• Computers and Concrete
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.193-206
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• 2019

Although concrete is the most widely used construction material, its deficiency in shrinkage and low tensile resistance is undeniable. However, the aforementioned defects can be partially modified by addition of fibers. On the other hand, possibility of adding waste materials in concrete has provided a new ground for use of recycled concrete aggregates in the construction industry. In this study, a constant combination of recyclable coarse and fine concrete aggregates was used to replace the corresponding aggregates at 50% substitution percentage. Moreover, in order to investigate the effects of fibers on mechanical and durability properties of recycled aggregate concrete, the amounts of 0.5%, 1%, and 1.5% steel fibers (ST) and 0.05%, 0.1% and 0.15% polypropylene (PP) fibers by volumes were used individually and in hybrid forms. Compressive strength, tensile strength, flexural strength, ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV), water absorption, toughness, elastic modulus and shrinkage of samples were investigated. The results of mechanical properties showed that PP fibers reduced the compressive strength while positive impact of steel fibers was evident both in single and hybrid forms. Tensile and flexural strength of samples were improved and the energy absorption of samples containing fibers increased substantially before and after crack presence. Growth in toughness especially in hybrid fiber-reinforced specimens retarded the propagation of cracks. Modulus of elasticity was decreased by the addition of PP fibers while the contrary trend was observed with the addition of steel fibers. PP fibers decreased the ultrasonic pulse velocity slightly and had undesirable effect on water absorption. However, steel fiber caused negligible decline in UPV and a small impact on water absorption. Steel fibers reduce the drying shrinkage by up to 35% when was applied solely. Using fibers also resulted in increasing the ductility of samples in failure. In addition, mechanical properties changes were also evaluated by statistical analysis of MATLAB software and smoothing spline interpolation on compressive, flexural, and indirect tensile strength. Using shell interpolation, the optimization process in areas without laboratory results led to determining optimal theoretical points in a two-parameter system including steel fibers and polypropylene.

• Journal of Korean Society of Rural Planning
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.47-62
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• 2019

This paper considers the effect of "comprehensive rural community improvement project" in terms of three factors - physical environment, rural tourism, socioeconomic and analyzed the path effect leading to the final outcome - the quality of life of residents, using covariance structure analysis. By doing so, this study looks into why residents prefer the improvement of a physical environment that takes a public nature. The analysis showed that the socioeconomic effect did not have an immediate impact on the improvement of quality of life of residents at a significance level of 5%, whereas the improvement of physical environment had a static effect on the quality of living at a significance level of 1%. Residents' preference for "hardware" or physical environment may be attributed to lack of their understanding of human factors such as social capital. However, analyzing the impact of specific contents of the project on performance, it is found that as projects fail to generate a tangible socioeconomic effect, residents strategically prefer the repair of their physical environment such as public facilities that directly affect their daily lives, so that they can maximize an improvement of the quality of living. Hence, this study suggests that instead of attributing the failure of rural community development projects to residents, macroscopic problems of rural communities and specific contents of projects should be dealt with before the success of any project can be discussed.

• Journal of Coastal Disaster Prevention
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.119-131
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• 2017

Global warming under the influence of climate change and its direct impact on glacial and sea level are known issue. However, there is a lack of research on an indirect impact of climate change such as coastal structure design which is mainly based on a frequency analysis of water level under the stationary assumption, meaning that maximum sea level will not vary significantly over time. In general, stationary assumption does not hold and may not be valid under a changing climate. Therefore, this study aims to develop a novel approach to explore possible distributional changes in annual maximum sea levels (AMSLs) and provide the estimate of design water level for coastal structures using a multiple non-crossing quantile regression based nonstationary frequency analysis within a Bayesian framework. In this study, 20 tide gauge stations, where more than 30 years of hourly records are available, are considered. First, the possible distributional changes in the AMSLs are explored, focusing on the change in the scale and location parameter of the probability distributions. The most of the AMSLs are found to be upward-convergent/divergent pattern in the distribution, and the significance test on distributional changes is then performed. In this study, we confirm that a stationary assumption under the current climate characteristic may lead to underestimation of the design sea level, which results in increase in the failure risk in coastal structures. A detailed discussion on the role of the distribution changes for design water level is provided.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.85 no.3
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• pp.205-220
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• 2022

