Eun Kyeong Cho Assistant Professor of Education, COLA, travels to South Korea

Professor Cho traveled to South Korea in summer 2011 to make a presentation at an international seminar and to meet colleagues to continue an on going collaboration with South Korean researchers at the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education (KICCE)

Potential Predictors that Influence Women to Undergo Cosmetic Surgery

There may be relationships among collectivism, self-esteem, and religiousness in relation to individual acceptance of cosmetic surgery. This present study hypothesized that both self-esteem and religiousness would be negatively correlated with individual acceptance of cosmetic surgery. It was also hypothesized that an individual with higher levels of collectivism would be more likely to show higher levels of acceptance of cosmetic surgery. A multiple regression analysis expected self-esteem, collectivism, and religiousness to be the significant predictors of the acceptance of cosmetic surgery. Questionnaire data were collected from 565 female college students from a Christian university in the southeastern United States. Based on data analyses, it was found that self-esteem and collectivism showed no significant relationships with the acceptance of cosmetic surgery. However, religiousness presented a negative correlation with the acceptance of cosmetic surgery. Moreover, religiousness was revealed to be a significant predictor of the acceptance of cosmetic surgery based on the multiple regression data analysis

Chemical Evolution in VeLLOs

A new type of object called "Very Low Luminosity Objects (VeLLOs)" has been discovered by the Spitzer Space Telescope. VeLLOs might be substellar objects forming by accretion. However, some VeLLOs are associated with strong outflows, indicating the previous existence of massive accretion. The thermal history, which significantly affects the chemistry, between substellar objects with a continuous low accretion rate and objects in a quiescent phase after massive accretion (outburst) must be greatly different. In this study, the chemical evolution has been calculated in an episodic accretion model to show that CO and N2H+ have a relation different from starless cores or Class 0/I objects. Furthermore, the CO2 ice feature at 15.2 micron will be a good tracer of the thermal process in VeLLOs.Comment: corrected e-mail addres

Concrete Static Stress Estimation Using Computer Vision-Based Digital Image Processing

Department of Urban and Environmental Engineering (Urban Infrastructure Engineering)As increasing interests about structural safety due to occasionally occurring collapse of structures and social infrastructures, efforts to identify and monitor the current state of structure are also increasing. Recently, most structures have been built of concrete, so identification of safety level of concrete structures becomes a critical issue. One of such techniques is to evaluate the current stress state in concrete. This technique is essential in various fields involved in an investigation of tensile stress of tendons in pre- and post-tensioned structures, building remodeling which needs to remove bearing walls and adds other foundations, and identification of load distribution in enlarged concrete structures. In other words, current stress level in concrete is an important factor to check the safety level of the structures in service. Although it is obvious that a technique for estimating the static stress level of concrete is essential, the method to identify the stress state of the currently used concrete structure is definitely limited. Several efforts for estimating the current stress state have been developed in previous research, including a stress-strain relationship based on elastic theory and a stress relaxation method (SRM) for concrete. These methods in the previous researches have made a certain contribution in this field but practical use in real structures is still inadequate. Therefore, an objective of this study is to develop a static stress estimation technique which can be applied to real concrete structures. This study proposes a method that can measure the static stress level of concrete by incorporating SRM and computer vision-based image processing. Applying a small damage to concrete specimen can release the current stress state and induce stress field change inside concrete around the damage. Computer vision-based measurement can measure the deformation due to this stress field change. This deformation measurement is used in the static stress estimation algorithm developed in this study. The proposed method is validated using several concrete specimens and consequently demonstrates the performance.clos

Integrated genomic and transcriptomic analyses of radiation-induced malignancies

Cancer is a genetic disease caused by an unregulated expansion of a clone of cells (Sompayrac, 2004). The genetic abnormalities in cancer are the consequences of defective DNA replication, repair, maintenance, and modification, genetic background, and exposure to mutagens (Alexandrov et al., 2013). Ionizing radiation (IR), a mutagen exposed to cancer patients during clinical radiotherapy (RT), can cause DNA damage, genomic instability, and mutagenesis (Sherborne et al., 2015). While RT has been effective in treating cancer, it increases the risk of second malignant neoplasm (SMN), a severe delayed complication associated with mainly pediatric cancer survivors many decades after the treatment of their first cancer (Robison & Hudson, 2014). As the mortality of patients with childhood cancer has been decreasing, cases of radiation-induced cancers has been increasing (Robison & Hudson, 2014). The considerable contribution by RT to SMN risk illustrate the need to characterize the genetic mechanism directly responsible for radiation-induced malignancies. To better our understanding of the mutational landscape of SMNs, our specific aims are to identify potential driver mutations implicated in radiation-induced malignancies through genome and transcriptome analysis and to assess whether genetic background, specifically germline polymorphisms and mutations in tumor suppressor gene TP53, has an impact on the formation of secondary malignancies