• Title/Summary/Keyword: problems & preferences

Search Result 216, Processing Time 0.024 seconds

A Study on the State of Health Functional Foods & Herbal Medicine Consumed by Elementary School Students (초등학생의 건강기능식품 및 한약 복용 실태에 대한 연구)

  • Kim, Mi-Ki;Jung, Ji-Ho;Ahn, Jae-Sun;Yim, Jung-Hoon;An, Min-Seop;Park, Jin-Su;Lee, Hai-Ja;Park, Eun-Jung
    • The Journal of Pediatrics of Korean Medicine
    • /
    • v.23 no.3
    • /
    • pp.143-153
    • /
    • 2009
  • Objectives The purpose of this study is to get the basic information from patients how much they understood about their medication and also to know whether patients are making reasonable drug choice between Health Functional Foods and Herbal medicine. Methods 500 questionnaires were handed out to the parents of students in two elementary schools located in OO, Junlabukdo province. 421 questionnaires were completed to be evaluated. Results Among 421 subjects, 53.0% were female, and 47.0% were male. The percentages of the subjects consuming Health Functional Foods and herbal medicine were67.7% and 67.8%, respectively. Among those people who consumed Health Functional Food, 44.1% were using nutritional supplements, red ginseng or ginseng products (26.9%), chlorella products (11.5%), and plum extract products (7.7%). As for the reason to consume Health Functional Foods were varied, but 'in order to be healthy, although currently displaying no illness.'(43.0%) were the most responses among the given choices. On the other hand, the reason for consuming herbal medicine was 'In order to grow taller'(26.1%), 'In order to cure weak physical state frequently displaying common illnesses',(25.9%), and 'In order to cure diseases.'(23.3%). For the questions about effectiveness after consumption,the 69.9% subjects said that it seemed to be effected, and that % was slightly higher than that of subjects with consuming Health Functional Foods(64.4%). For question concerning preferences between Health Functional Foods and herbal medicine, 57.5% chose herbal medicine, and this percentage was higher than that of Health Functional Foods(42.5%).As for the reasons of additional consumption of the Health Functional Foods, subject answered as 'Easy to consume.'(41,6%), which was the most common among the subjects consuming Health Functional Foods. On other hand, the subjects of herbal medicine answered as that herbal medicine is 'more effective'(45.7%), and 'more trustworthy in preventing side-effects.'(40.3%). After consumption of the herbal medication, only 3.9% of the subjects consuming either Health Functional Foods or herbal medicine had side-effects. The most common side-effects were 'dermal reaction' which is normally caused by Health Functional Foods and 'indigestion' problems caused by herbal consumption. Conclusions According to the 421 subjects those involved in study, the percentages of consuming Health Functional Foods(67.7%) and herbal medicine(67.8%) were similar. The most commonly consumed products were a type of Health Functional Foods which were the nutrition-supplying products. Ginseng or red ginseng products were the next commonly used products. Health Functional Foods were commonly consumed for preventing illness and maintaining health rather than any other purpose. In contrary, herbal medicines were more commonly consumed for purposes such as for growth or treating certain type of disease. As a result of consumption, more than half of both subject replied as 'satisfied'. As for the side effects, dermal reaction was the most common problem for those with consuming Health Functional Foods, while indigestion was the most common side effect from the subjects with consuming herbal medicine.

  • PDF

Analyzing animation techniques used in webtoons and their potential issues (웹툰 연출의 애니메이션 기법활용과 문제점 분석)