This study aimed to describe the prevalence of comorbidities associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and their relation with relevant outcomes. A systematic review based on the PRISMA methodology was performed from January 2020 until July 2021. The MEDLINE, Lilacs, and Scielo databases were searched to identify studies related to COPD and its comorbidities. Observational studies on the prevalence of comorbidities in COPD patients and costs with health estimates, reduced quality of life, and mortality were included. Studies that were restricted to one or more COPD pain assessments and only specific comorbidities such as osteoporosis, bronchitis, and asthma were excluded. The initial search identified 1,409 studies and after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 20 studies were finally selected for analysis (comprising data from 447,459 COPD subjects). The most frequent COPD comorbidities were: hypertension (range, 17%-64.7%), coronary artery disease (19.9%-47.8%), diabetes (10.2%-45%), osteoarthritis (18%-43.8%), psychiatric conditions (12.1%-33%), and asthma (14.7%-32.5%). Several comorbidities had an impact on the frequency and severity of COPD exacerbations, quality of life, and mortality risk, in particular malignancies, coronary artery disease, chronic heart failure, and cardiac arrhythmias. Comorbidities, especially cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, are frequent in COPD patients, and some of them are associated with higher mortality.

• Journal of the Korean Recycled Construction Resources Institute
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.402-410
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• 2022

The present study introduces a calibration method of the CSC model implemented in the LS-DYNA program for considering the material properties of ultra-high performance concrete(UHPC). Based on previous experimental studies, various parameters, which constitute three shear failure surfaces, pressure-volumetric strain curve, fracture energy, dynamic increase factor(DIF), and so on, are modified. Then, the proposed calibration method is verified by comparing the numerical result with the experimental data through the single element analysis. In addition, based on the established finite element models, the applicability of the calibrated CSC model is examined for UHPC structures subjected to impact and blast loadings.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.345-353
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• 2009

The success and failure of any project depends upon many factors, the Project Manager is considered to be the key contributor to the success of any project, as well as a guide to the team members to achieve the client satisfaction (Cost, Time and Quality). Therefore the main aim of this paper is to provide a practical approach for understanding the importance of the Project Manager and his effectiveness to the success of the construction projects. In addition, the Project Manager's roles, responsibilities and duties have direct impact to the success of the construction projects. In order to identify the thoughts and opinion of the construction industry on this particular assertion, a quantitative study was carried out within the UK construction industry. The result of the study shows that there is an extremely strong correlation between the Project Manager and the success of the construction projects. In construction projects the Project Manager is considered to be one of the most important people who can lead and drive the projects in the right direction and conclude construction projects successfully. Moreover, these can play the most important role regarding the improvement of the organization's performance, the organization's profitability and the client's satisfaction. The research confirmed that the Project Manager is a very essential element to the success of the construction project and have an impact at every stage of the construction project. So it concluded that selection of a Project Manager should be carefully done with regard to experience, knowledge, power/authority and good understanding to the kind of the project.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.627-633
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• 2023

This study sought to identify the effects of entrepreneurship orientation and self efficacy on entrepreneurial intentions among workers in the bio-healthcare industry in Korea. As interest in health increases in the age of aging, the bio-healthcare industry is attracting a lot of attention for start-ups as an industry that can create high added value, but there are also aspects that take a relatively long time to develop technology, require a lot of money, and have a relatively high probability of failure. In this study, we measured the level of entrepreneurship orientation and self efficacy of bio-healthcare industry workers and identified the degree of influence on entrepreneurial intentions. Studies have shown that innovativeness, progressiveness, and risk-taking among entrepreneurship orientations all have a significant impact on entrepreneurial intention. In addition, self efficacy has been shown to have a mediating effect on the relationship between innovativeness, progressiveness, risk-taking and entrepreneurial intention.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.141-154
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• 2023

