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The STEAM interdisciplinary integrated-thematic curriculum with engineering design is the main concept of the 12-year basic education curricula of Technology. This research is based on the engineering design orientation as a teaching strategy, developing project for paper mechanism, and implementing Living Technology courses for gifted high school students in Taiwan to test the teaching effectiveness. In the project, students need to integrate the theory, using engineering design process methods, performing work prediction and evaluation, prototyping experiments and trial work, and finally optimizing the work and improving the design. The results of the present study facilitate us get deeper understanding of the practical implementation and engineering thinking skills of gifted students. Suggestions based on the results were generated to improve the future Living Technology curriculum. The findings in this study serve as a reference for the future design, development, and implementation of STEAM curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the research is analyzed and help provide a prediction model for similar diseases by using MERS and SARS data. There are examples of companies like BlueDot which used AI analysis of data points from multiple resources and predicted the outbreak in December 2019 mid. Using big data will have its advantages because we can use data from multiple sources and merge them to understand the next COVID19 or similar disease outbreak and predict the possible occurrences in different regions. Contact tracing is essential to predict the outbreak of a disease with data that is collected from different sources, for examples-post with metadata, tags on social media passenger lists, smart cards used in metros, where vehicles were parked, what all places credit and debit cards were used and the travel history. The methodology used is gathering secondary data of contact of what all locations the affected person visited. Data from social media and social networks can be worked upon and reconstructed to predict the outbreak of communicable diseases. A pandemic can be mitigated depending on the ability to identify the affected areas, individuals, and potential hotspots on a global level. Analyzing data using big data analytics from the hotspots, where data is easily available with countries and cities. If this data is modeled mathematically and used with AI, important predictions could be made. Information about the movement of people like done in Taiwan where travel history of a woman suffering from cough and diarrhea was correctly used to diagnose that she had covid19. AI and Big Data will help in preparing us for emergencies. The research will help in tackling the disease in real-time and help governments and organizations to plan and respond to sudden emergencies, lift public health, identify vaccine candidates. The research paper will help researchers to uncover relationships within massive datasets and help them in decision-making. This paper will help them in integrating information from multiple resources and predicting disease outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the research is analyzed and help provide a prediction model for similar diseases by using MERS and SARS data. There are examples of companies like BlueDot which used AI analysis of data points from multiple resources and predicted the outbreak in December 2019 mid. Using big data will have its advantages because we can use data from multiple sources and merge them to understand the next COVID19 or similar disease outbreak and predict the possible occurrences in different regions. Contact tracing is essential to predict the outbreak of a disease with data that is collected from different sources, for examples-post with metadata, tags on social media passenger lists, smart cards used in metros, where vehicles were parked, what all places credit and debit cards were used and the travel history. The methodology used is gathering secondary data of contact of what all locations the affected person visited. Data from social media and social networks can be worked upon and reconstructed to predict the outbreak of communicable diseases. A pandemic can be mitigated depending on the ability to identify the affected areas, individuals, and potential hotspots on a global level. Analyzing data using big data analytics from the hotspots, where data is easily available with countries and cities. If this data is modeled mathematically and used with AI, important predictions could be made. Information about the movement of people like done in Taiwan where travel history of a woman suffering from cough and diarrhea was correctly used to diagnose that she had covid19. AI and Big Data will help in preparing us for emergencies. The research will help in tackling the disease in real-time and help governments and organizations to plan and respond to sudden emergencies, lift public health, identify vaccine candidates. The research paper will help researchers to uncover relationships within massive datasets and help them in decision-making. This paper will help them in integrating information from multiple resources and predicting disease outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The temperature-salinity relationship is one of the most important characteristics for identifying water masses in marine research. Temperature-salinity characteristic changes dynamically with the geographic location and is sensitive to the depth at the same location. When depth is considered, however, it is not easy to compare the characteristics of the water masses efficiently for a wide range of areas of the ocean. In this paper, the Gaussian mixture model was proposed to analyze the temperature-salinity-depth characteristics of water masses, based on which the comparison between water masses may be conducted. First, the temperature-salinity-depth data for various locations are used to train a set of Gaussian mixture models individually. The distance between two Gaussian mixture models is then defined as the weighting sum of the pairwise Bhattacharyya distances among the Gaussian distributions. Accordingly, the distance between two water masses is fast measured, which makes possible the automatic and efficient comparison of the water masses for a large area. This approach not only approximates the temperature-salinity-depth distribution directly without prior knowledge of their relationship but controls the complexity by adjusting the number of mixtures when the samples are not evenly distributed. In addition, this approach facilitates the knowledge discovery in marine research, since it helps to represent, manage and share the characteristics of water masses flexibly. The proposed approach has been successfully applied to a real-time visualization system of ocean data, which allows the user to explore and compare water masses responsively through aggregating the data without degrading the resolution. The system provides an interface for querying the geographic locations with similar temperature-salinity-depth characteristics to track specific patterns of water masses, such as those in the Kuroshio near Taiwan or the South China Sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientifically sound water quality management measures on water supply reservoirs rely on extensive information of