,000 or 2,000 FTU of phytase/kg did not differ from pigs fed the PC diet in bone characteristics. The apparent digestibility of dry matter, crude protein, ash and energy was not affected by dietary treatment. However, pigs fed the PC diet excreted more fecal phosphorus (g/d, p<0.01) and fecal phosphorus per BW gain (g/kg) than pigs fed the diets with phytase. Phytase linearly decreased (p<0.01) fecal phosphorus excreted per BW gain (g/kg), plasma calcium concentration as well as plasma and bone alkaline phosphatase activity. In Exp. 2, phytase supplementation in the low-P diet increased (p<0.05) the apparent ileal digestibility (AID) of Ca, P, leucine, lysine, phenylalanine, alanine and cysteine, tended to AID of crude protein, isoleucine, threonine, asparagine and serine. In conclusion, the novel phytase originated from Trichoderma reesei is effective in releasing Ca, P, and amino acids from corn soy based diet for pigs.

• Journal of agriculture & life science
• /
• v.45 no.1
• /
• pp.101-107
• /
• 2011

A Total of 48,101 performance records of sows for Yorkshire and Landrace breeds were collected from swine breeding farms in Korea from 2001 to 2008. A general ingredient analysis included the fixed effects of breed, parity, year, season, and farm. For the number of heads per 1st parity analysis by each growth traits, the data of 48,101 heads was used to analyze growth traits group. In the general ingredient analysis, the results showed high significance except for lean percentage by season (p<0.05). Average daily gain of Landrace breed ($640.48{\pm}0.749g$) was better than that of Yorkshire breed ($624.22{\pm}0.608g$), and the backfat thickness of Yorkshire breed ($13.44{\pm}0.030mm$) was thicker than that of Landrace breed ($12.50{\pm}0.037mm$). For the number of born alive and number of stillborn by growth traits for each breed, number of born decreased after test end day of 161 to 165 day, and average daily gain of 620 g to 640 g and the highest number of born appeared at the backfat thickness of 13 mm to 14 mm for yorkshire breed. In case of Landrace breed, number of born was the highest, and the number of stillborn increased together with average daily gain. The number of born was high when backfat thickness was less than 11 mm. The number of born trended to decrease when backfat thickness increased.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.39 no.6
• /
• pp.633-641
• /
• 2015

Several complex processes that are employed in industries, such as shipping, power plants, and the petrochemical industry, involve time-varying behavior as well as strong nonlinear behavior during operation. The fixed-parameter proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers have difficulty in dealing with control problems that occur in such processes. In this paper, we propose a method of designing a nonlinear PID controller for industrial processes that exhibit a large number of nonlinearities and time-varying behavior. The gains of the nonlinear PID controller are characterized by a simple nonlinear function of the error and/or error rate depending on the process set-point and output. We tune the user-defined parameters using a genetic algorithm by minimizing the integral of time absolute error (ITAE) index. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by performing a comparison of the proposed method and two other nonlinear and adaptive methods that are employed for reference tracking, disturbance-rejection performances, and robustness to parameter changes on a continuously stirred tank reactor.

• Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.249-255
• /
• 2015

An 8 week feeding trial was conducted to evaluate whether methionine and cysteine would effectively spare taurine supplementation on growth performance in juvenile rock bream Oplegnathus fasciatus. Triplicate groups of 25 fish averaging $2.74{\pm}0.04g$ ($mean{\pm}SD$) were fed one of the experimental diets. Five experimental diets including a fish meal based control diet were prepared by adding sulfur amino acid at fixed level of 1.0% and taurine at graded levels of 0%, 0.25%, 0.5% and 1.0% ($S+Tau_0$, $S+Tau_{0.25}$, $S+Tau_{0.5}$ and $S+Tau_{1.0}$, respectively). After the feeding trial, growth performance of fish fed the $S+Tau_{0.25}$, $S+Tau_{0.5}$ and $S+Tau_{1.0}$ diets were significantly higher (P < 0.05) than those of fish fed the Control diet. ANOVA test suggested that when sulfur amino acid were supplemented to the diets, the optimum taurine supplementation level could be 0.25% in the diet, and broken line analysis of weight gain indicated a level of 0.33%, for positive effects on growth and feed utilization. Fish whole-body protein content and taurine concentration steadily increased with the increase of dietary level in the presence of sulfur amino acid in the diets. On the other hand, whole-body lipid content significantly decreased with the incremental levels of dietary taurine. In conclusion, the results of the present study clearly indicated that dietary supplementation of methionine and cysteine at a level of 1% could spare 0.25 to 0.33% of taurine in juvenile O. fasciatus diets.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
• /
• v.54 no.3
• /
• pp.27-42
• /
• 2004

