• Nutrition Research and Practice
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.149-164
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• 2024

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: The economic recession caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic disproportionately affected poor and vulnerable populations globally. Better uunderstanding of vulnerability to shocks in food supply and demand in the Asia Pacific region is needed. SUBJECTS/METHODS: Using secondary data from rapid assessment surveys during the pandemic response (n = 10,420 in mid-2020; n = 6,004 in mid-2021) in India, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, this study examined the risk factors for reported income reduction or job loss in mid-2021 and the temporal trend in food security status (household food availability, and market availability and affordability of essential items) from mid-2020 to mid-2021. RESULTS: The proportion of job loss/reduced household income was highest in India (60.4%) and lowest in Indonesia (39.0%). Urban residence (odds ratio [OR] range, 2.20-4.11; countries with significant results only), female respondents (OR range, 1.40-1.69), engagement in daily waged labor (OR range, 1.54-1.68), and running a small trade/business (OR range, 1.66-2.71) were significantly associated with income reduction or job loss in three out of 4 countries (all P < 0.05). Food stock availability increased significantly in 2021 compared to 2020 in all four countries (OR range, 1.91-4.45) (all P < 0.05). Availability of all essential items at markets increased in India (OR range, 1.45-3.99) but decreased for basic foods, hygiene items, and medicine in Vietnam (OR range, 0.81-0.86) in 2021 compared to 2020 (all P < 0.05). In 2021, the affordability of all essential items significantly improved in India (OR range, 1.18-3.49) while the affordability of rent, health care, and loans deteriorated in Indonesia (OR range, 0.23-0.71) when compared to 2020 (all P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Long-term social protection programs need to be carefully designed and implemented to address food insecurity among vulnerable groups, considering each country's market conditions, consumer food purchasing behaviors, and financial support capacity.

• Pediatric Infection and Vaccine
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.94-101
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• 2024

Purpose: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has posed a significant burden to infant and toddler's care globally, while the disease severity is generally mild in this age group. In this study, we aimed to assess epidemiological and clinical aspects of COVID-19 in infants and toddlers in Seoul, South Korea. Methods: We used Seoul Metropolitan Government's epidemiological investigation database to describe the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of COVID-19 in infants and toddlers, between March 2020 to December 2021. Results: A total of 5,025 infants and toddlers aged <5 years was diagnosed between the observed period. 2,720 (54.1%) had symptoms, and fever was the most common symptom in 1,941 (74.1%). Of the diagnosed cases, 96.4% did not have underlying diseases. In a district level, extended opening of childcare facility was associated with increased risk of COVID-19 in infants and toddlers. Conclusions: An efficient monitoring system, resembling routine clinical care, is crucial, considering the low rates of severe progression and fatality among infants and toddlers. Moreover, a well-grounded intervention based on scientific evidence, rather than unconditional closures, is necessary to establish a suitable childcare policy that ensures safety from infectious diseases while not overlooking the developmental aspects of social skills.

• Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.43-52
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• 2024

Recent abnormal climate conditions have increased the risk of slope collapses, which frequently result in significant loss of life and property due to the absence of early prediction and warning dissemination. In this paper, we develop a slope condition analysis system using IoT sensors and AI-based camera to assess the condition of slopes. To develop the system, we conducted hardware and firmware design for measurement sensors considering the ground conditions of slopes, designed AI-based image analysis algorithms, and developed prediction and warning solutions and systems. We aimed to minimize errors in sensor data through the integration of IoT sensor data and AI camera image analysis, ultimately enhancing the reliability of the data. Additionally, we evaluated the accuracy (reliability) by applying it to actual slopes. As a result, sensor measurement errors were maintained within 0.1°, and the data transmission rate exceeded 95%. Moreover, the AI-based image analysis system demonstrated nighttime partial recognition rates of over 99%, indicating excellent performance even in low-light conditions. Through this research, it is anticipated that the analysis of slope conditions and smart maintenance management in various fields of Social Overhead Capital (SOC) facilities can be applied.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.106-119
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• 2024

Drug shortage is a persistent phenomenon that poses a public health risk worldwide and occurs due to a range of causes. The purpose of this study is to review key policies to prepare for and respond to drug shortages in selected countries, such as the United States, Canada, and some European countries in order to draw implications. This study reviewed the reports and articles derived from search engines and Google Scholar by using keywords such as drug shortage and stock-out. Over the last decade or so, the United States have strengthened requirements on advance notification for disruption and interruption of drug manufacturing, established the Inter-agency Drug Shortages Task Force to promote the communication and coordination of responses, and expedited drug regulatory processes. Similarly, Canada established the Multi-Stakeholder Steering Committee on drug shortages by involving representatives from central and local governments and private sectors. Canada also adopted a tiered approach to the communication of drug shortages based on the assessment of the severity of the shortage problem and released a detailed information guide on communication. In 2019, the joint task force between the European Medicines Agency and the Heads of Medicines Agencies issued guidelines on drug shortage communication in the European Economic Area. The countries reviewed in this paper focus on communication across different stakeholders for the monitoring of and timely response to drug shortages. The efforts to protect public health from the negative impact of the drug shortage crisis would require multi-sectorial and multi-governmental coordination and development of guidelines.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.1-16
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• 2015