  • Kim, Yu-mi
    • Cartoon and Animation Studies
    • /
    • s.46
    • /
    • pp.85-106
    • /
    • 2017
  • With the media's shift into the digital era in the 2000s, comic book publishers attempted a transition into the new medium by establishing a distribution structure using internet networks. But that effort shied from escaping the parallel-page reading structure of traditional comics. On the other hand, webtoons are showing divers changes by redesigning the structure of traditional sequential art media; they tend to separate and allot spaces according to the vertical scroll reading method of the internet browser and include animations, sound effects and background music. This trend is also in accordance with the preferences of modern readers. Modern society has complicated social structures with the development of various media; the public is therefore exposed to different stimuli and shows characteristics of differentiated perceptions. In other words, webtoons display more relevant and entertaining characteristics by inserting sounds and using moving texts and characters in specific frames, while traditional comics require an appreciation of withdrawal and immersion like other published media. Motions in webtoons are partially applied for dramatic tension or to create an effective expression of action. For example, hand-drawn animation is adopted to express motions by dividing motion images into many layers. Sounds are also utilized, such as background music with episode-related lyrics, melodies, ambient sounds and motion-related sound effects. In addition, webtoons provide readers with new amusement by giving tactile stimuli via the vibration of a smart phone. As stated above, the vertical direction, time-based nature of animation motions and tactile stimuli used in webtoons are differentiated from published comics. However, webtoons' utilization of innovative techniques hasn't yet reached its full potential. In addition to the fact that the software used for webtoon effects is operationally complex, this is a transitional phenomenon since there is still a lack of technical understanding of animation and sound application amongst the general public. For example, a sound might be programmed to play when a specific frame scrolls into view on the monitor, but the frame may be scrolled faster or slower than the author intended; in this case, sound can end before or after a reader sees the whole image. The motion of each frame is also programmed to start in a similar fashion. Therefore, a reader's scroll speed is related to the motion's speed. For this reason, motions might miss the intended timing and be unnatural because they are played out of context. Also, finished sound effects can disturb the concentration of readers. These problems come from a shortage of continuity; to solve these, naturally activated consecutive sounds or animations, like the simple rotation of joints when a character moves, is required.

Food Habits and Health Food Consumption Patterns of Adults in the Ulsan Area (울산지역 중.장년층의 식생활 특성과 건강식품 섭취 실태)

  • 유수연;김혜경
    • Korean Journal of Community Nutrition
    • /
    • v.8 no.6
    • /
    • pp.889-900
    • /
    • 2003
  • This study was carried out to obtain information regarding eating habits, including health related behavior and health food consumption patterns. The subjects of this study were 149 men and 152 women residing in the Ulsan area. We obtained results by means of a questionnaire and an interview, and these were analyzed using the SPSS package program. The results of this study are summarized as follows The average age of the men was 47.6 $\pm$ 7.3 years and of the women was 47.3 $\pm$ 7.6 years old. The average height and weight of the men were 169.4 $\pm$ 5.5 cm and 67.7 $\pm$ 8.2 kg, respectively. Those of the women were 157.6 $\pm$ 5.0 cm and 58.2 $\pm$ 7.5 kg, respectively. The BMI values of all the subjects ranged from 20.0 to 25.0, all within the normal levels. In the case of dietary patterns, 24.3% of the total population always skipped a meal. In particular, 15.9% of the total population skipped breakfast. No time to eat, no appetite, having no taste, and having poor health were themain reasons for skipping meals. With regard to health care, there was a significant difference between the men and the women with respect to smoking and drinking (p<0.001). Of the total population, 40.5% hardly exercised (less than once a week), 26.2% exercised occasionally, 13.6% frequently exercised, and 19.6% exercised almost every day. A total of 60.7% responded that they were not interested in their health. The mean eating habit score of the subjects was 65.6 $\pm$ 9.9. The women had a higher eating habit score than the men (64.0 $\pm$ 9.6 for the men and 67.2 $\pm$ 9.9 for the women). Except for one group above 60 years, the older group had a higher eating habit score than the younger one. The group having a higher income and a more specialized career had a higher eating habit score than the one having a lower income and a less specialized career. There was also a marital difference. The group of single subjects showed a lower eating habit score than the married group. The group having a higher eating habit score drank, smoked and went out for meals less, and exercised more than the group having lower scores. They also were more concerned about their health. In the older group, there were more diabetic and hypertensive individuals. The subjects who had a higher BMI index were more likely to be patients with hypertension, especially in the men's group. Those who had a higher BMI index and hypertension simultaneously took a variety of medicines and foods for promoting health. Those who worried a lot about their health and had health problems tended to take special foods for their health. Patients usually took tonics. Special foods for health included Chinese medicines, tonic foods, vitamin or mineral supplements and manufactured health food supplements. Preferences for them depended on the sex and age of the subject. In the case of tonic foods, the men liked them more than the women. Foods other than tonic foods were favorites with the women. This study may provide basic information on the eating habits and health related behaviors of middle-aged people. However, further studies are needed to improve the eating habits and to change the nutritional attitudes, so that people can make better choices of health foods.

