• International Journal of Human Ecology
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.39-51
• /
• 2016

This pilot study examined programs for early childhood education and care in three Chinese cities. The samples for this study were one university-based kindergarten, one private kindergarten (rural area), and one public kindergarten (urban area). Six types of instruments were used to assess early childhood education and care services regarding quality matters. Most questions asked were open-ended; consequently, the interview answers by kindergarten directors or teachers (as well as observations made by the researcher) formed the basis for collecting the data. Quality components for each program were determined by a comparison method. The comparison allowed the researcher to understand the range of quality education and care available as well as the variability of existing kindergarten programs in China. The findings of the investigation revealed important information on; (a) demographic information (fees, class hours, total weeks of class, vacation, number of children and staff, class size, and teacher-child ratio) (b) teacher characteristics, (c) health practices, (d) safety practices, (e) work environment, (f) physical settings, (g) play materials, (h) parent involvement, (i) nutrition, (j) daily schedule. Implications within the Chinese context for quality practices and issues to further develop and strengthen early childhood education and care systems are discussed.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
• /
• 2022.06a
• /
• pp.1245-1246
• /
• 2022

Walkability is an indicator of how much pedestrians are willing to walk and how well a walking environment is created. As walking can promote pedestrians' mental and physical health, there has been increasing focus on improving walkability in different ways. Thus, plenty of research has been undertaken to measure walkability. When measuring walkability, there are many objective and subjective variables. Subjective variables include a feeling of safety, pleasure, or comfort, which can significantly affect perceived walkability. However, these subjective factors are difficult to measure by making the walkability index more reliant on objective and physical factors. Because many subjective variables are associated with human emotional states, understanding pedestrians' emotional states provides an opportunity to measure the subjective walkability variables more quantitatively. Pedestrians' emotions can be examined through surveys, but there are social and economic difficulties involved when conducting surveys. Recently, an increasing number of studies have employed physiological data to measure pedestrians' stress responses when navigating unpleasant environmental barriers on their walking paths. However, studies investigating the emotional states of pedestrians in the walking environment, including assessing their positive emotions felt, such as pleasure, have rarely been conducted. Using wearable devices, this study examined the various emotional states of pedestrians affected by the walking environment. Specifically, this study aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of monitoring biometric data, such as electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate variability (HRV), using wearable devices as an indicator of pedestrians' emotional states-both pleasant-unpleasant and aroused-relaxed states. To this end, various walking environments with different characteristics were set up to collect and analyze the pedestrians' biometric data. Subsequently, the subjects wearing the wearable devices were allowed to walk on the experimental paths as usual. After the experiment, the valence (i.e., pleasant or unpleasant) and arousal (i.e., activated or relaxed) scale of the pedestrians was identified through a bipolar dimension survey. The survey results were compared with many potentially relevant EDA and HRV signal features. The research results revealed the potential for physiological responses to indicate the pedestrians' emotional states, but further investigation is warranted. The research results were expected to provide a method to measure the subjective factors of walkability by measuring emotions and monitoring pedestrians' positive or negative feelings when walking to improve the walking environment. However, due to the lack of samples and other internal and external factors influencing emotions (which need to be studied further), it cannot be comprehensively concluded that the pedestrians' emotional states were affected by the walking environment.

• Interdisciplinary Bio Central
• /
• v.6 no.4
• /
• pp.2.1-2.7
• /
• 2014

Sexual dimorphism in intelligence suggests that this phenotype is a sexually selected trait. This view is supported by an overrepresentation (compared to the autosomal genome) of genes affecting cognition on the X chromosome. The aim of this study is to test the hypothesis that sexual selection can explain sex and country-level differences in performance on tests of fluid intelligence. Nationally representative samples from N = 44 countries were obtained from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Creative Problem Solving (CPS), which evaluates the core of intelligence, that is novel problem solving ability. Sexual selection has the double effect of increasing the prevalence of a favored phenotype and reducing genetic variation in sexually selected traits. Matching these predictions from evolutionary theory, the average country fluid intelligence is positively correlated to sexual dimorphism after partialling out per capita GDP and the latter in turn is inversely correlated to variance in intelligence scores within populations. Males have a higher variance than females but there is a negative correlation between male-female difference in variance and sexual dimorphism in intelligence, suggesting that selection reduces variance more in the selected sex. Average country male height is negatively correlated to sexual dimorphism in intelligence, a fact that supports the notion of a trade-off between physical and intellectual competition in the context of access to females. The results of this study, if replicated, imply that genome-wide association studies of cognition may benefit from a focus on sex chromosomes, which so far have been neglected. Another implication of this study is that intelligence has continued to evolve after different human populations migrated out of Africa and possibly up to the 19th century, as suggested by the substantial variability in sex differences even between neighbouring countries.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.11-18
• /
• 2015