Traffic accident is one of the major cause of death worldwide for the last several decades. According to the statistics of world health organization, approximately 1.24 million deaths occurred on the world's roads in 2010. In order to reduce future traffic accident, multipronged approaches have been adopted including traffic regulations, injury-reducing technologies, driving training program and so on. Records on traffic accidents are generated and maintained for this purpose. To make these records meaningful and effective, it is necessary to analyze relationship between traffic accident and related factors including vehicle design, road design, weather, driver behavior etc. Insight derived from these analysis can be used for accident prevention approaches. Traffic accident data mining is an activity to find useful knowledges about such relationship that is not well-known and user may interested in it. Many studies about mining accident data have been reported over the past two decades. Most of studies mainly focused on predict risk of accident using accident related factors. Supervised learning methods like decision tree, logistic regression, k-nearest neighbor, neural network are used for these prediction. However, derived prediction model from these algorithms are too complex to understand for human itself because the main purpose of these algorithms are prediction, not explanation of the data. Some of studies use unsupervised clustering algorithm to dividing the data into several groups, but derived group itself is still not easy to understand for human, so it is necessary to do some additional analytic works. Rule based learning methods are adequate when we want to derive comprehensive form of knowledge about the target domain. It derives a set of if-then rules that represent relationship between the target feature with other features. Rules are fairly easy for human to understand its meaning therefore it can help provide insight and comprehensible results for human. Association rule learning methods and subgroup discovery methods are representing rule based learning methods for descriptive task. These two algorithms have been used in a wide range of area from transaction analysis, accident data analysis, detection of statistically significant patient risk groups, discovering key person in social communities and so on. We use both the association rule learning method and the subgroup discovery method to discover useful patterns from a traffic accident dataset consisting of many features including profile of driver, location of accident, types of accident, information of vehicle, violation of regulation and so on. The association rule learning method, which is one of the unsupervised learning methods, searches for frequent item sets from the data and translates them into rules. In contrast, the subgroup discovery method is a kind of supervised learning method that discovers rules of user specified concepts satisfying certain degree of generality and unusualness. Depending on what aspect of the data we are focusing our attention to, we may combine different multiple relevant features of interest to make a synthetic target feature, and give it to the rule learning algorithms. After a set of rules is derived, some postprocessing steps are taken to make the ruleset more compact and easier to understand by removing some uninteresting or redundant rules. We conducted a set of experiments of mining our traffic accident data in both unsupervised mode and supervised mode for comparison of these rule based learning algorithms. Experiments with the traffic accident data reveals that the association rule learning, in its pure unsupervised mode, can discover some hidden relationship among the features. Under supervised learning setting with combinatorial target feature, however, the subgroup discovery method finds good rules much more easily than the association rule learning method that requires a lot of efforts to tune the parameters.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.515-523
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• 2013

The eastern coast of South Korea is expected to be damaged by volcanic ash when Mt. Baekdusan volcano erupts. Even if the amount of volcanic ash is small, it can be fatal on the agricultural sector withering many plants and causing soil acidification. Thus, in this paper, we aim to estimate agricultural losses caused by the volcanic ash and to visualize them with Google map. To estimate the volcanic ash losses, a damage assessment model is needed. As the volcanic ash hazard depends on the kind of a crops and the ash thickness, the fragility function of damage assessment model should represent the relation between ash thickness and damage rate of crops. Thus, we model the fragility function using the damage rate for each crop of RiskScape. The volcanic ash losses can be calculated with the agricultural output and the price of each crop using the fragility function. This paper also represents the estimated result of the losses in Gangwon province, which is most likely to get damaged by volcanic ashes in Korea. According to the result with gross agricultural output of Gangwon province in 2010, the amount of volcanic ash losses runs nearly 635,124 million wons in Korean currency if volcanic ash is accumulated over four millimeters. This amount represents about 50% of the gross agricultural output of Gangwon province. We consider the damage only for the crops in this paper. However, a volcanic ash fall has the potential to damage the assets for a farm, including the soil fertility and installations. Thus, to estimate the total amount of volcanic ash damage for the whole agricultural sectors, these collateral damages should also be considered.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.39-57
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• 2012