Utility-Based Video Adaptation in MPEG-21 for Universal Multimedia Access (UMA를 위한 유틸리티 기반 MPEG-21 비디오 적응)

  • 김재곤;김형명;강경옥;김진웅
    • Journal of Broadcast Engineering
    • /
    • v.8 no.4
    • /
    • pp.325-338
    • /
    • 2003
  • Video adaptation in response to dynamic resource conditions and user preferences is required as a key technology to enable universal multimedia access (UMA) through heterogeneous networks by a multitude of devices In a seamless way. Although many adaptation techniques exist, selections of appropriate adaptations among multiple choices that would satisfy given constraints are often ad hoc. To provide a systematic solution, we present a general conceptual framework to model video entity, adaptation, resource, utility, and relations among them. It allows for formulation of various adaptation problems as resource-constrained utility maximization. We apply the framework to a practical case of dynamic bit rate adaptation of MPEG-4 video streams by employing combination of frame dropping and DCT coefficient dropping. Furthermore, we present a descriptor, which has been accepted as a part of MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA), for supporting terminal and network quality of service (QoS) in an interoperable manner. Experiments are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the presented framework using the descriptor.

Improving Performance of Recommendation Systems Using Topic Modeling (사용자 관심 이슈 분석을 통한 추천시스템 성능 향상 방안)

  • Choi, Seongi;Hyun, Yoonjin;Kim, Namgyu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.21 no.3
    • /
    • pp.101-116
    • /
    • 2015
  • Recently, due to the development of smart devices and social media, vast amounts of information with the various forms were accumulated. Particularly, considerable research efforts are being directed towards analyzing unstructured big data to resolve various social problems. Accordingly, focus of data-driven decision-making is being moved from structured data analysis to unstructured one. Also, in the field of recommendation system, which is the typical area of data-driven decision-making, the need of using unstructured data has been steadily increased to improve system performance. Approaches to improve the performance of recommendation systems can be found in two aspects- improving algorithms and acquiring useful data with high quality. Traditionally, most efforts to improve the performance of recommendation system were made by the former approach, while the latter approach has not attracted much attention relatively. In this sense, efforts to utilize unstructured data from variable sources are very timely and necessary. Particularly, as the interests of users are directly connected with their needs, identifying the interests of the user through unstructured big data analysis can be a crew for improving performance of recommendation systems. In this sense, this study proposes the methodology of improving recommendation system by measuring interests of the user. Specially, this study proposes the method to quantify interests of the user by analyzing user's internet usage patterns, and to predict user's repurchase based upon the discovered preferences. There are two important modules in this study. The first module predicts repurchase probability of each category through analyzing users' purchase history. We include the first module to our research scope for comparing the accuracy of traditional purchase-based prediction model to our new model presented in the second module. This procedure extracts purchase history of users. The core part of our methodology is in the second module. This module extracts users' interests by analyzing news articles the users have read. The second module constructs a correspondence matrix between topics and news articles by performing topic modeling on real world news articles. And then, the module analyzes users' news access patterns and then constructs a correspondence matrix between articles and users. After that, by merging the results of the previous processes in the second module, we can obtain a correspondence matrix between users and topics. This matrix describes users' interests in a structured manner. Finally, by using the matrix, the second module builds a model for predicting repurchase probability of each category. In this paper, we also provide experimental results of our performance evaluation. The outline of data used our experiments is as follows. We acquired web transaction data of 5,000 panels from a company that is specialized to analyzing ranks of internet sites. At first we extracted 15,000 URLs of news articles published from July 2012 to June 2013 from the original data and we crawled main contents of the news articles. After that we selected 2,615 users who have read at least one of the extracted news articles. Among the 2,615 users, we discovered that the number of target users who purchase at least one items from our target shopping mall 'G' is 359. In the experiments, we analyzed purchase history and news access records of the 359 internet users. From the performance evaluation, we found that our prediction model using both users' interests and purchase history outperforms a prediction model using only users' purchase history from a view point of misclassification ratio. In detail, our model outperformed the traditional one in appliance, beauty, computer, culture, digital, fashion, and sports categories when artificial neural network based models were used. Similarly, our model outperformed the traditional one in beauty, computer, digital, fashion, food, and furniture categories when decision tree based models were used although the improvement is very small.

