Eun Jin Han

Trend analysis of academic research and technical development pertaining to gas hydrates

Recently, many countries have shown considerable interest in gas hydrates as an alternative energy source and have conducted many studies for exploring, drilling, and producing gas hydrates. In this paper, we investigate international R&D trend in gas hydrates in order to provide research direction by applying text clustering to the published papers and patent documents. In particular, our study examines research in the United States, where the most active research has been undertaken; Japan, a country that leads in technological development; and China, which has enormous resources of gas hydrates. This study delineates these countries’ expertise and changing R&D trends in gas hydrates. Our findings can provide insights for academic research and technical development regarding gas hydrates.

Spatial association of public sports facilities with body mass index in Korea

Governments and also local councils create and enforce their own regional public health care plans for the problem of overweight and obesity in the population. Public sports facilities can help these plans. In this paper, we investigated the contribution of public sports facilities to the reduction of the obesity of local residents. We used the data obtained from the Fifth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys; and measured the degree of obesity using body mass index (BMI). We conducted various spatial regression analyses including the global Morans I test and local indicators of spatial autocorrelation analysis finding that there exists spatial dependence in the error term of spatial regression model for BMI. However, we also observed that the number of local public sports facilities is not significantly related to local BMI. This result can be caused by the low utilization ratio and an unbalanced spatial distribution of local public sports facilities. Based on our findings, we suggest that local councils need to improve the quality of public sports facilities encouraging the establishment of preferred types of pubic sports facilities.