The Influence of Sense of School Community on Korean Students’ Life Satisfaction and Comparison of Sense of Community for Students’ Gender and High School Specialties

The purpose of this study was to compare the sense of community of South Korean high school students as measured by a Korean version of the Sense of Community Index 2 (KSCI2) and examine the effect of two factors of the KSCI2, reinforcement of needs and influence, on students’ life satisfaction as measured by the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS). A total of 375 Korean high school students provided usable data from three vocational high schools specializing in agriculture, electronics and engineering, and business and marketing, and one Meister high school specializing in automotive. Descriptive statistics, independent t-test, one-way ANOVA, and path analysis with structural equation modeling (SEM), were performed to analyze data. Findings suggested that there were statistically significant differences in reinforcement of needs, influence, and life satisfaction, for the gender of students and school specialties. First, male students scored higher than female students on reinforcement of needs and influence. Next, male students were more satisfied with their lives than female students. For reinforcement of needs, students specializing in automotive scored higher than those specializing in business and marketing. For influence, students specializing in automotive scored higher than those specializing in all the other three specialties. Finally, both factors of reinforcement of needs and influence had positive effects on students’ life satisfaction. Implications and suggestions for further studies are discussed

Localizome: a server for identifying transmembrane topologies and TM helices of eukaryotic proteins utilizing domain information

The Localizome server predicts the transmembrane (TM) helix number and TM topology of a user-supplied eukaryotic protein and presents the result as an intuitive graphic representation. It utilizes hmmpfam to detect the presence of Pfam domains and a prediction algorithm, Phobius, to predict the TM helices. The results are combined and checked against the TM topology rules stored in a protein domain database called LocaloDom. LocaloDom is a curated database that contains TM topologies and TM helix numbers of known protein domains. It was constructed from Pfam domains combined with Swiss-Prot annotations and Phobius predictions. The Localizome server corrects the combined results of the user sequence to conform to the rules stored in LocaloDom. Compared with other programs, this server showed the highest accuracy for TM topology prediction: for soluble proteins, the accuracy and coverage were 99 and 75%, respectively, while for TM protein domain regions, they were 96 and 68%, respectively. With a graphical representation of TM topology and TM helix positions with the domain units, the Localizome server is a highly accurate and comprehensive information source for subcellular localization for soluble proteins as well as membrane proteins. The Localizome server can be found at

Trends and educational variation in the association between spouses' marital histories in South Korea, 1993-2017

Background: Marriages between divorced and never-married individuals indicate a society's openness to divorce and have implications for children's well-being. Few studies have examined the association between spouses' marital histories, its educational variation, and the trends therein outside of the United States. Objective: Little is known about trends in assortative mating by marital history in more traditional societies, where stigma against divorce often remains. This study examined the changing patterns of assortative mating by marital history in South Korea across 25 single-year marriage cohorts, 1993-2017. Methods: Calculating the odds ratios from two-by-two marriage tables classifying spouses' marital histories and also applying individual-level logistic regression models to 7,451,399 marriages formed from 1993 to 2017, we investigated trends in the association between spouses' marital histories. We further explored heterogeneity in the strength of the association between spouses' marital histories and its trends over time by spouses' educational combinations. Results: The association between spouses' marital histories has declined over time across all educational groups. However, crossing boundaries of marital history is most difficult in marriages where the man and woman are both college-educated and is easiest in marriages where the man and woman are both non-college-educated. Contribution: We document the trends in marital history homogamy (which has not received much attention in the literature) in Korea, with distinctive contexts of divorce and remarriage. Presenting educational patterns in the association between spouses' marital histories is another contribution

Investigating Influence of Hydrological Regime on Organic Matters Characteristic in a Korean Watershed

Source tracking of dissolved organic matter (DOM) is important to manage water quality in rivers. However, it is difficult to find the source of this DOM because various DOMs can be added from the river watershed. Moreover, the DOM composition can be changed due to environmental conditions. This study investigated the change of organic matter characteristics in the Taewha River of Ulsan City, Korea, before and after rainfall. A Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was used to simulate water flow from various sources, and dissolved organic matter characterization was conducted in terms of molecular size distribution, hydrophobicity, fluorescence excitation and emission, and molecular composition. From the results, it was found that lateral flow transported hydrophobic and large-molecule organic matter after rainfall. According to the orbitrap mass spectrometer analysis, the major molecular compound of the DOM was lignin. Coupling the SWAT model with organic matter characterization was an effective approach to find sources of DOM in river