The unabated influx of micro businesses has turned the Korean retailing market to a rat race, which causes severe financial distress for micro business owners due to heavy competition. The woes of these micro business owner's are exacerbated by the presence of large scale distributors such as Super Supermarket(SSM) and large discount stores. In summary, the Korean retail market is overburdened an uneconomically viable. Retailing has low barriers to entry which attracts unskilled labor or those with little capital. These start-ups have low opportunity costs since they would make low wages elsewhere in the economy. Thus, these owners are content with relatively low returns on their investment. These 'subsistence ventures' are maintained for economical viability rather than economic growth. These 'subsistence ventures' intensifies competition among small-scale businesses. The presence of large retail corporations also aggravates the situation. The recent stagnation of the economy has worsened the retail market in Korea. The overwhelming competition solidifies the coarse structural system and the prolonged economic sluggishness has increased the risk of insolvency for micro business owners. As the economy continues to stagnate, the imminent risk in retailing market will rise up to surface threatening economic stability. More systematic inflows and outflows of retailers are required in order to redress this structural problem. It has been empirically shown that the self-employment rate is high in Korea compared to other OECD countries. To draw the comparison of self-employment rate by industry, Korea shows high rates among transportation, whole sale, retail, education, lodging, and restaurants. In the case of the transportation and education service sectors, this high rate can be explained by the idiosyncratic nature of Korean culture. In the transportation sector, political policies favor private cap service and private freight carriers. In the education service sector, Koreans put particular emphasis on education that leads to many private institutions that outnumber other OECD countries. For these singular reasons, Korea maintains high micro business, self-employed rates particularly in retailing. A comparable nation is Japan, with its similar social, economic, cultural environment among OECD countries. Unlike Korea, Japan has much lower rates of micro business which continues to decrease. Also Korean retailers are much more destitute than Japanese. The fundamental problem of Korean retailing is the involuntary exit of these 'subsistence ventures,' micro businesses with low margins, in which a small drop in demand can lead to financial difficulties for the owner. This problem will be exacerbated when Korean babyboomers retire and join the micro business ventures. The first priority in order to cope with the severity of oversupply in retailing is to provide better opportunities for the potential self-employers. There should be viable alternatives to subsistent ventures. Strengthening the retirement program, scrutiny of exit process, reconfiguration of policy funds are the recommendations.

• Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.124-143
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• 2000

Objectives：The primary purpose of this study is to understand the psychopathology of the victims of school violence in terms of early psychosis. By doing this, the early detection of psychosis among the victims is possible, and early detection may lead to early intervention. Methods：Two-thousand and nine-hundred seventy two students from 16 middle schools in Seoul were asked to fill out questionnaire comprised of popularity and intellectual and school status of Piers-Harris Children's Self Concept Inventory, Symptom Check List-90-Revised, and Ostracism Scale. The subjects whose scores upon Ostracism Scale were higher than average by two standard deviation were labeled as ‘Repelled and Isolated group', and subjects whose scores on popularity were significantly lower than average and whose scores on psychoticism of SCL-90-R were higher than average were defined as 'tentative early psychosis group'. Odds ratios were calculated from the numbers of subjects with and without high psychoticism scores and high ostracism scores. On the subjects of 'tentative early psychotic group', we examined every clinical characteristic and conducted correlation analysis and regression analysis in order to find out the risk factors and to construct theoretical model that explains the psychoticism scores. Results：The results were as follows：1) Total 157(5.3%) subjects were rated significantly higher on ostracism scale, and among them, 47 subjects(29.9%) were rated significantly higher than average on psychoticism scale, while only 50 subjects among 2,135 students who were rated within normal range showed significantly higher score on psychoticism scale. Odds ratio for psychotic group of isolated group were 17.82 and it was statistically significant. 2) Forty-seven subjects(31 boys, 16 girls) who were rated as they were unpopular and rejected from peers had significantly higher psychoticism scores. They were not significantly different from simply high psychoticism subjects in anxiety, social anhedonia scale, magical thinking, obsessivecompulsive symptoms, phobic anxiety, psychoticism, somatization, but showed higher ostracism scores and paranoid tendencies. Among school violence victims, who rated themselves unpopular and showed higher psychoticism scores, the psychoticism scores were mainly explained by anxiety, depression, hostility, interpersonal sensitivity, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, paranoid tendency, somatization scales($r^2=0.93$). Conclusion：Thus, it can be concluded that the subjects with higher ostracism score have the substantially high risk for psychosis development. By these results, we propose that school violence victims with anxiety, depression, hostility, interpersonal sensitivity, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, paranoid tendency, somatization should be tested individually considering school adjustment, attentional deficit, concept formation problems.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.147-165
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• 2009