This study investigated the effect of water retention characteristics between aged and fresh Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) on the stability of the landfill. A series of transient numerical modeling for the slope of an MSW landfill was performed considering the variation of water retention characteristics due to leachate circulation. Four different scenarios were considered in this analysis depending on how to obtain hydraulic conductivity and the aging degree of materials. Unsaturated hydraulic properties of the MSW used for the modeling were evaluated through modified hanging column tests. Different water retention properties and various landfill conditions, such as subgrade stiffness, leachate injection frequency, and gas and leachate collection system, were considered to investigate the pore water distribution and slope stability. The stability analyses related to the factor of safety showed that unsaturated properties under those varied conditions significantly impacted the slope stability, where the factor of safety decreased, ranging between 9.4 and 22%. The aged materials resulted in a higher factor of safety than fresh materials; however, after 1000 days, the factor of safety decreased by around 10.6% due to pore pressure buildup. The analysis results indicated that using fresh materials yielded higher factor of safety values. The landfill subgrade was found to have a significant impact on the factor of safety, which resulted in an average of 34% lower factor of safety in soft subgrades. The results also revealed that a failed leachate collection system (e.g., clogging) could result in landfill failure (factor of safety < 1) after around 298 days, while the leachate recirculation frequency has no critical impact on stability. In addition, the accumulation of gas pressure within the waste body resulted in factor of safety reductions as high as 24%. It is essential to consider factors related to the unsaturated hydraulic properties in designing a landfill to prevent landfill instability.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.86 no.3
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• pp.234-244
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• 2023

Background: Effective treatment of fluoroquinolone-resistant multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (FQr-MDR-TB) is difficult because of the limited number of available core anti-TB drugs and high rates of resistance to anti-TB drugs other than FQs. However, few studies have examined anti-TB drugs that are effective in treating patients with FQr-MDR-TB in a real-world setting. Methods: The impact of anti-TB drug use on treatment outcomes in patients with pulmonary FQr-MDR-TB was retrospectively evaluated using a nationwide integrated TB database (Korean Tuberculosis and Post-Tuberculosis). Data from 2011 to 2017 were included. Results: The study population consisted of 1,082 patients with FQr-MDR-TB. The overall treatment outcomes were as follows: treatment success (69.7%), death (13.7%), lost to follow-up or not evaluated (12.8%), and treatment failure (3.9%). On a propensity-score-matched multivariate logistic regression analysis, the use of bedaquiline (BDQ), linezolid (LZD), levofloxacin (LFX), cycloserine (CS), ethambutol (EMB), pyrazinamide, kanamycin (KM), prothionamide (PTO), and para-aminosalicylic acid against susceptible strains increased the treatment success rate (vs. unfavorable outcomes). The use of LFX, CS, EMB, and PTO against susceptible strains decreased the mortality (vs. treatment success). Conclusion: A therapeutic regimen guided by drug-susceptibility testing can improve the treatment of patients with pulmonary FQr-MDR-TB. In addition to core anti-TB drugs, such as BDQ and LZD, treatment of susceptible strains with later-generation FQs and KM may be beneficial for FQr-MDR-TB patients with limited treatment options.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.395-409
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• 2023

Long-span suspension bridges have tunnel anchor systems to maintain stable cables. More investigations are required to determine how closely tunnel excavation beneath the tunnel anchor impacts the stability of the tunnel anchor. In order to investigate the impact of the adjacent tunnel's excavation on the stability of the tunnel anchor, a large-span suspension bridge tunnel anchor is utilised as an example in a three-dimensional numerical simulation approach. In order to explore the deformation control mechanism, orthogonal tests are employed to pinpoint the major impacting elements. The construction of an advanced pipe shed, strengthening the primary support. Moreover, according to the findings the grouting reinforcement of the surrounding rock, have a significant control effect on the settlement of the tunnel vault and plug body. However, reducing the lag distance of the secondary lining does not have such big influence. The greatest way to control tunnel vault settling is to use the grout reinforcement, which increases the bearing capacity and strength of the surrounding rock. This greatly minimizes the size of the tunnel excavation disturbance area. Advanced pipe shed can not only increase the surrounding rock's bearing capacity at the pipe shed, but can also prevent the tunnel vault from connecting with the disturbance area at the bottom of the anchorage tunnel, reduce the range of shear failure area outside the anchorage tunnel, and have the best impact on the plug body's settlement control.