Work-related Attitudes of Non-regular and Regular Workers in Korea: Exploring Distributive Justice as a Mediator

Raising the timely issue of the non-regular workforce in South Korea, this article examined the degree and intensity of commitment of non-regular workers (contingent and part-time workers) to their job and organization. The results showed that both contingent and parttime workers were less committed to the organization and job than regular workers. This article showed that work status affected the individual, by influencing subjective stratum and his or her perception of distributive justice, which in turn had an impact on organizational commitment and job involvement. Finally, the article stressed that nonregular workers did not constitute a homogeneous group and that, consequently, part-time workers should be treated as distinct from other types of non-regular workers. The sociological implications of the non-regular workforce were discussed

Towards Neural Decoding of Imagined Speech based on Spoken Speech

Decoding imagined speech from human brain signals is a challenging and important issue that may enable human communication via brain signals. While imagined speech can be the paradigm for silent communication via brain signals, it is always hard to collect enough stable data to train the decoding model. Meanwhile, spoken speech data is relatively easy and to obtain, implying the significance of utilizing spoken speech brain signals to decode imagined speech. In this paper, we performed a preliminary analysis to find out whether if it would be possible to utilize spoken speech electroencephalography data to decode imagined speech, by simply applying the pre-trained model trained with spoken speech brain signals to decode imagined speech. While the classification performance of imagined speech data solely used to train and validation was 30.5 %, the transferred performance of spoken speech based classifier to imagined speech data displayed average accuracy of 26.8 % which did not have statistically significant difference compared to the imagined speech based classifier (p = 0.0983, chi-square = 4.64). For more comprehensive analysis, we compared the result with the visual imagery dataset, which would naturally be less related to spoken speech compared to the imagined speech. As a result, visual imagery have shown solely trained performance of 31.8 % and transferred performance of 26.3 % which had shown statistically significant difference between each other (p = 0.022, chi-square = 7.64). Our results imply the potential of applying spoken speech to decode imagined speech, as well as their underlying common features.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Effects of 12 weeks nutrition education on nutritional status in hemodialysis patients

Protein-energy malnutrition is present in a large proportion of patients with end stage renal disease and, is a strong risk factor for mortality in these patients. This study was aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of 12-weeks nutrition education during the hemodialysis session for the improvement of nutritional status. From the June 2011 to the September 2011, patients who were on regular hemodialysis in Pusan National University Hospital were enrolled in this study. In education group, intensive nutrition education was performed by the hemodialysis nurse, for fifty to sixty minutes during the hemodialysis session, once a week. Curriculum for renal nutrition includes regular taking of their medication, intake of moderate amount of protein and sufficient calories, reduction of water, salt, potassium and phosphate intake. Otherwise, any education program was not performed in patients of control group. Nutrition status was assessed by the subjective global assessment (SGA),body mass index (BMI), triceps skinfold thickness (TSF), arm muscle area(AMC) and laboratory markers such as serum albumin, serum blood urea nitrogen(BUN) and hemoglobin(Hb) level before and after the education. Effect of nutrition education was analyzed using ANCOVA test. A total of 49 patients were enrolled in this study and nutrition education was provided to 25 hemodialysis patients. Their mean age was 57.20±15.49 in education group and 55.13±14.42 in control groupand male was 56.0% in education group and 50.0% in control group and, other baseline characteristics were not significantly different between two groups. After the 12-week education, significant improvement was found in SGA, serum albumin, BUN and Hb level. SGA score was improved from 6.36±0.99 to 6.72±0.61 in education group, compared to control group(6.38±0.88 to 6.42±0.88, p=0.029 ). Improvement of serum albumin level, BUN and Hb was as follows: serum albumin(4.23±0.28 to 4.30±0.25 in education group, 4.28±0.39 to 4.13±0.34 in control group, p=0.040), serum Hb(10.45±1.49 to 11.13±1.74 in education group, 10.51±1.12 to 10.04±1.02 in control group, P=0.004), serum BUN(66.52±18.76 to 70.94±17.26 in education group, 59.50±13.61 to 58.68±13.88 in control group, p=0.032). 12 week nutrition education during the hemodialysis session by hemodialysis nurse was effectiv

Arctic-North Pacific Coupled Impacts on the Late Autumn Cold in North America

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is known to bring an anomalously cold (warm) period to southeastern (northwestern) North America during the cold season of its positive phase through a Rossby wave linkage. This study provides evidence that the remote connection between the North Pacific and the downstream temperature over central North America is strengthened by the warm arctic conditions over the Chukchi and East Siberian Sea, especially in the late autumn season. The modulation effect of the Arctic manifests itself as an altered Rossby wave response to a transient vorticity forcing that results from an equatorward storm track shift, which is induced collaboratively by the PDO and the warm Arctic. This observational finding is supported by two independent modeling experiments: 1) an idealized coupled GCM experiment being nudged toward the warm arctic surface condition and 2) a simple stationary wave model (SWM) experiment forced by transient eddy forcing