An Integrative Remote Sensing Application of Stacked Autoencoder for Atmospheric Correction and Cyanobacteria Estimation Using Hyperspectral Imagery

Hyperspectral image sensing can be used to effectively detect the distribution of harmful cyanobacteria. To accomplish this, physical- and/or model-based simulations have been conducted to perform an atmospheric correction (AC) and an estimation of pigments, including phycocyanin (PC) and chlorophyll-a (Chl-a), in cyanobacteria. However, such simulations were undesirable in certain cases, due to the difficulty of representing dynamically changing aerosol and water vapor in the atmosphere and the optical complexity of inland water. Thus, this study was focused on the development of a deep neural network model for AC and cyanobacteria estimation, without considering the physical formulation. The stacked autoencoder (SAE) network was adopted for the feature extraction and dimensionality reduction of hyperspectral imagery. The artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector regression (SVR) were sequentially applied to achieve AC and estimate cyanobacteria concentrations (i.e., SAE-ANN and SAE-SVR). Further, the ANN and SVR models without SAE were compared with SAE-ANN and SAE-SVR models for the performance evaluations. In terms of AC performance, both SAE-ANN and SAE-SVR displayed reasonable accuracy with the Nash???Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) > 0.7. For PC and Chl-a estimation, the SAE-ANN model showed the best performance, by yielding NSE values > 0.79 and > 0.77, respectively. SAE, with fine tuning operators, improved the accuracy of the original ANN and SVR estimations, in terms of both AC and cyanobacteria estimation. This is primarily attributed to the high-level feature extraction of SAE, which can represent the spatial features of cyanobacteria. Therefore, this study demonstrated that the deep neural network has a strong potential to realize an integrative remote sensing application

GS2PATH: A web-based integrated analysis tool for finding functional relationships using gene ontology and biochemical pathway data

GS2PATH is a Web-based pipeline tool to permit functional enrichment of a given gene set from prior knowledge databases, including gene ontology (GO) database and biological pathway databases. The tool also provides an estimation of gene set enrichment, in GO terms, from the databases of the KEGG and BioCarta pathways, which may allow users to compute and compare functional over-representations. This is especially useful in the perspective of biological pathways such as metabolic, signal transduction, genetic information processing, environmental information processing, cellular process, disease, and drug development. It provides relevant images of biochemical pathways with highlighting of the gene set by customized colors, which can directly assist in the visualization of functional alteration

Renal Artery Embolization Using a New Liquid Embolic Material Obtained by Partial Hydrolysis of Polyvinyl Acetate (Embol): Initial Experience in Six Patients

Objective To evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of a new liquid embolic material, Embol, in embolization of the renal artery. Materials and Methods Embol is a new embolic material obtained by partial hydrolysis of polyvinyl acetate mixed in absolute ethanol and Iopromide 370 and manufactured by Schering Korea, Kyonggido, Korea. Six patients who underwent embolization of the renal artery using Embol were evaluated. Four were male and two were female and their ages ranged from 11 to 70 (mean, 53) years. Clinical and radiologic diagnoses referred for renal artery embolization were renal cell carcinoma (n = 3), renal angiomyolipoma (n = 2) and pseudoaneurysm of the renal artery (n = 1). After selective renal angiography, Embol was injected through various catheters, either with or without a balloon occlusion catheter. Changes in symptoms and blood chemistry which may have been related to renal artery embolization with Embol were analyzed. Results The six patients showed immediate total occlusion of their renal vascular lesions. One of the three in whom renal cell carcinoma was embolized with Embol underwent radical nephrectomy, and the specimen thus obtained revealed 40% tumor necrosis. In the two patients with angiomyolipomas, the tumors decreased in size and abdominal pain subsided. Bleeding from pseudoaneurysm of the renal artery was successfully controlled. Four patients showed symptoms of post-embolization syndrome, and one of these also showed increased levels of blood urea nitrogen and creatinine. One patient experienced transient hypertension. Conclusion Embol is easy to use, its radiopacity is adequate and it is a safe and effective embolic material which provides immediate and total occlusion of renal vascular lesions.ope