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Purpose: Rare diseases necessitate consistent access to specialized health services. In Korea, despite the growing socioeconomic burden, insufficient comprehensive research is available on patients with rare diseases and their families, particularly concerning factors influencing the length of time to diagnosis. The aim of this study was to thoroughly characterize rare pediatric diseases and explore factors impacting the diagnostic odyssey. Methods: The study enrolled patients under 15 years old seeking medical care at the Seoul National University Children’s Hospital Rare Disease Center between January 2022 and December 2023. Participating patients were required to have been diagnosed with one of the 1,248 rare diseases recognized in Korea. A 33-question survey was developed to assess clinical features of the patients, characteristics of their primary caregivers, and their perceptions of ongoing medical care. Results: The study included 101 patients and their families. Regarding perceived cognitive and motor functions, most families indicated moderate or severe limitations (cognitive, 62.4%; motor, 57.4%). Over half of the families (53.5%) reported discontinuing employment to provide patient care. Neurological symptoms represented the most common initial chief concern, with dermatologic symptoms and laboratory test abnormalities also noted. Three factors were associated with time to diagnosis: the number of hospitals visited, whether the districts of residence and diagnosis aligned, and the age at symptom onset. Conclusion: The comprehensive characterization of patients with rare diseases and their families in Korea, along with the identification of factors impacting the diagnostic odyssey, provides key insights for the development of a tailored support system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critical mapping of Korean feminist documentary practices in the twentyfirst century, with emphasis on films made since the mid-2010s. The study is grounded in a distinction between the documentaries before and after this period in terms of the feminist politics and the social actors that these films address and engage. In so doing, it argues for three implications of twenty-first century Korean feminist documentary cinema as follows: first, rather than remaining with little remarkable change, the activist tradition of Korean independent documentary has been renewed and revamped in its continual intersections with the shifting social movements for women's rights; second, since the mid-2010s, the agendas of feminist documentary have been diversified to the extent that they include not simply the lives and voices of disenfranchised women as a key social subject of traditional activist filmmaking before that period, but also the corporeal and affective dimensions of women's identity, such as abortion and menstruation, and their relation to women's sociality; and finally, in dialogue with this differentiation of feminist issues, the modes and styles of documentary filmmaking have been so varied that they embrace reenactment, urban ethnography, personal documentary, and the filmmaker's presence in the text. This is particularly evident in the corpus of Kangyu Garam, a younger-generation woman documentarian who has prolifically demonstrated her authorship with her middle-length and feature-length documentaries devoted to portraying and recording the space and time of various women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a theoretical contribution by providing clear and detailed derivation of economic agents’ decision problems including elastic labor supply in Gertler’s overlapping generation (OLG) model. We apply the model to the Korean economy by calibration based on Korean economic data. It also analyzes the impact of current social issues such as aging and extension of retirement age, on the Korean economy in a long-run equilibrium. Subsequently, we also discuss the implications of the analysis. Aging has prolonged the period of retirement; therefore, population structure changes by the increase in the proportion of retirees, the total consumption-toGDP ratio decreases, and capital stock increases due to reduced propensity to consume out of wealth in preparation for an individual’s retirement life. The implementation of retirement age extension increases the proportion of retirees relatively less and alleviates fluctuations in labor supply and the share of financial assets for both economic agents. However, the decrements in consumption-to-GDP ratio is larger than before, and this leads to a larger rise in the capital stock compared to when there is only an aging effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preparations for the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008 involved the large-scale demolition of dilapidated houses in the old towns of Seoul and Beijing and the forced relocation of their residents as the urban poor. Two activist video documentaries in South Korea and China, Kim Dong-won's Sanggye-dong Olympics (1988), Seoul, South Korea, Purn-yeongsang) and Ou Ning's Meishi Street (2006), Beijing, China, Alternative Archive), bear witness to those detrimental effects that the urban transformation linked to the two cities' hosting of the Olympics had on their communities. This article examines the ways in which the two film-makers used the capacities of video technology, such as spontaneity and portability, and the relative ease with which the amateur can access and handle it, to capture the truth of demolition and relocation in the observational, realist aesthetics, and to develop alternative modes of documentary subjectivity for representing the poor residents' embodied knowledge and emotion. The use of an amateurish female voice-over in Sanggye-dong Olympics, and the casting of a male resident as an amateur documentarian who operates a video camera in Meishi Street testify to the extent to which video technology enabled the film-makers to develop the 'participatory' and 'performative' modes of documentary in which the residents could be empowered to speak for themselves. It is through the modes of subjectivity, this article argues, that the two political documentaries succeed in bringing into the public consciousness the interests and issues of the social actors who are neglected by the host countries' official media and authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the ideological implications of Nambowon (‘the Committee for Men's Rights’), one of the most popular sketches in a live comedy series entitled Gag Concert in Korea. The sketch humorously criticizes women who take advantage of men in various situations and always ends with a funny slogan demanding equal rights for men and the end of reverse gender discrimination. We treat Nambowon not as an idiosyncratic text but as part of Korean television programs that portray the rising social status of women as well as gender differences. Previous studies of gender and comedy have typically focused on textual meanings, and relatively little work