In today’s digital era, tablets are gaining popularity as reading devices. However, few studies have compared reading e-books on tablets with reading printed books and regular classroom instruction for language learning. To evaluate the role of tablets in reading and analyze the possibilities, the current study examined 97 elementary school students learning English as a foreign language in South Korea. These students were taught English once or twice a week for 11 weeks based on extensive reading using tablets (n = 42), printed books (n = 32), or regular textbook-based instruction as control (n = 23). The results indicate that literal level reading comprehension was improved the largest in the tablet group compared with the other groups. By contrast, improvements in inferential reading comprehension and grammatical knowledge were greater in those reading printed books than in the tablet group. The findings suggest that the print medium was superior for deep reading and digital texts were better for quick and shallow learning.

Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease, involving gastrointestinal tract and extra-intestinal organs. IgA nephropathy is a rare extra-intestinal manifestation of Crohn’s disease. We describe a case of 21-year old Korean man who was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease 5 years after IgA nephropathy was suspected. At the age of 16, he had gross hematuria and 2 years after he was diagnosed with IgA nephropathy. Three years later, he complained of abdominal pain and diarrhea. He was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease by colonoscopy and histologic exams. There has been increasing evidences of common pathophysiology between the two diseases.

The record by natural disasters, in particular waterrelated hazards of the last decade is far from favorable. According to the Center for Research Epidemology of Disasters, for last 44 years, disasters caused by meteology, climate and water-related hazards caused 3.5million deaths. Since 1960, the cost of disasters in the world were more than 3.5 trillion dollars. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The drought has killed an anonymous people in the Horn of Africa. Especially the region of Asia is concentrated 80% of global disasters and the floods and earthquakes have affected millions of people in Pakistan and China. These disasters remind us of the need for violence we have instruments such as the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), particularly because the disaster risk factors are numerous: climate change, environmental degradation, poor land use, nonexistent or poorly applied building codes, poverty, and even worse, poor governance by inappropriate and inadequate institutions. Of course there were some important success cases in the last decade. According to the National Report biannually submitted to the web platform “Preventionweb” by Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015, many countries have made their efforts for the objective of disaster risk reduction. For example, China has worked hard to stabilize its economic losses in its target range of 1.5% of GDP for last three years. In addition, Turkey will implement its anti-seismic prevention in all schools and hospitals in the country by 2017. Ethiopia has developed a sophisticated data management system to help guide its efforts to tackle not only to drought but also to other natural hazards. These countries as well as many others have included the study of disaster risk in their policy agenda. In Latin America, a cost-benefit analysis in Ecuador found that every dollar invested in reducing disaster risk, eliminating recurring losses from floods and storms, saves ultimately as equivalent as $ 9.50. Similarly, the EU believes that € 1 on the protection against floods earn €6. In the UK, investment in defenses against flooding means that 800,000 properties were protected during storms last winter. In March, the UN member states will meet for the Third World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Sendai, the center of the Tohoku region, which has suffered most from the earthquake and the 2011 tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear crisis. All of us as stakeholders in the field of disaster risk reduction have the same question in mind. The world has been up to the ambitious objectives of the HFA? The Leaders of the world must intensify their efforts in the fight against the risks posed by climate change, sea level rise, rapid urbanization and the rapid growth of population. With a strong political commitment at the highest level can enable real progress towards safer, more sustainable future. Also there needs to establish an integrated platform and information system for disaster risk to make policy-makers, economic leaders and all the public understand why disaster risk reduction is important, how we can react about those unexpected risks through early warning system and regular training for prevention and preparedness, what kind of measures are developed for risk assessment, how the scientific information is utilized for risk management.