Virtual community(VC) will increasingly be organized as commercial enterprises, with the objective of earning an attractive financial return by providing members with valuable resources and environment. For example, Cyworld.com in Korea uses several community services to enable customers of Cyworld to take control of their own value as potential purchasers of products and services. Although initial adoption is important for online network service success, it does not necessarily result in the desired managerial performance unless the initial usage is continuously related to the continuous usage and purchase. Particularly, the customer who receives relevant online services and is well equipped with online network services, will trust the online service provider and perceive less risk and experience more activities such as continuous usage and purchase. Thus, how to promote continued online service usage or, alternatively, how to prevent discontinuance is a critical issue for VC service providers to consider. By aggregating a wide range of information and online environments for customers and providing trust to its members, the service providers of virtual communities help to reduce the perceived risk of continuous usage and purchase. Drill down, online service managers realize that achieving strong and sustained customers who continuously use online service and purchase on it is crucial. Therefore, the research into this online service continuance will identify the relationship between the initial usage and the continuous usage and purchase. The research of continuous usage or post adoption has recently emerged as an important issue in the IS literature. Individuals' information systems(IS) continuous usage decisions are congruent with consumers' repeat purchase decisions. The TAM(Technology Acceptance Model) paradigm has been strongly confirmed across a wide range from product purchase on EC to online service usage contexts. The analysis of IS usage based on TAM has proven to be successful across almost online service contexts. However, most of previous studies have focused on only an area (i.e., VC or EC). Just little research has tried to analyze the relationship between VC and EC. The effect of some factors on user intention, captured through several theories such as TAM, has been demonstrated. Yet, few studies have explored the salient relationships of VC users' EC acceptance. To fill this gap between VC and EC research, this paper attempts to develop a research model that extends the TAM perspective in view of the additional contributions of trust in the service provider and trust in members on some factors that affect EC and VC adoption. In this extension, we applied the TAM-to-TAM(T2T) model, and analyzed the transfer effect of trust between these two TAMs. The research model was empirically tested on the context of a social network service. The model was to extend TAM with the trust concept for the virtual community environment from the perspective of tasks. By building an extended model of TAM and examining the relationships between trust and the existing variables of TAM, it is aimed to explain a user's continuous intention to use VC and purchase on EC. The unit of analysis in this paper is an individual user of a virtual community. The population of interest is the individual with the experiences in virtual community. The data for this paper was made available via a Web survey of VC users. In total, 281 cases were gathered for about one week, but there were some missing values in the sample and there were some inappropriate cases. Thus, only 248 cases were finally analyzed. We chose the structural equation analysis to test the hypotheses and it is better suited for explaining complex relationships than the other methods. In this test, AMOS was used to test the Structural Equation Model (SEM). Noticeable results have been found in the T2T model regarding the factors affecting the intention to use of virtual community and loyalty. Our result showed that trust transfer plays a key role in forming the two adoption beliefs. Overall, this study preliminarily confirms the salience of trust transfer in online service.

• Korean Security Journal
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• no.58
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• pp.81-106
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• 2019

This study analyzed safety management system against disasters perceived by local residents of Chungcheongbuk-do and then examined the policy directions to be considered in order for local governments to improve the safety level of residents and build an effective safety management system against disasters. The findings were as follows. First, in their recognition of risks of safety against disasters, recognition on the possibility of the occurrence of natural disasters was higher than that of social disasters or safety accidents. Secondly, also in the aspect of the importance of category of safety management against disasters, they recognized that of natural disasters far higher than others. Third, they showed satisfaction higher than average with basic job performance of local governments related with safety management, whereas they showed relatively less satisfaction with the aspects of check and publicity of risk factors, and short-term restoration system out of phased job performance. Fourth, in the aspect of capability of local governments for safety management against disasters, they rated positively capability of the responsible departments and the professionality, whereas they relatively underestimated the scale or budget of safety-related organizations. Fifth, the policy directions to be taken for safety against disasters by local governments included strengthening of regular education like experience-based training, expansion of education among local residents, more support for relevant facilities and resources, activation of residents-participating campaigns, improvement of apparatus and personnel treatment related with firefighting and security, frequent patrol and oversight, more exercises against disasters. So, to strengthen safety management system against disasters in local governments and build a effective responding system may need to extend programs assisting vulnerable class to safety against disasters, build a community-friendly safety management system, extend the cooperation system by participation of residents, enhance collaboration and support system with safety-related bodies like police, firefighters.