An Empirical Study in Relationship between Franchisor's Leadership Behavior Style and Commitment by Focusing Moderating Effect of Franchisee's Self-efficacy (가맹본부의 리더십 행동유형과 가맹사업자의 관계결속에 관한 실증적 연구 - 가맹사업자의 자기효능감의 조절효과를 중심으로 -)

  • Yang, Hoe-Chang;Lee, Young-Chul
    • Journal of Distribution Research
    • /
    • v.15 no.1
    • /
    • pp.49-71
    • /
    • 2010
  • Franchise businesses in South Korea have contributed to economic growth and job creation, and its growth potential remains very high. However, despite such virtues, domestic franchise businesses face many problems such as the instability of franchisor's business structure and weak financial conditions. To solve these problems, the government enacted legislation and strengthened franchise related laws. However, the strengthening of laws regulating franchisors had many side effects that interrupted the development of the franchise business. For example, legal regulations regarding franchisors have had the effect of suppressing the franchisor's leadership activities (e.g. activities such as the ability to advocate the franchisor's policies and strategies to the franchisees, in order to facilitate change and innovation). One of the main goals of the franchise business is to build cooperation between the franchisor and the franchisee for their combined success. However, franchisees can refuse to follow the franchisor's strategies because of the current state of franchise-related law and government policy. The purpose of this study to explore the effects of franchisor's leadership style on franchisee's commitment in a franchise system. We classified leadership styles according to the path-goal theory (House & Mitchell, 1974), and it was hypothesized and tested that the four leadership styles proposed by the path-goal theory (i.e. directive, supportive, participative and achievement-oriented leadership) have different effects on franchisee's commitment. Another purpose of this study to explore the how the level of franchisee's self-efficacy influences both the franchisor's leadership style and franchisee's commitment in a franchise system. Results of the present study are expected to provide important theoretical and practical implications as to the role of franchisor's leadership style, as restricted by government regulations and the franchisee's self-efficacy, which could be needed to improve the quality of the long-term relationship between the franchisor and franchisee. Quoted by Northouse(2007), one problem regarding the investigation of leadership is that there are almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are people who have tried to define it. But despite the multitude of ways in which leadership has been conceptualized, the following components can be identified as central to the phenomenon: (a) leadership is a process, (b) leadership involves influence, (c) leadership occurs in a group context, and (d) leadership involves goal attainment. Based on these components, in this study leadership is defined as a process whereby franchisor's influences a group of franchisee' to achieve a common goal. Focusing on this definition, the path-goal theory is about how leaders motivate subordinates to accomplish designated goals. Drawing heavily from research on what motivates employees, path-goal theory first appeared in the leadership literature in the early 1970s in the works of Evans (1970), House (1971), House and Dessler (1974), and House and Mitchell (1974). The stated goal of this leadership theory is to enhance employee performance and employee satisfaction by focusing on employee motivation. In brief, path-goal theory is designed to explain how leaders can help subordinates along the path to their goals by selecting specific behaviors that are best suited to subordinates' needs and to the situation in which subordinates are working (Northouse, 2007). House & Mitchell(1974) predicted that although many different leadership behaviors could have been selected to be a part of path-goal theory, this approach has so far examined directive, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented leadership behaviors. And they suggested that leaders may exhibit any or all of these four styles with various subordinates and in different situations. However, due to restrictive government regulations, franchisors are not in a position to change their leadership style to suit their circumstances. In addition, quoted by Northouse(2007), ssubordinate characteristics determine how a leader's behavior is interpreted by subordinates in a given work context. Many researchers have focused on subordinates' needs for affiliation, preferences for structure, desires for control, and self-perceived level of task ability. In this study, we have focused on the self-perceived level of task ability, namely, the franchisee's self-efficacy. According to Bandura (1977), self-efficacy is chiefly defined as the personal attitude of one's ability to accomplish concrete tasks. Therefore, it is not an indicator of one's actual abilities, but an opinion of the extent of how one can use that ability. Thus, the judgment of maintain franchisee's commitment depends on the situation (e.g., government