New Korean Cinema: Mourning to Regeneration

The past two decades saw Korean cinema establishing itself as one of the most vibrant national cinemas in the world. Scholars have often sought clues in democratization in the early 1990s. Yet, the overall condition of Korean cinema had remained hardly promising until the late 1990s, which urges us to rethink the euphoria over democratization. In an effort to find a better account for its stunning and provocative revival, this dissertation challenges the custom of associating the resurgence of Korean cinema with democratization and contends that Korean cinema has gained its novelty and vitality, above all, by confronting the abortive nature of democratic transitions. The overarching concern of this study is thus elucidating the piquant tastes of the thematics and the styles Korean cinema has developed to articulate public discontents with recent historical changes. Chapter one revisits the New Wave era (the late 1980s to the early 1990s) and employs the notion of ssitkim (mourning) to probe how New Wave filmmakers maneuvered between legacies of the democracy movement and public/industrial demands and between historical trauma and rapid changes in the wake of democratization. Chapter two discusses Korean cinema’s reorientations in the second half of the 1990s through films by Lee Chang-dong and Hong Sang-soo. Lee’s investment in the non-linear time narrative offers a notable instance of renegotiations over national history at a time of troubled historical transition. Hong’s rediscovery of everyday life without good sense and depth presents an eloquent commentary on the post-epic milieu. Chapter three adopts Deleuze’s notion of the originary to explain how the revenge narrative and the theme of violence in Park Chan-wook’s films provide a significant critique of the democratized and neo-liberalizing milieu where the faculty of action becomes further frustrated. Chapter four looks to the Manchurian Western, a vernacular hybrid film genre, to investigate how the Western has been integral part of sociocultural formations in South Korea and thereby to demonstrate the need to step beyond restrictive frameworks such as historical and cultural authenticity for a greater understanding of the complex dynamic in transnational uses of popular genres

Robust Kernel-based Feature Representation for 3D Point Cloud Analysis via Circular Graph Convolutional Network

Feature descriptors of point clouds are used in several applications, such as registration and part segmentation of 3D point clouds. Learning discriminative representations of local geometric features is unquestionably the most important task for accurate point cloud analyses. However, it is challenging to develop rotation or scale-invariant descriptors. Most previous studies have either ignored rotations or empirically studied optimal scale parameters, which hinders the applicability of the methods for real-world datasets. In this paper, we present a new local feature description method that is robust to rotation, density, and scale variations. Moreover, to improve representations of the local descriptors, we propose a global aggregation method. First, we place kernels aligned around each point in the normal direction. To avoid the sign problem of the normal vector, we use a symmetric kernel point distribution in the tangential plane. From each kernel point, we first projected the points from the spatial space to the feature space, which is robust to multiple scales and rotation, based on angles and distances. Subsequently, we perform graph convolutions by considering local kernel point structures and long-range global context, obtained by a global aggregation method. We experimented with our proposed descriptors on benchmark datasets (i.e., ModelNet40 and ShapeNetPart) to evaluate the performance of registration, classification, and part segmentation on 3D point clouds. Our method showed superior performances when compared to the state-of-the-art methods by reducing 70$\%$ of the rotation and translation errors in the registration task. Our method also showed comparable performance in the classification and part-segmentation tasks with simple and low-dimensional architectures.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

I-gel as a first-line airway device in the emergency room for patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest

Aim. The optimal method for advanced airway management during cardiac arrest remains controversial. Most patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) in Korea are managed with a bag-valve mask by paramedics, while physicians perform advanced airway management in emergency departments (ED). Endotracheal intubation (ETI) has a risk of failure at the first attempt. By contrast, I-gel, a supraglottic airway device, is easier to insert than an endotracheal tube and shows a higher first-attempt success rate than ETI in out-of-hospital settings by paramedics in the United States. We reviewed the use of ETI and I-gel by ED physicians to assess the first attempt success rate in a hospital setting. Methods. We conducted a retrospective chart review of patients with non-traumatic OHCA who were managed with either ETI using a Macintosh laryngoscope, or I-gel in the ED of Korean hospital from January 2012 to January 2014. Results. Of 322 adult patients with non-traumatic OHCA, 160 received I-gel and 162 received ETI. The first-attempt success rate was higher in the I-gel group (96.9%) than in the ETI group (84.6%, p < 0.001). The time from arrival to obtaining advanced airway management was shorter in the I-gel group than in the ETI group. Conclusions. I-gel showed a better first-attempt success rate and shorter insertion time compared with ETI when performed by physicians in a hospital setting

Pseudo-no-Reflow Phenomenon in Carotid Artery Stenting using FilterWire EX: Successful Recovery by Aspiration Thrombectomy

Distal protection devices such as FilterWire EX have been widely used in carotid artery stenting, however, the large amount of atherothrombotic debris entrapped in the filter could reduce or stop antegrade flow. We present a case of pseudo-no-reflow phenomenon after postdilatation of the stent in a patient with asymptomatic carotid artery stenosis. After several passes using an Export Aspiration catheter, normal flow in the internal carotid artery was restored. Aspiration thrombectomy can successfully recover pseudo-no-reflow phenomenon

Effects of Substrate to Inoculum Ratio on the Biochemical Methane Potential of Piggery Slaughterhouse Wastes

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of substrate to inoculum ratio (S/I ratio) on the biochemical methane potential (BMP) and anaerobic biodegradability (Ddeg) of different piggery slaughterhouse wastes, such as piggery blood, intestine residue, and digestive tract content. These wastes were sampled from a piggery slaughterhouse located in Kimje, South Korea. Cumulative methane production curves for the wastes were obtained from the anaerobic batch fermentation having different S/I ratios of 0.1, 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5. BMP and anaerobic biodegradabilities (Ddeg) of the wastes were calculated from cumulative methane production data for the tested conditions. At the lowest S/I ration of 0.1, BMPs of piggery blood, intestine residue, and digestive tract content were determined to be 0.799, 0.848, and 1.076 Nm3 kg−1-VSadded, respectively, which were above the theoretical methane potentials of 0.539, 0.644, and 0.517 Nm3 kg−1-VSadded for blood, intestine residue, and digestive tract content, respectively. However, BMPs obtained from the higher S/I ratios of 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 were within the theoretical range for all three types of waste and were not significantly different for the different S/I ratios tested. Anaerobic biodegradabilities calculated from BMP data showed a similar tendency. These results imply that, for BMP assay in an anaerobic reactor, the S/I ratio of anaerobic reactor should be above 0.1 and the inoculum should be sufficiently stabilized to avoid further degradation during the assay