Stress is one of the major causes threatening the mental and physical health of human today. In this paper, we analyzed the heart rate variability(HRV), galvanic skin response(GSR), and skin temperature data measured from the university subjects before and after the class to examine the influence on bio-signal in stress environment. Thirty subjects from university students (aged between 21 and 27 years; mean=22.31, STD=1.45) took part in this study. From the experiment results, RMSSD(p=0.033), LF peak(p=0.003), VLF(p=0.045) were statistically significant from those of the control group(p<0.05) of HRV both in time and frequency domain. We observed that mean skin conductivity after the class(mean=5.993(uS), SD=3.406) is higher than that before the class(mean=3.039(uS), SD=2.628) by 97.2% on average and the skin temperature after the class($34.835{\pm}0.305$) is slightly higher than that before the class($34.471{\pm}0.281$) by 1.055% on average. The results in this research could be used to examine the autonomic response in clinical stress related research.

• Journal of Life Science
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.291-297
• /
• 2008

We investigated whether 1) the combined capsaicin (75 mg), sesamin (30 mg), and L-carnitine (900 mg) (CCSC) ingestion enhances autonomic nervous system (ANS) activities including thermogenic sympathetic activity as energy metabolic modulator, 2) ${\beta}_3-AR$ polymorphism of each subject influences with ANS activity. Seven healthy males $(22.0{\pm}0.5\;yr)$ volunteered for this study. The cardiac autonomic nervous activities evaluated by means of heart rate variability of power spectral analysis were continuously measured during 5 min every 30 min for total 120 min resting condition with CCSC or placebo oral administration chosen at random. The results indicated that, there are not $Arp/Arg^{64}$ variants of the ${\beta}_3-AR$ genotypes in our subjects. There were not also significant differences in heart rate during rest between both trials. The difference of ANS activity did not reach the statistical significance between both trials. However, the significant improvement showed TOTAL power, HF component, and the indices of SNS and PNS activities before and at 30 min after CCSC ingestion (p<0.05, respectively). In conclusions, although each component of combined CCSC is associated with lipolysis and/or fat oxidation, the combined CCSC consumption is not influenced in stimulation of thermogenic sympathetic activity as modulator of energy metabolism. In rather, our results suggested that CCSC ingestion improves the balance of both SNS and PNS activities. Therefore, it will be considered many combined nutrient components for ergogenic and/or lipolysis effects as well as genetic variants affecting ANS activity in further studies.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
• /
• v.12 no.1
• /
• pp.51-57
• /
• 2010

Cycling that transform human energy into mechanical energy is one of the man-machine systems out of sports fields. Benchmarking means "improving ourselves by learning from others', therefore benchmarking toward dominant cyclist is necessary on field. The goals of this study were to provide important factors on multi-disciplines (kinematics, physiology, power, psychology) for a tailored-training program that is suitable to individual characteristics. Two cyclists participated in this study and gave consent to the experimental procedure. One was dominant cyclist (years: 21 yrs, height: 177 cm, mass: 70 kg), and the other was non-dominant cyclist (years: 21, height: 176, mass: 70). Kinematic data were recorded using six infrared cameras (240Hz) and QTM (software). Physiological data (VO2max, AT) were acquired according to graded exercising test with cycle ergometer and power with Wingate test used by Bar-Or et. al (1977) and to evaluate muscle function with Cybex. Psychological data were collected with competitive state anxiety inventory (CSAI-2) that was devised by Martens et. al (1990) and athletes' self-management questionnaire (ASMQ) of Huh (2003). It appears that the dominant's CV of ankle joint angle was higher than non-dominant's CV and dominant's pedaling pattern was consistent in biomechanics domain, which the dominant's values for all factors ware higher than non-dominant's values in physical, and physiological domain, and their values between cognitive anxiety and somatic anxiety were contrary to each other in psychology. Further research on multi-disciplines may lead to the development of tailored-optimal training programs applicable with key factors to enhance athletic performance by means of research including athlete, coach and parents.

