• Environmental Analysis Health and Toxicology
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.293-301
• /
• 2009

This study was conducted to investigate the distribution of the concentrations of selected trace metals and inorganic anions in five types of drinking water samples (mineral spring water, well water, small community water, municipal tap water, and commercial mineral water) collected from Chuncheon, Gangwon-do in 2007. Forty four samples were analyzed for five metals and five anions using an atomic absorption spectrometer and an ion chromatograph, respectively. Arsenic (As) and nitrate (${NO_3}^-$) concentrations in some groundwater samples did not meet the future (10 ${\mu}g/L$) and current (44 mg/L) Korean drinking water standards, respectively. On the other hand, any municipal tap water samples, the sources of which were lake surface water, satisfied the Korean standards. Human health risk assessment results showed that arsenic in all types of water, especially groundwater including commercial mineral water, may pose both noncarcinogenic and carcinogenic effects on the residents. It is concluded that groundwater is not safe drinking water any longer and that a national survey and follow-up measures need to be taken.

• Journal of Power System Engineering
• /
• v.14 no.5
• /
• pp.36-40
• /
• 2010

The ultrasonic guided wave propagates along with the given structure's wall direction. Because of this specific character, the ultrasonic guided waves arc used in many other fields. Especially, it can be readily utilized for nondestructive inspection of various structures that are made up of gas pipes, heat exchanger tubes, and thin plates. Further, the guided wave technology can be readily utilized when inspecting pipes or thin plates which pose high risk of the accident but for which the nondestructive inspection itself is impossible because it is difficult to get to them since they are coated or buried underground. In the other hand, conventional ultrasonic testing such as thickness gauging uses bulk waves and only tests the region of structure immediately below the transducer. As a result of the application about inlet and outlet cooling water line using guided wave test, we conformed that the overall corrosions were in the lower side of the 304.8 mm inlet valve and these corrosions were engaged in not locally but through the lower side of the valve line. In the near future, we can expect that the detectable defect size is smaller than before along with the development of the sensing technology.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.46 no.4
• /
• pp.489-500
• /
• 2014

In this study, remote handling strategies for a large-scale argon cell facility were considered. The suggested strategies were evaluated by several types of field test. The teleoperation tasks were performed using a developed remote handling system, which enabled traveling over entire cell area using a bridge transport system. Each arm of the system had six DOFs (degrees of freedom), and the bridge transport system had four DOFs. However, despite the dexterous manipulators and redundant monitoring system, many operators, including professionals, experienced difficulties in operating the remote handling system. This was because of the lack of a strategy for handling the installed camera system, and the difficulty in recognizing the gripper pose, which might fall outside the FOV (field of vision) of the system during teleoperation. Hence, in this paper, several considerations for the remote handling tasks performed in the target facility were discussed, and the tasks were analyzed based on ergonomic factors such as the workload. Toward the development of a successful operation strategy, several ergonomic issues, such as active/passive view of the remote handling system, eye/hand alignment, and FOV were considered. Furthermore, using the method for classifying remote handling tasks, several unit tasks were defined and evaluated.

• Korean Journal of Health Education and Promotion
• /
• v.22 no.3
• /
• pp.29-47
• /
• 2005

Objectives: Individuals' self-reported unmet needs are an important indicator of heath care of their society. Using data from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) Cycle 1.2, we examine unmet needs for mental health care in Canada and discuss its implications to health education. Results: The most frequently reported reason for unmet needs was barriers to acceptability issues, which stem primarily from lack of knowledge of mental health, negative attitudes towards mental disorder, and mistrust of mental health professionals. Unmet needs for mental health care appeared an especially serious issue among the young. Also, individuals who reported unmet needs tended to have some ill health behavior such as illicit drug use that could be their coping mechanism. On the other hand, emotional and informational support factors have shown an important mitigating effect on unmet needs. Conclusions: These findings of unmet needs pose a major challenge to health education. To effectively address unmet mental health care needs, it is recommended that the focus of relevant policies and programs should be on enhancing a multi-level mental health education strategy including efforts on individual, environmental and professional level education.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.503-517
• /
• 1998

