Taiwan and ROC: A critical analysis of President Chen Shui-bien's construction of Taiwan identity in national speeches

Names used to address Taiwan – such as taiwan and zhonghuamingguo (Republic of China [ROC]) – are symbols defining Taiwan's political realities, each with their own unique historical significance. Since his election in 2000, Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bien has had to alternate between taiwan and ROC to strike a balance among conflicting ideas about Taiwan's national identity. The act is grounded in complex political discourse dictating that Taiwan must not be seen as separate from the sinic world and simultaneously to respond to steadily rising Taiwanese consciousness. Facing intercessions by the United States and China, as well as ever-present domestic clashes, rhetorical exigency requires the president to fashion unique political discourse concerning what Taiwan is and ought to be. This study explores how these names and related expressions are used in Chen's public addresses to the nation during his two-term tenure from 2000 to 2008, and how their development reflects the struggle over Taiwan's national identity.     

How does consumer age affect the desire for new products and brands? A multi-group causal analysis

Marketing lacks comprehension on the increasingly important segment of mature consumers in regard to their behavior and respective reasons for certain behavior. This study on the desire for alternative products or brands within the domain of fast moving consumer goods was capable of verifying differences among age-groups. While the keenness for cross-buying increases with age, the desire for switching to other familiar brands than the one usually purchased, and the desire for switching to new brand alternatives decrease with age; Thus indicating age-patterns in product category-specific innovativeness and variety seeking. The study also considers a wide range of behavioral determinants such as product satisfaction, product involvement, category experience, perceived purchase risk etc. mediating the effect of age on these desires, giving a fairly good picture of the unveiled causes for the age group differences. Furthermore, the issue of age potentially operating as a moderating variable on the effects of the behavioral determinants on the desires for product and brand alternatives found consideration in this study, but was proven to be of marginal relevance.     

Return to work among employees with mental health problems: Development and validation of a self-efficacy questionnaire

Abstract

Because of the costs to both the organization and the individual, it is important that employees who are sick-listed with mental health problems are facilitated in their return to work (RTW). In order to provide adequate interventions, it is necessary to obtain a better understanding of the RTW process of people with mental health problems. Work-related self-efficacy (SE) might play a key role within this process. This paper describes the development and validation of the return-to-work self-efficacy’ scale (RTW-SE) for employees with mental health problems. Three Dutch samples of sick-listed employees were used to validate the 11-item instrument (N=2214). Based on the factor structure and reliability results, RTW-SE was conceptualized as a unitary construct. The associations with general SE, locus of control, coping, physical workload and mental health problems support the construct validity of this scale. Most importantly, RTW-SE proved to be a robust predictor of actual return to work within three months. The encouraging preliminary psychometric properties of the scale make it a potentially valuable tool in research and in clinical practice and occupational health care settings, both before and after employees have returned to work.     

Online signal extraction by robust regression in moving windows with data-adaptive width selection

Online (also ‘real-time’ or ‘sequential’) signal extraction from noisy and outlier-interfered data streams is a basic but challenging goal. Fitting a robust Repeated Median (Siegel in Biometrika 69:242–244, 1982) regression line in a moving time window has turned out to be a promising approach (Davies et al. in J. Stat. Plan. Inference 122:65–78, 2004; Gather et al. in Comput. Stat. 21:33–51, 2006; Schettlinger et al. in Biomed. Eng. 51:49–56, 2006). The level of the regression line at the rightmost window position, which equates to the current time point in an online application, is then used for signal extraction. However, the choice of the window width has a large impact on the signal extraction, and it is impossible to predetermine an optimal fixed window width for data streams which exhibit signal changes like level shifts and sudden trend changes. We therefore propose a robust test procedure for the online detection of such signal changes. An algorithm including the test allows for online window width adaption, meaning that the window width is chosen w.r.t. the current data situation at each time point. Comparison studies show that our new procedure outperforms an existing Repeated Median filter with automatic window width selection (Schettlinger et al. in Int. J. Adapt. Control Signal Process. 24:346–362, 2010).     

A Sensitivity Analysis of the Social Vulnerability Index

The Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI), created by Cutter et al. (2003) , examined the spatial patterns of social vulnerability to natural hazards at the county level in the United States in order to describe and understand the social burdens of risk. The purpose of this article is to examine the sensitivity of quantitative features underlying the SoVI approach to changes in its construction, the scale at which it is applied, the set of variables used, and to various geographic contexts. First, the SoVI was calculated for multiple aggregation levels in the State of South Carolina and with a subset of the original variables to determine the impact of scalar and variable changes on index construction. Second, to test the sensitivity of the algorithm to changes in construction, and to determine if that sensitivity was constant in various geographic contexts, census data were collected at a submetropolitan level for three study sites: Charleston, SC; Los Angeles, CA; and New Orleans, LA. Fifty-four unique variations of the SoVI were calculated for each study area and evaluated using factorial analysis. These results were then compared across study areas to evaluate the impact of changing geographic context. While decreases in the scale of aggregation were found to result in decreases in the variance explained by principal components analysis (PCA), and in increases in the variance of the resulting index values, the subjective interpretations yielded from the SoVI remained fairly stable. The algorithm's sensitivity to certain changes in index construction differed somewhat among the study areas. Understanding the impacts of changes in index construction and scale are crucial in increasing user confidence in metrics designed to represent the extremely complex phenomenon of social vulnerability.     

Political influence in multi-choice institutions: cyclicity,anonymity, and transitivity

We study political influence in institutions where each member chooses a level of support for a collective goal. These individual choices determine the degree to which the goal is reached. Influence is assessed by newly defined binary relations, each of which ranks members on the basis of their relative performance at a corresponding level of participation. For institutions with three options (e.g., voting games in which each voter may vote “yes”, “abstain”, or vote “no”), we obtain three influence relations, and show that their strict components may be cyclic. This latter property describes a “paradox of power” which contrasts with the transitivity of the unique influence relation of binary voting games. Weak conditions of anonymity suffice for each of these relations to be transitive. We also obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for each of these relations to be complete. Further, we characterize institutions in which the rankings induced by these relations, and the Banzhaf–Coleman and Shapley–Shubik power indices coincide. We argue that extending the influence relations to firms would be useful in efficiently assigning workers to different units of production. Finally, we provide applications to various forms of political and economic organizations.     

How Much More XXX is Generation X Consuming? Evidence of Changing Attitudes and Behaviors Related to Pornography Since 1973

We use data from the General Social Survey (GSS) over a 40-year period (1973–2012) to evaluate changes in attitudes about pornography and pornography consumption among American young adults. One of the major challenges in making comparisons across birth generations is separating the effect of birth cohort from age and period effects. We use an intrinsic estimator to separately identify the effects of age, birth cohort, and time period using 40 years of repeated cross-section data. We find that, relative to the general population, young people's beliefs about whether pornography should be illegal have stayed relatively constant over this 40-year period and, if anything, have slightly increased. We also find that pornography consumption has been increasing across birth generations, though this increase has been smaller than would be inferred based on differences across generations at a single point in time, due to a strong age component in consumption patterns.