regulation and policy and leadership style of franchisor) and how it affects one's ability to mobilize resources to deal with the task, so even if people possess the same ability, there may be differences in self-efficacy. Figure 1 illustrates the model investigated in this study. In this model, it was hypothesized that leadership styles would affect the franchisee's commitment, and self-efficacy would moderate the relationship between leadership style and franchisee's commitment. Theoretically, quoted by Northouse(2007), the path-goal approach suggests that leaders need to choose a leadership style that best fits the needs of subordinates and the work they are doing. According to House & Mitchell (1974), the theory predicts that a directive style of leadership is best in situations in which subordinates are dogmatic and authoritarian, the task demands are ambiguous, and the organizational rule and procedures are unclear. In these situations, franchisor's directive leadership complements the work by providing guidance and psychological structure for franchisees. For work that is structured, unsatisfying, or frustrating, path-goal theory suggests that leaders should use a supportive style. Franchisor's Supportive leadership offers a sense of human touch for franchisees engaged in mundane, mechanized activity. Franchisor's participative leadership is considered best when a task is ambiguous because participation gives greater clarity to how certain paths lead to certain goals; it helps subordinates learn what actions leads to what outcome. Furthermore, House & Mitchell(1974) predicts that achievement-oriented leadership is most effective in settings in which subordinates are required to perform ambiguous tasks. Marsh and O'Neill (1984) tested the idea that organizational members' anger and decline in performance is caused by deficiencies in their level of effort and found that self-efficacy promotes accomplishment, decreases stress and negative consequences like depression and emotional instability. Based on the extant empirical findings and theoretical reasoning, we posit positive and strong relationships between the franchisor's leadership styles and the franchisee's commitment. Furthermore, the level of franchisee's self-efficacy was thought to maintain their commitment. The questionnaires sent to participants consisted of the following measures; leadership style was assessed using a 20 item 7-point likert scale developed by Indvik (1985), self-efficacy was assessed using a 24 item 6-point likert scale developed by Bandura (1977), and commitment was assessed using a 6 item 5-point likert scale developed by Morgan & Hunt (1994). Questionnaires were distributed to Korean optical franchisees in Seoul. It took about 20 days to complete the data collection. A total number of 140 questionnaires were returned and complete data were available from 137 respondents. Results of multiple regression analyses testing the relationships between the each of the four styles of leadership shown by the franchisor as independent variables and franchisee's commitment as the dependent variable showed that the relationship between supportive leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.13, p<.001),and the relationship between participative leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.07, p<.001)were significant. However, when participants divided into high and low self-efficacy groups, results of multiple regression analyses showed that only the relationship between achievement-oriented leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.14, p<.001) was significant in the high self-efficacy group. In the low self-efficacy group, the relationship between supportive leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.17, p<.001),and the relationship between participative leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.10, p<.001) were significant. The study focused on the franchisee's self-efficacy in order to explore the possibility that regulation, originally intended to protect the franchisee, may not be the most effective method to maintain the relationships in a franchise business. The key results of the data analysis regarding the moderating role of self-efficacy between leadership behavior style as proposed by path-goal and commitment theory were as follows. First, this study proposed that franchisor should apply the appropriate type of leadership behavior to strengthen the franchisees commitment because the results demonstrated that supportive and participative leadership styles by the franchisors have a positive influence on the franchisee's level of commitment. Second, it is desirable for franchisor to validate the franchisee's efforts, since the franchisee's characteristics such as self-efficacy had a substantial, positive effect on the franchisee's commitment as well as being a meaningful moderator between leadership and commitment. Third, the results as a whole imply that the government should provide institutional support, namely to put the franchisor in a position to clearly identify the characteristics of their franchisees and provide reasonable means to administer the franchisees to achieve the company's goal.

  • PDF