The Determinants of Childbirth Grants of Local Governments in South Korea

Declining fertility is one of the top policy issues in South Korea. To increase the birth rate, the government of South Korea has been enacting several fertility encouragement polices. Although almost all of the birth encouragement policies have been led by the central government, a childbirth grant program was developed by primary local governments themselves. The grant levels vary significantly between local governments. I examine what explains the differences in the childbirth grant level by analyzing twelve years (2004-2015) of panel data with a fixed-effects model. Prior studies indicate that the extent of demand for a policy and the availability of financial resources are the main factors influencing welfare policies of South Korean local governments. From this point of view, my study focuses on population fluctuation and fiscal capacity of the local governments as the primary explanatory variables while including several socio-economic and political factors as control variables. According to my estimation results, population change has a statistically significant impact on the grant level (generosity of the grants) offered by primary local governments in the provinces while it has no significant impact in the metropolitan cites. By contrast, the fiscal capacity has a subtle impact only on the grant levels of the municipalities in the metropolitan cities. Interestingly, the grant level of nearby local governments has a positive effect both in the provinces and metropolitan cities. The results indicate the local governments in the provinces respond more sensitively to population change regardless of their fiscal capacity. Most provinces have more small municipalities facing a shrinking population compared to metropolitan cities. While the stated goal of childbirth grants is increasing births, a competition among local governments not to lose younger people to nearby local governments contributes to increasing childbirth grants. This suggests the central government intervene in the childbirth grant policy of local governments to alleviate financial burden on the small and poor local governments as well as to increase the birth rate

Recent Application of Bio-Alcohol: Bio-Jet Fuel

Recently, the biomass-based energy production has been actively studied as a research and development area for reducing carbon emissions as a solution to global warming caused by the increase of carbon dioxide emissions. Especially, as the energy consumption in the air transportation field increases, the carbon dioxide emissions increase simultaneously. Therefore, the bio-jet fuel production technology is being actively developed to solve this problem. The bio-jet fuel manufacturing process is a process of manufacturing biomass-derived jet fuel that can replace the existing petroleum-based jet fuel. It includes an alcohol-to-jet (ATJ) process using bio-alcohol such as bio-butanol and bio-ethanol, oil-to-jet (OTJ) process using vegetable oil, and an F-T process using syngas obtained from gasification of biomass-based raw materials

Nasopharynx as a Microbiologic Reservoir in Chronic Suppurative Otitis Media: Preliminary Study

ObjectivesThe present study was designed to identify the correlations of bacterial strains of the middle ear and the nasopharynx in chronic suppurative otitis media (CSOM) patients who were scheduled for operations.MethodsSixty-three patients with CSOM were enrolled in the study. Culture specimens were collected from the middle ear and nasopharynx of patients who were admitted for operation. Samples collections were performed 3 times; from the middle ear and nasophaynx at the admission day, from the middle ear during the operation, and from the external auditory canal post-operatively. Bacteria were identified by gram staining and biochemical tests. The correspondence rate of organisms which simultaneously exist in the middle ear and the nasopharynx was measured.ResultsSixty-eight organisms were isolated from the middle ear and 57 organisms from the nasopharynx among 63 patients. Of 68 bacteria identified in middle ear, 26.52% (18 bacteria) corresponded with those of nasopharynx. MRSA had the high correspondence rate, and of 18 methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolated from middle ear, 33.3% (6 bacteria) corresponded with nasophaynx. Meanwhile, 3 organisms of MRSA were detected from the external auditory canal post-operatively, although they were only found in nasopharynx pre-operatively.ConclusionThe current trend of middle ear swab alone for bacterial detection would be insufficient to identify the potent MRSA and impede early antibiotic intervention for the effective middle ear surgery. Therefore, it is necessary to perform nasopharynx cultures together with conventional middle ear culture to control potent risk for infection pre-operatively

Zoom-SVD: Fast and Memory Efficient Method for Extracting Key Patterns in an Arbitrary Time Range

Given multiple time series data, how can we efficiently find latent patterns in an arbitrary time range? Singular value decomposition (SVD) is a crucial tool to discover hidden factors in multiple time series data, and has been used in many data mining applications including dimensionality reduction, principal component analysis, recommender systems, etc. Along with its static version, incremental SVD has been used to deal with multiple semi infinite time series data and to identify patterns of the data. However, existing SVD methods for the multiple time series data analysis do not provide functionality for detecting patterns of data in an arbitrary time range: standard SVD requires data for all intervals corresponding to a time range query, and incremental SVD does not consider an arbitrary time range. In this paper, we propose Zoom-SVD, a fast and memory efficient method for finding latent factors of time series data in an arbitrary time range. Zoom-SVD incrementally compresses multiple time series data block by block to reduce the space cost in storage phase, and efficiently computes singular value decomposition (SVD) for a given time range query in query phase by carefully stitching stored SVD results. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Zoom-SVD is up to 15x faster, and requires 15x less space than existing methods. Our case study shows that Zoom-SVD is useful for capturing past time ranges whose patterns are similar to a query time range.Comment: 10 pages, 2018 ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2018

Design principles for transforming making programs into online settings at public libraries

Purpose This paper aims to investigate design principles for transforming existing making communities of practice within public libraries into online knowledge-building communities to support youths, families with young children and adult members’ making and tinkering during COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach Building upon C4P and connected learning framework, the authors analyze existing literature and practitioner reports on informal learning projects related to making and STEM learning, family learning and online learning as well as emergent cases of innovative approaches in response to COVID-19 from public libraries, informal learning institutions and community groups. Findings The authors suggest 11 design principles around five areas: program design, facilitation, tools and materials, process documentation and sharing and feedback. Originality/value This work contributes to the information and learning sciences concerned with community engagement and knowledge creation by suggesting a design model to transform and sustain existing making communities of practice within public libraries into online knowledge-building communities during COVID-19