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Zoysiagrass (Zoysia spp.) has excellent turf quality and can be applied to various uses for personal space to public sports areas or commercial landscapes. However, it has disadvantages such as slow growth rate, cold hardiness, low seed yield, and hard to establish from seeds, which cannot be improved with agricultural practices. Therefore, breeding a new cultivar as a hybrid could be an efficient strategy to improve the Zoysiagrass cultivar. In fact, hybrid zoysiagrass shows mixed traits of both parents in morphology and heterosis in growth. However, inflorescence appearance and its rate are known to make a hybrid. Thus, the variety of inflorescence appearance timing and production rate were investigated among 549 genetic resources. As a result, only 5.38% of the variety among survived zoysiagrass after transplanting showed more than 30% inflorescence appearance within the given period. During that, some varieties showed a reduction of total inflorescence. Hence, we report the diversity of inflorescence appearance timing and production rate that could be useful for breeders and researchers breeding new Zoysiagrass cultivars.

There are many applications of image-based analysis for phenotyping agronomic traits. However, they are inappropriate or difficult to operate due to lack of time, equipment, and financial limits. In this report, we demonstrate fast and reliable phenotyping methods to screen drought tolerance in soybeans (Glycine max L.) using the green area of the canopy from the image sensor. Vertical images obtained from the commercial digital camera and processed on free software called Canopeo were used for initial screening for drought stress evaluation. As a result, this method positively correlated with the number of nodes, which is the indicator of the yield components. It also showed that the green area of the canopy has significantly been affected by drought, and varieties than the number of nodes. This simple method using the digital images obtained in a cost-effective manner would be useful for initial drought evaluations.

The FX (Foreign Exchange) is a form of exchange for the global decentralized trading of international currencies. The simple sense of Forex is simultaneous purchase and sale of the currency or the exchange of one country`s currency for other countries`. We can find the consistent rules of trading by comparing the gradient boosting method and the decision trees methods. Methods such as time series analysis used for the prediction of financial markets have advantage of the long-term forecasting model. On the other hand, it is difficult to reflect the rapidly changing price fluctuations in the short term. Therefore, in this study, gradient boosting method and decision tree method are applied to analyze the short-term data in order to make the rules for the revenue structure of the FX market and evaluated the stability and the prediction of the model.

When we evaluate prospective students in the interview process, we have to implement a system in which each student can be fairly judged. This process, the standardization of the scores which the interviewers have produced based on a student`s performance, is implemented to ensure that each student receives a score that objectively translates one`s performance. Although we don`t know exactly how effective the standardization is in many different cases, we have researched which standardization methods are most stable and have minimum risks among the four methods such as STD, Range, MAD and IQR. These methods use scales such as standard deviation, range, maximum median and interquartile range.

Combined hepatocellular carcinoma and cholangiocarcinoma (combined HCC-CC) is a rare subtype of primary liver cancer. We investigated the histopathologic features of transitional or intermediate areas in 21 combined HCC-CCs and immunophenotypes using different hepatic progenitor cell markers (CK7, CK19, c-kit, NCAM, and EpCAM). Major histologic findings of transitional or intermediate areas of 21 combined HCC-CCs included strands/trabeculae of small, uniform, oval-shaped cells with scant cytoplasm and hyperchromatic nuclei embedded within an abundant stroma, small cells with an antler-like anastomosing pattern, and solid nests of intermediate hepatocyte-like cells surrounded by small cells in periphery, in order of frequency. The intermediate area of one tumor was composed predominantly of spindle cells arranged in short fascicles. Immunophenotype of tumor cells with intermediate morphology suggested a progenitor cell origin for this tumor. Clinical findings of combined HCC-CC showed a closer resemblance with those of HCC than those of CC. In univariate analysis, tumor size, TNM stage, and serum alpha-fetoprotein levels showed a significant association with poor patient survival. Serum alpha-fetoprotein level was an independent prognostic indicator in multivariate analysis. In conclusion, an awareness of the clinicopathologic features, specifically the various morphologic features of intermediate areas in this tumor, is essential for prevention of potential misdiagnosis as another tumor.