• Imaging Science in Dentistry
• /
• v.46 no.2
• /
• pp.93-101
• /
• 2016

Purpose: The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of varying resolutions of cone-beam computed tomography images on the accuracy of linear measurements of edentulous areas in human cadaver heads. Intact cadaver heads were used to simulate a clinical situation. Materials and Methods: Fiduciary markers were placed in the edentulous areas of 4 intact embalmed cadaver heads. The heads were scanned with two different CBCT units using a large field of view ($13cm{\times}16cm$) and small field of view ($5cm{\times}8cm$) at varying voxel sizes (0.3 mm, 0.2 mm, and 0.16 mm). The ground truth was established with digital caliper measurements. The imaging measurements were then compared with caliper measurements to determine accuracy. Results: The Wilcoxon signed rank test revealed no statistically significant difference between the medians of the physical measurements obtained with calipers and the medians of the CBCT measurements. A comparison of accuracy among the different imaging protocols revealed no significant differences as determined by the Friedman test. The intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.961, indicating excellent reproducibility. Inter-observer variability was determined graphically with a Bland-Altman plot and by calculating the intraclass correlation coefficient. The Bland-Altman plot indicated very good reproducibility for smaller measurements but larger discrepancies with larger measurements. Conclusion: The CBCT-based linear measurements in the edentulous sites using different voxel sizes and FOVs are accurate compared with the direct caliper measurements of these sites. Higher resolution CBCT images with smaller voxel size did not result in greater accuracy of the linear measurements.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.27 no.3
• /
• pp.45-52
• /
• 2022

A tangible sports game is an exercise game that uses sensors or cameras to track the user's body movements and to feel a sense of reality. Recently, VR indoor sports room systems installed to utilize tangible sports game for physical activity in schools. However, these systems primarily use screen-touch user interaction. In this research, we developed a V-Catch Vision system that uses AI image recognition technology to enable tracking of user movements in three-dimensional space rather than two-dimensional wall touch interaction. We also conducted a usability evaluation experiment to investigate the exercise effects of this system. We tried to evaluate quantitative exercise effects by measuring blood oxygen saturation level, the real-time ECG heart rate variability, and user body movement and angle change of Kinect skeleton. The experiment result showed that there was a statistically significant increase in heart rate and an increase in the amount of body movement when using the V-Catch Vision system. In the subjective evaluation, most subjects found the exercise using this system fun and satisfactory.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
• /
• v.24 no.6
• /
• pp.207-215
• /
• 2024

Cloud computing is now used by most companies, business centres and academic institutions to embrace new computer technology. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are limited to certain services, missing some of the assets requested by their customers, it means that different clouds need to interconnect to share resources and interoperate between them. The clouds may be interconnected in different characteristics and systems, and the network may be vulnerable to volatility or interference. While information technology and cloud computing are also advancing to accommodate the growing worldwide application, criminals use cyberspace to perform cybercrimes. Cloud services deployment is becoming highly prone to threats and intrusions. The unauthorised access or destruction of records yields significant catastrophic losses to organisations or agencies. Human intervention and Physical devices are not enough for protection and monitoring of cloud services; therefore, there is a need for more efficient design for cyber defence that is adaptable, flexible, robust and able to detect dangerous cybercrime such as a Denial of Service (DOS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) in heterogeneous cloud computing platforms and make essential real-time decisions for forensic investigation. This paper aims to develop a framework for digital forensic for the detection of cybercrime in a joined heterogeneous cloud setup. We developed a Digital Forensics model in this paper that can function in heterogeneous joint clouds. We used Unified Modeling Language (UML) specifically activity diagram in designing the proposed framework, then for deployment, we used an architectural modelling system in developing a framework. We developed an activity diagram that can accommodate the variability and complexities of the clouds when handling inter-cloud resources.