exists to explain the audience's reception. Thus, we explore why audiences enjoy the show and whether and why there are differences in the reactions of male and female viewers to the portrayal of gender in Nambowon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the effects of supportive learning culture, team creativity, and collaborative knowledge creating practices on team performance. A survey was used to collect data from a total of 228 knowledge workers from nine Korean organizations. Analyses included measuring item internal consistency, validating proposed constructs, and examining structural relationships using Structural Equation Modelling. The proposed research model was validated in terms of item internal consistency and a model-fit in the Korean business context. Supportive learning culture had a positive and direct influence on team creativity and on the teams' collaborative knowledge creation practices; however, it had an indirect influence on the team performance through the variables of team creativity and knowledge creation practices. In the conclusion, limitations, implications, and further research suggestions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research, data collected from 633 participants were used to assess the influence of learning culture on the perceived knowledge conversion process in Korean for profit organizations. The seven dimensions of the learning organization (Watkins and Marsick 1993, 1996) served as exogenous variables; four modes of the knowledge conversion SECI theory - socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization - were endogenous variables (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995). Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to measure the influential relationships among the four modes of the knowledge conversion process and the impact of cultural aspects of learning organization on the overall process. Supplemental analysis techniques were utilized, including confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for construct validation and canonical correlation analysis (CCA) for the relationship among the sets of each variable. Results confirmed the positive influence of the learning organization culture on the overall process of knowledge conversion. The most powerful direct impacts of learning culture were found in the knowledge combination and socialization modes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is considered as fundamentally new image modality having advantages such as high-speed, real-time cross sectional imaging with non-invasive in vivo investigation of biological tissue and its potential for clinical application is highly evaluated. In spite of these merits, the research activity in OCT has not taken much attention until recently. However the situation in Korea is gradually changing due to understanding of its versatile-applications. Active research and Commercialization are underway. Bulk optics-based OCT system is changed into align-free fiber-optics system. With our expertise in the fabrication of fiber grating devices and strong background in control of fiber based system, we hope to contribute in developing simplified all-fiber OCT system with better performance. As a leading research group, working on OCT, we have firstly implemented fiber-based OCT system in Korea and demonstrated the imaging performance with glass plate and onion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the feasibility and efficacy of dose escalation using three-dimensional (3-D) conformal boost technique, 21 patients with stage III or IV nasopharyngeal cancer were enrolled in a prospective protocol. All patients with node metastases initially received external radiotherapy by conventional technique up to 70.2 Gy, followed by 3-D conformal radiotherapy (3-D CRT) to the boost part up to 79.2 Gy with 9 Gy increments (daily fraction of 1.8 Gy for 5 days). A modified technique with the same dose escalation of 9 Gy using 3-D CRT was applied to 7 patients without node metastases, who were treated by conventional technique up to 54 Gy, followed by 3-D CRT to boost up to a basic dose of 70.2 Gy, and then finally with dose escalation of 9 Gy. The protocol was relatively well tolerated by the majority of patients. Acute complications during the dose escalation schedule was low, with rare occurrences of grade 3 or 4 toxicity. Although late radiation-induced complications also appeared limited, 1 patient developed a temporal lobe necrosis and 2 patients suffered from sensory-neural hearing loss. There were no radiation-induced fatal complications. At a median follow-up of 48 months, only 3 patients experienced local failure and 2 patients developed distant metastases. The 5-year overall actuarial survival rate and recurrencefree survival rate for all patients were 68% and 85%, respectively. On the basis of acceptable morbidity and encouraging treatment results, we conclude that the dose escalation in 9 Gy increments using a 3-D conformal boost technique is relatively safe and efficacious, enough to be used routinely for locally advanced nasopharyngeal cancers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies indicated that heavy rainfall (>10 mm/h) over the Korean peninsula is characterized by two rain types; cold-type vs. warm-type, which are featured by strong updraft, high cloud top altitude, and large amount of ice crystal, vs. lower cloud top height and more of liquid water. In this study, for evaluating UM heavy rainfall forecasts for different rain types over the Korean peninsula, heavy rain events occurred over the Korean Peninsula during the summer of 2012-2016 period were classified into two types (i.e. cold-type vs. warm-type), by using AWS (Automated Weather Station) rain gage data and IMPACT·LDAR II (Improved Accuracy from Combined Technology·Lightning Detection And Range II) lightening data. By doing that, 78 cold-type cases and 164 warm-type cases were noted Using classified heavy rain cases, we first evaluated the performance of UM rainfall forecasts for each rain type against AWS rain gage data. For the comparison, UM rainfall and AWS rain gage data were collocated at area mean grid of 0.25˚ x 0.25˚ over the peninsula. The calculated threat score, false alarm ratio and probability of detection values indicate that UM forecasts better for the warm-type rainfall, in comparison to the performance for cold-type rainfall. Quantitative evaluation of UM rainfall forecast also shows that warm-type UM rainfall forecasts are better than cold-type forecasts, partly because of severe underestimate of cold-type rainfall. It is thought that such underestimates are partly due to the current UM model capability which may not properly simulate short-living smaller-scale cold type rain system, due to the coarser spatial and temporal resolutions. On the other hand, considering that the warm-type is closely linked to the large-scale synoptic forcing, it is not surprising to find that the same UM model better forecasts the warm-type heavy rainfall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]