Cumulative trauma disorders(CTDs) of the upper extremities among the workers at manufacturing workplace have become a serious problem in Korea. However, most of the studies on the CTDs carried out in this country have focused on the Video Display Terminal(VDT) operators. In fact, high rates of the CTDs have been reported for telecommunication employees, and the CTDs associated with VDT use in telecommunication industries pose great health and social problems in Korea today. On the other hand, there are few studies on the CTDs among the manufacturing workers, and the severity of the problem was much under-reported. This study reports and discusses the results of the literature review on the cross-sectional studies of the CTDs, along with the analysis of the problems associated with identification, medical examinations, and ergonomic evaluation of the disorders. Also a checklist was developed for the use of quick screening tool for risk factor analysis. Consistency of the checklist was validated with the field studies of several manufacturing workplace. Current issues and suggestions for future ergonomic studies are also addressed.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.250-255
• /
• 2012

Face recognition has wide applications in security and surveillance systems as well as in robot vision and machine interfaces. Conventional challenges in face recognition include pose, illumination, and expression, and face recognition at a distance involves additional challenges because long-distance images are often degraded due to poor focusing and motion blurring. This study investigates the effectiveness of applying photon-counting linear discriminant analysis (Pc-LDA) to face recognition in harsh environments. A related technique, Fisher linear discriminant analysis, has been found to be optimal, but it often suffers from the singularity problem because the number of available training images is generally much smaller than the number of pixels. Pc-LDA, on the other hand, realizes the Fisher criterion in high-dimensional space without any dimensionality reduction. Therefore, it provides more invariant solutions to image recognition under distortion and degradation. Two decision rules are employed: one is based on Euclidean distance; the other, on normalized correlation. In the experiments, the asymptotic equivalence of the photon-counting method to the Fisher method is verified with simulated data. Degraded facial images are employed to demonstrate the robustness of the photon-counting classifier in harsh environments. Four types of blurring point spread functions are applied to the test images in order to simulate long-distance acquisition. The results are compared with those of conventional Eigen face and Fisher face methods. The results indicate that Pc-LDA is better than conventional facial recognition techniques.

• Advances in aircraft and spacecraft science
• /
• v.4 no.3
• /
• pp.219-235
• /
• 2017

The large container ships and fast patrol boats are complex marine structures. Therefore, their global mechanical behaviour has long been modeled mostly by refined beam theories. Important issues of cross section warping and bending-torsion coupling have been addressed by introducing special functions in these theories with inherent assumptions and thus compromising their robustness. The 3D solid Finite Element (FE) models, on the other hand, are accurate enough but pose high computational cost. In this work, different marine vessel structures have been analysed using the well-known Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF). According to CUF, the governing equations (and consequently the finite element arrays) are written in terms of fundamental nuclei that do not depend on the problem characteristics and the approximation order. Thus, refined models can be developed in an automatic manner. In the present work, a particular class of 1D CUF models that was initially devised for the analysis of aircraft structures has been employed for the analysis of marine structures. This class, which was called Component-Wise (CW), allows one to model complex 3D features, such as inclined hull walls, floors and girders in the form of components. Realistic ship geometries were used to demonstrate the efficacy of the CUF approach. With the same level of accuracy achieved, 1D CUF beam elements require far less number of Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) compared to a 3D solid FE solution.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.25 no.10
• /
• pp.1535-1545
• /
• 2022

