Discrimination and incorporation of Taiwanese indigenous Austronesian peoples

This paper examines contemporary developments among Taiwan’s indigenous Austronesian peoples. We have reviewed major policy changes mainly since the 1980s and their impacts on later developments – both the positive improvements in general well-being and the persistence of ingrained problems among them. Major findings indicate two growing trends among Taiwanese Austronesians. One is the rise of interest in their cultures and efforts to preserve and restore selected indigenous customs and practices. The other trend is a continuous outflow of the indigenes from traditional tribal communities to urban centers for better employment, education, or health care. Their increasing urbanization also contributes to more inter-ethnic marriages and the loss of indigenous languages and practices. The case of Taiwanese Austronesians illustrates the impacts historical and politico-economic processes are having on indigenous peoples.     

Governing Migrant Workers at a Distance: Managing the Temporary Status of Guestworkers in Taiwan

This paper explores how a liberal democratic state keeps migrant workers in temporary status by preventing their permanent settlement. Using Taiwan’s guestworker policy as an example, we argue that through expertise discourses and strategies of “governance at a distance” involving private sector, the Taiwan government has formulated policies and implemented measures that effectively kept guestworkers in temporary status. Analyzing Taiwan’s guestworker policy helps us to understand how the state and its collaborators work together to enhance the control capacity over migrants, while at the same time, enabling the state to keep its liberal pretense.     

Risks Perception of Electromagnetic Fields in Taiwan: The Influence of Psychopathology and the Degree of Sensitivity to Electromagnetic Fields

Little is known about the perceived health risks of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and factors associated with risk perception in non‐Western countries. Psychological conditions and risk perception have been postulated as factors that facilitate the attribution of health complaints to environmental factors. This study investigated people's perceived risks of EMFs and other environmental sources, as well as the relationships between risk perception, psychopathology, and the degree of self‐reported sensitivity to EMFs. A total of 1,251 adults selected from a nationwide telephone interviewing system database responded to a telephone survey about the relationships between environmental sources and human health. The interview included questions assessing participants’ psychiatric conditions and the presence and degree of sensitivity to EMFs. One hundred and seventy participants were self‐identified as having sensitivity to EMFs, and 141 met the criteria for psychiatric conditions without EMF sensitivity. More than half of the survey respondents considered power lines and mobile phone base stations to affect people's health to a big extent. Higher sensitivity to EMFs, psychopathology, being female, being married, more years of education, and having a catastrophic illness had positive associations with perceived risks of EMF‐related environmental sources as well as for all environmental sources combined. We observed no moderating effect of psychopathology on the association between degree of sensitivity to EMF and risk perception. Thus, psychopathology had influence on general people's risk perception without having influence on the relationship between people's degree of sensitivity to EMF and risk perception. The plausible explanations are discussed in the text.     

Joint modelling of longitudinal binary data and survival data

The medical costs in an ageing society substantially increase when the incidences of chronic diseases, disabilities and inability to live independently are high. Healthy lifestyles not only affect elderly individuals but also influence the entire community. When assessing treatment efficacy, survival and quality of life should be considered simultaneously. This paper proposes the joint likelihood approach for modelling survival and longitudinal binary covariates simultaneously. Because some unobservable information is present in the model, the Monte Carlo EM algorithm and Metropolis-Hastings algorithm are used to find the estimators. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed model based on the accuracy and precision of the estimates. Real data are used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model.     

Efficient polynomial-time algorithms for the constrained LCS problem with strings exclusion

In this paper, we revisit a recent variant of the longest common subsequence (LCS) problem, the string-excluding constrained LCS (STR-EC-LCS) problem, which was first addressed by Chen and Chao (J Comb Optim 21(3):383–392, 2011). Given two sequences \(X\) and \(Y\) of lengths \(m\) and \(n,\) respectively, and a constraint string \(P\) of length \(r,\) we are to find a common subsequence \(Z\) of \(X\) and \(Y\) which excludes \(P\) as a substring and the length of \(Z\) is maximized. In fact, this problem cannot be correctly solved by the previously proposed algorithm. Thus, we give a correct algorithm with \(O(mnr)\) time to solve it. Then, we revisit the STR-EC-LCS problem with multiple constraints \(\{ P_1, P_2, \ldots , P_k \}.\) We propose a polynomial-time algorithm which runs in \(O(mnR)\) time, where \(R = \sum _{i=1}^{k} |P_i|,\) and thus it overthrows the previous claim of NP-hardness.     

Pilot Evaluation of a Sexual Abuse Prevention Program for Taiwanese Children

The purpose of the current study was to develop and evaluate the efficacy of a school-based child sexual abuse prevention program for Taiwanese children. Forty-six Taiwanese children age 6 to 13 were divided into one of two groups based on their school grade and then randomly assigned to a skills-based child sexual abuse prevention program who received training immediately or a waiting-list control condition who received the training after a delay. Children's self-protection skills improved regardless of age after participation in the program. The program, however, did not successfully improve children's knowledge of sexuality and safety. Although future studies should modify the program content to better target knowledge of sexuality and safety, these results are promising for a pilot of this skills-based CSA prevention program in Taiwan.     

面向科技融合的文化创意产业协同创新机制研究

针对文化创意产业与科技融合中存在的问题进行了研究,探索了在文化产业新内涵以及网络与信息化的信用保障体系下,对文化产业集群中的多领域、多单位主体以及人才之问建立起有效的信息互动共享与交流机制;依托西安交通大学文化创意产业研究中心的建设,力图搭建文化产业“产学研”与科技文化产业融合的合作桥梁,探求建立有效的文化创意协同创新服务机制和体系.     

Understanding lifetime homeless duration: investigating wave 1 findings from the Journeys Home project

The variation in the amount of time people remain homeless has important policy implications with respect to reducing long‐term homelessness and designing more effective early intervention approaches. This paper examines the factors that influence lifetime homeless duration in Australia using data from the first wave of Journeys Home, a new national survey of individuals exposed to high levels of housing insecurity that employs more rigorous sampling methods than previously used. Those at increased risk of long durations of homelessness over their lifetimes include people who had less family support in childhood, shorter work histories and lower education levels. We also find evidence supporting the idea that people who first experience homelessness at a young age are more likely to experience persistent homelessness.     

Distribution lot-sizing models for arborescent supply chains with discrete-period variable demand

This study formulates a novel mixed-integer programming lot-sizing model for arborescent supply chains with discrete-period variable demand and then develops an efficient two-phase heuristic method, in which a combined multi-period demand ordering policy, rather than the lot-for-lot ordering policy usually assumed in previous papers, is adopted. Two important properties are introduced and used to obtain a better initial feasible solution. The good performance of the proposed heuristic method is verified through a comparison with the optimal solution method. It is also shown that the performance of the proposed combined multi-period demand ordering method is superior to that of the lot-for-lot ordering method. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to explore the impacts of changing the values of relevant parameters on the total supply chain cost, the total number of orders and the total number of opened members. Finally, a well-known logistics company in Taiwan is chosen to demonstrate the excellent performance and the aptness of the proposed ordering method.     

Γ-Optimal decision procedures for selecting the best population in randomized complete block design

In randomized complete block design, we face the problem of selecting the best population. If some partial information about the unknown parameters is available, then we wish to delermine the optimal decisin rule to select the best population.

In this paper, in the class of natural selection rules, we employ the Γ-optimal criterion to determine optimal decision rules that will minimize the maximum expected risk over the class of some partial information. Furthermore, the traditional hypothesis testing is briefly discussed from the view point of ranking and selecting.