This article compares the labor market policies (LMPs) of South Korea and Taiwan to explore the activation approaches in East Asia. These two countries took divergent paths to activation after the 1990s, and their decisive differences lay in the scale of direct job creation program as compared to vocational training and employment services. Diverse socioeconomic contexts and democratic landscapes further shaped the activation repertoires available to the governments of both countries. We explain, however, this divergence chiefly through political competition employing not only programmatic but also nonprogrammatic measures, in which incumbent governments provide specific LMP measures in exchange for political support from their constituencies. Additionally, economic crises and political instability molded the diverse evolution of each country's LMP. This study contributes to the understanding of the changing dynamics of East Asian social policies and highlights the circumstances that lead to policy changes.

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Recent studies have revealed that the composition of human gut microbiota varies according to region, race, age, diet, living environment, and sampling and DNA extraction method. The purpose of this study was to broaden our understanding of the intestinal microbial composition of Koreans by conducting a 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing on 78 Korean samples composed of adults, children, normal and obese groups. We compared the microbiome composition and diversity of these groups at different levels including the phylum and genus level using two different stool DNA extraction kits of QIAamp® PowerFecal® DNA Kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany) and CT Max Fecal DNA Kit (Ct bio, Korea). We found that Ct bio (Ct) kit recovered higher DNA yields and OTUs than QIAamp® PowerFecal® DNA Kit (Qia). The Ct kit, which adopted more rigorous bead beating method, detected the most Gram-positive (G+) bacteria, Firmicutes, at the Phylum level, whereas the Qia kit, which used a less rigorous cell lysis method, found the most Gram-negative (G-) bacteria, Bacteroidetes. The Firmicutes-to-Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio showed no significant difference between the obese and the normal groups of same kit; however, they were significantly different with two different kits. There was a difference in the intestinal flora between healthy Korean adults and children. The taxa that differed significantly between the adults and children were Bacteroides, Bifidobacterium, Prevotella, and Subdoligranulum. There was no significant difference in the intestinal flora between the normal weight group and the obese group in adults and children, respectively. This is probably because the difference in body mass index (BMI) between the sample groups collected in this study is statistically significant, but it is not large enough to show a clear difference in the flora. Therefore, these results should be interpreted with caution while considering the BMI values and Korean obesity criterion together.

Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) present a potential of high compute throughput with energy efficiency. A CGRA consists of an array of Functional Units (FUs), which communicate with each other through an interconnect network containing transmission nodes and register files. To achieve high performance from the software solutions mapped onto CGRAs, modulo scheduling of loops is generally employed. One of the key challenges in modulo scheduling for CGRAs is to explicitly handle routings of operands from a source to a destination operations through various routing resources. Existing modulo schedulers for CGRAs are slow because finding a valid routing is generally a searching problem over a large space, even with the guidance of well-defined cost metrics. Applications in traditional embedded multimedia domains are regarded as relatively tolerant to a slow compile time in exchange for a high-quality solution. However, many rapidly growing domains of applications, such as 3D graphics, require a fast compilation. Entrances of CGRAs to these domains have been blocked mainly due to their long compile time. We attack this problem by utilizing patternized routes, for which resources and time slots for a success can be estimated in advance when a source operation is placed. By conservatively reserving predefined resources at predefined time slots, future routings originating from the source operation are guaranteed. Experiments on a real-world 3D graphics benchmark suite show that our scheduler improves the compile time up to 6,000 times while achieving an average 70% throughputs of the state-of-the-art CGRA modulo scheduler, the Edge-centric Modulo Scheduler (EMS).

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