A Policy Entrepreneur in the Information Society: Shaping the Interdisciplinarity of Brain Research in Korea

This paper aims to show the historical contingency of policy entrepreneurship in science by analyzing the case of brain research in South Korea during the last decade of the 20th century. This decade saw an increasing emphasis placed upon the development of information technology and its use for societal changes. The rise of the “Information Society” in Korea was an important context for shaping the field of brain research as an amalgam of multiple disciplines which led to the passage of the Brain Research Promotion Act; the first law in the world enacted to promote brain research. This paper, through focusing on in what context someone takes up an entrepreneurial role, shows how the concept of interdisciplinarity has been shaped by, and how it has influenced the development of brain research and its related policy measures in Korea. It ultimately reveals the contingent and transient aspect of a policy entrepreneur and his effect on building a new field.     

From shanzhai chic to Gangnam style: seven practices of cultural-economic mediation in China and Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency.     

What Motivates Parents to Mediate Children’s Use of Smartphones? An Application of the Theory of Planned Behavior

Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study examines parents’ attitudes, social norms, self-efficacy, and intentions regarding parental mediation of children’s smartphone use. A survey conducted with parents of young smartphone users aged 10–17 shows that parents tend to perceive discussion-based active mediation to be more desirable, as compared to rule-making restrictive mediation. Findings also indicate that the extent to which parents believe that they have control over their parental mediation practices plays an important role in forming positive intentions to practice parental mediation, regardless of the mediation domain.     

DISTRIBUTIVE PARTITIONING OPERATION IN MATHEMATICAL SITUATIONS INVOLVING FRACTIONAL QUANTITIES

In the present study, we describe a participating student’s (Carol’s) distributive partitioning scheme and operations along with Steffe’s and his colleagues’ studies about children’s constructions of fraction knowledge as a particular model of mathematical learning. Analysis of Carol’s mathematical behaviors indicates that an operationally common mathematical behavior (distributive partitioning operation) was revealed in various mathematical problem situations such as fraction multiplication, fraction division, and multiplicative transformation between fractional quantities. It both provides a rationale for why becoming versed in one mathematical subject could facilitate working with another mathematical subject and also implies the necessity of describing and defining students’ mathematical behaviors from an operational view of knowledge, which might lead to building foundations of a substantial cognitive map for students’ mathematical development.     

Changes in children’s anger,sadness, and persistence across blocked goals: Implications for self-regulation

The current study took a person-centered approach to examine the heterogeneity of changes in children’s emotions and persistence during a goal-blocking task and examined how different profiles of emotions and persistence related to children’s self-regulation. Children’s anger, sadness, and persistence were rated in a goal-blocking task in toddlerhood (T1; N = 140, 72 boys, M_age = 2.67 years, 90.7% White) and preschool (T2). Children’s self-regulation, specifically sustained attention and engagement, was assessed at T1, T2, and early school-age (T3) from 2005 to 2012. Growth mixture modeling revealed two classes of children at T1 and three classes at T2 with different patterns of anger, sadness, and persistence. Children’s classification at T2, but not T1, significantly predicted their sustained attention and engagement both concurrently and longitudinally.     

Programmed sample delivery on a pressurized paper

This paper reports a method to control the fluid flow in paper-based microfluidic devices simply by pressing over the channel surface of paper, thereby decreasing the pore size and permeability of a non-woven polypropylene sheet. As a result, fluid resistance is increased in the pressed region and causes flow rate to decrease. We characterize the decrease of flow rate with respect to different amounts of pressure applied, and up to 740% decrease in flow velocity was achieved. In addition, we demonstrate flow rate control in a Y-shaped merging paper and sequential delivery of multiple color dyes in a three-branched paper. Furthermore, sequential delivery of multiple fluid samples is performed to demonstrate its application in multi-step colorimetric immunoassay, which shows a 4.3-fold signal increase via enhancement step.     

Building world-class research university: The Brain Korea 21 project

This study evaluated the effects of South Korea’s Brain Korea 21 (BK 21) project, a special research funding program designed to build world-class research university. The effects were measured by examining the frequency of article publications in SCI journals during the 1995–2005 period. The results of the analysis indicated that the growth of research publications from Korean research universities was increased significantly following the implementation of the BK 21 project in 1999. In addition, during the period under study, four research universities (Yonsei, Korea, Sungkyunkwan, and Hanyang) were newly emerged. However, the growth rate of research publications was not different from that of the US and Japan, and even less than that of China. Thus, although the BK 21 project contributed to the growth of research publications of Korean universities, the project did not lessen the gap between Korea universities and world-class research universities in the US or Japan in number of publications.     

Bromo-oxidation reaction in enzyme-entrapped alginate hollow microfibers

In this article, the authors present the fabrication of an enzyme-entrapped alginate hollow fiber using a microfluidic device. Further use of enzyme-entrapped alginate hollow fibers as a biocatalytic microchemical reactor for chemical synthesis is also deliberated in this article. To ensure that there is no enzyme leaching from the fiber, fiber surfaces were coated with chitosan. To confine the mobility of reactants and products within the porous hollow fibers the entire fibers were embedded into a transparent polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) matrix which also works as a support matrix. A vanadium-containing bromoperoxidase enzyme isolated from Corallina confusa was used as a model enzyme to demonstrate the use of these alginate hollow-fiber reactors in bromo-oxidation of phenol red to bromophenol blue at different dye flow rates. Stability of the entrapped enzyme at different temperatures and the effect of the chitosan coating on the reaction conversion were also studied. It was observed that molecules as big as 27 kDa can be retained in the matrix after coating with chitosan while molecules with molecular-weight of around 378 Da can still diffuse in and out of the matrix. The kinetic conversion rate in this microfluidic bioreactor was more than 41-fold faster when compared with the standard test-tube procedure.