Sign language has completely different meaning depending on the direction of the hand or the change of facial expression even with the same gesture. In this respect, it is crucial to capture the spatial-temporal structure information of each movement. However, sign language translation studies based on Sign2Gloss2Text only convey comprehensive spatial-temporal information about the entire sign language movement. Consequently, detailed information (facial expression, gestures, and etc.) of each movement that is important for sign language translation is not emphasized. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose Spatial-temporal Keypoints Centered Sign2Gloss2Text Translation, named STKC-Sign2 Gloss2Text, to supplement the sequential and semantic information of keypoints which are the core of recognizing and translating sign language. STKC-Sign2Gloss2Text consists of two steps, Spatial Keypoints Embedding, which extracts 121 major keypoints from each image, and Temporal Keypoints Embedding, which emphasizes sequential information using Bi-GRU for extracted keypoints of sign language. The proposed model outperformed all Bilingual Evaluation Understudy(BLEU) scores in Development(DEV) and Testing(TEST) than Sign2Gloss2Text as the baseline, and in particular, it proved the effectiveness of the proposed methodology by achieving 23.19, an improvement of 1.87 based on TEST BLEU-4.

• Journal of Veterinary Science
• /
• v.25 no.4
• /
• pp.50.1-50.6
• /
• 2024

Importance: Canine extraction of large carnivores can pose significant risk due to extensive tissue damage during aggressive bone reduction. This report highlights a rare instance in which the use of a piezoelectric surgical unit (PSU) for maxillary canine extraction in a large carnivore resulted in successful outcomes with minimal tissue damage. Case presentation: A 10-year-old male African lion presented with decreased appetite because of bilateral maxillary canine fractures. Intraoral radiographs revealed enlarged root canals and periapical radiolucency of the fractured canines, leading to a diagnosis of periapical periodontitis and pulpitis. To extract the right maxillary canine, conventional method using hand instrument failed to achieve adequate luxation, necessitating the use of the flat blade of the PSU to sever the periodontal ligament. The left maxillary canine was extracted using PSU from the beginning, and the extraction time was markedly shortened by using PSU without additional alveolar bone damage or bleeding. Conclusion and Relevance: This case demonstrated that utilizing PSU for canine extraction in a lion resulted in periodontal ligament separation, reducing damage to the alveolar bone and shortening surgical time. It suggests the promising application of PSU in tooth extraction for large wild animals, indicating its potential significance in veterinary dentistry.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
• /
• v.16B no.5
• /
• pp.341-346
• /
• 2009

The motion data glove is a representative human-computer interaction tool that inputs human hand gestures to computers by measuring their motions. The motion data glove is essential equipment used for new computer technologiesincluding home automation, virtual reality, biometrics, motion capture. For its popular usage, this paper attempts to develop an inexpensive visual.type motion data glove that can be used without any special equipment. The proposed approach has the special feature; it can be developed as a low-cost one becauseof not using high-cost motion-sensing fibers that were used in the conventional approaches. That makes its easy production and popular use possible. This approach adopts a visual method that is obtained by improving conventional optic motion capture technology, instead of mechanical method using motion-sensing fibers. Compared to conventional visual methods, the proposed method has the following advantages and originalities Firstly, conventional visual methods use many cameras and equipments to reconstruct 3D pose with eliminating occlusions But the proposed method adopts a mono vision approachthat makes simple and low cost equipments possible. Secondly, conventional mono vision methods have difficulty in reconstructing 3D pose of occluded parts in images because they have weak points about occlusions. But the proposed approach can reconstruct occluded parts in images by using originally designed thin-bar-shaped optic indicators. Thirdly, many cases of conventional methods use nonlinear numerical computation image analysis algorithm, so they have inconvenience about their initialization and computation times. But the proposed method improves these inconveniences by using a closed-form image analysis algorithm that is obtained from original formulation. Fourthly, many cases of conventional closed-form algorithms use approximations in their formulations processes, so they have disadvantages of low accuracy and confined applications due to singularities. But the proposed method improves these disadvantages by original formulation techniques where a closed-form algorithm is derived by using exponential-form twist coordinates, instead of using approximations or local parameterizations such as Euler angels.