Music videos provide for many others images, alluring the audience to fall in another emotional world, while the sexual images shown in them suggest new images of man and woman. Today, men's images are being interpreted from various viewpoints. As interests in men's fashion are visualized through music video clothing, not only juveniles who want to be identified with the music video images but also adults try to imitate them, and proceed to wear the clothing, obliterating the boundary between 'reality' and 'illusion' and creating new images of men. This study is aimed at reviewing the male images shown in the music videos, particular their clothing, produced between 2000 and 2002. The results of this study could be summarized as follows : 1. Since beginning of the human history, men's image has been characterized by patriarchal system, capitalism, bourgeois class which emerged after industrial revolution and other man-dominant socio-cultural phenomena, such male image are shown in the music video as conservative and dominant image. 2. However, due to the post-modern culture, the power began to be decentralized. while feminism and men's liberation movement gain strength. As a result, women or heterosexuals began to regard men as sexual objects, and such a phenomenon is featured as sexual, bisexual or decadent images in the music videos. 3. On the threshold of the 21st century, music videos have begun to creatively describe men's life, their social conflicts, dreams and hopes and death and thereby. feature men's such images as being destroyed in view of existentialism. The numerous creative men's images interpreted in this way are featured in many music video works only to create playful, cyborg or demonic images using the senses. After all, men's images are featured in the music video costumes in diverse ways ranging from the conventional images to acquiescent images. In addition, various male images are combined with the characteristics of the music videos to be re-created anew. The young men in the our modern age tend to imitate or apply such images to create their own images or individualistic styles. All in all, men's image can be fixed no longer but diversified and fragmented in the new age.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.10 no.12
• /
• pp.3587-3593
• /
• 2009

Nowadays, the PV systems have been focused on the interconnection between the power source and the grid. The PV inverter, either single-phase or three-phase, can be considered as the core of the whole system because of an important role in the grid-interconnecting operation. An important issue in the inverter control is the load current regulation. In the literature, the Proportional+Integral (PI) controller, normally used in the current-controlled Voltage Source Inverter (VSI), cannot be a satisfactory controller for an ac system because of the steady-sate error and the poor disturbance rejection, especially in high-frequency range. By comparison with the PI controller, the Proportional+Resonant (PR) controller can introduce an infinite gain at the fundamental ac frequency; hence can achieve the zero steady-state error without requiring the complex transformation and the dq-coupling technique. In this paper, a PR controller is designed and adopted for replacing the PI controller. Based on the theoretical analyses, the PR controller based control strategy is implemented in a 32-bit fixed-point TMS320F2812 DSP and evaluated in a 3kW experimental prototype Photovoltaic (PV) power conditioning system (PCS). Simulation and experimental results are shown to verify the performance of implemented control scheme in PV PCS.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
• /
• v.25 no.2
• /
• pp.151-162
• /
• 2012

Analysis for back fat thickness (BFAT) and daily body weight gains from birth to the end of a performance test were conducted to find an optimal method for estimation of weaning age effects and to ascertain impacts of weaning age on the growth performance of purebred Berkshire pigs from a closed population in Korea. Individual body weights were measured at birth (B), at weaning (W: mean, 22.9 d), at the beginning of the performance test (P: mean, 72.7 d), and at the end of the performance test (T: mean, 152.4 d). Further, the average daily gains in body weight (ADG) of 3,713 pigs were analyzed for the following periods: B to W (DGBW), W to P (DGWP), P to T (DGPT), B to P (DGBP), B to T (DGBT), and W to T (DGWT). Weaning ages ranged from 17 to 34 d, and were treated as fixed (WF), random with (WC) and random without (WU) consideration of an empirical relationship between weaning ages in the models. WF and WC produced the lowest AIC (Akaike Information Criterion) and least fractions of error variance components in multi-traits analysis, respectively. The fractions of variances due to diverse weaning age and the weaning age correlations among ADGs of different stages (when no overlapping allowed) by WC ranged from 0.09 to 0.35 and from -0.03 to 0.44, respectively. The maximum weaning age effects and optimal back fat thicknesses were attained at weaning ages of 27 to 32 d. With the exception of DGBW, the effects of weaning age on the ADGs increased (ranging from 1.50 g/d to 7.14 g/d) with increased weaning age. In addition, BFAT was reduced by 0.106 mm per increased day in weaning age. In conclusion, WC produced reasonable weaning age correlations, and improved the fitness of the model. Weaning age was one of crucial factors (comparable with heritability) influencing growth performance in Berkshire pigs. Further, these studies suggest that increasing weaning age up to 32 d can be an effective management strategy to improve growth performance. However, additional investigations of the costs and losses related to extension of the suckling period and on the extended range of weaning age are necessary to determine the productivity and safety of this practice in a commercial herd and production system.