pollution sources, water quality status and pollution control/water quality improvement techniques for specific problems associated with drinking water treatment and eutrophication process. From 2017 to 2020, we participated a series of strategic management projects funded by Taiwan's Environmental Protection Administration for decision support of the National Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program on Water Environment. This paper briefly introduces the scientific approaches used and novel tools developed in these projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since ancient times, human beings in different countries and even different regions have different beliefs and cultures. Because of the different beliefs, there are different objects of worship and objects to avoid evil things, which are called amulets here. Amulets are considered to be worn on the body to have the psychological feeling of protection and blessing. Among the regions where Buddhism is the dominant religion, Thailand, where Theravada Buddhism is practiced, is famous for its amulets, which are called Buddha amulets, holy relics, or in Thai, just like Taiwan's peace amulets and talismans. However, due to the manipulation of some unscrupulous businessmen and people in recent years, Buddha amulets are often regarded as a scary object, which also makes people associate with some negative feelings. This study describes the art of handcrafting and the materials of Thai Buddha amulets, and summarizes the information of amulets from Thailand and Taiwan to understand their meanings and uses. By comparing the culture of faith in Taiwan, it will be argued that amulets are an essential product of faith, and not that Thai Buddha amulets have terrible power. The focus group method is used to interview the respondents who wear an amulet and who sell Buddha amulets, and the control group is those who do not know about amulets and do not wear an amulet. We hope that the results of this study will convey that the cultural meaning of Thai Buddha amulets has the same significance as other talismans and make Thai Buddha amulets return to the original and simple meaning of faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1999, the Working Group for Women in Physics (WGWIP) in Taiwan was registered within the Physical Society of Republic of China (renamed the Physical Society of Taiwan in 2017) and became a formal committee in 2003. Since then, the committee has worked on promoting women physicists and monitoring statistics on the status of progress. According to data collected by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan, the percentage of women graduated from physics and astronomy departments is around 14% in bachelor’s, 17% in master’s, and 13% in PhD programs. The inclination of young female students to choose a physics major has not changed much in the past few years. The numbers of female faculty members have improved slightly. About 77% female faculty are now in tenured positions, but the overall percentage of women in physics and astronomy departments has varied little in the last 10 years. The approved science projects granted by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in Taiwan for female physicists demonstrate the tendency of increasing budgets. In this paper, we present the results of our survey and discuss the required directions for our future steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies used constant cut-off indicator to distinguish distressed firms from non-distressed ones in the one-stage prediction models. However, distressed cut-off indicator must shift according to economic prosperity, rather than remains fixed all the time. This study focuses on Taiwanese listed firms and develops financial distress prediction models based upon the two-stage method. First, this study employs the firm-specific financial ratio and market factors to measure the probability of financial distress based on the discrete-time hazard models. Second, this paper further focuses on macroeconomic factors and applies rating transition matrix approach to determine the distressed cut-off indicator. The prediction models are developed by using the training sample from 1987 to 2004, and their levels of accuracy are compared with the test sample from 2005 to 2007. As for the one-stage prediction model, the model in incorporation with macroeconomic factors does not perform better than that without macroeconomic factors. This suggests that the accuracy is not improved for one-stage models which pool the firm-specific and macroeconomic factors together. In regards to the two stage models, the negative credit cycle index implies the worse economic status during the test period, so the distressed cut-off point is adjusted to increase based on such negative credit cycle index. After the two-stage models employ such adjusted cut-off point to discriminate the distressed firms from non-distressed ones, their error of misclassification becomes lower than that of one-stage ones. The two-stage models presented in this paper have incremental usefulness in predicting financial distress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information security policy in Taiwan stems the gap between expectation and reality. For this, the paper presents an analysis of patent indicators and patent document attempt to conclude the overview of the information security technology development. The paper also identifies the leading countries and cutting-edge areas with potential trends. Finally, several practicable and valuable strategies after this work are generalized to achieve the goals of Taiwan information security policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plan for beamlines in Phase II at Taiwan Photon Source is to construct two new BioSAXS and nano- ARPES beamlines. A highly brilliant light source can be produced with a cryogenic undulator, and many synchrotron facilities have been developed and operated with these in their storage rings. The development of a cryogenic undulator became a target for a light source in TPS phase II. A cryogenic undulator with period of length 15 mm will be made in a hybrid magnetic structure, and use PrFeB permanent-magnet materials. A maximum magnetic field 1.31 T is estimated at gap 4 mm and temperature about 100 K. The spectral performance of a TPS cryogenic undulator is presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies employ qualitative approach to explore the industrial clusters; however, few research has objectively quantified the evolutions of industry clustering. The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively analyze clustering among IC design, IC manufacturing as well as IC packaging and testing industries by using the foreign direct investment (FDI) data. The Lotka-Volterra system equations are first adopted here to capture the competition or cooperation among such three industries, thus explaining their clustering inclinations. The results indicate that the evolution of FDI into China for IC design industry significantly inspire the subsequent FDI of IC manufacturing as well as IC packaging and testing industries. Since IC design industry lie in the upstream stage of IC production, the middle-stream IC manufacturing and downstream IC packing and testing enterprises tend to cluster together with IC design firms, in order to sustain a steady business. Finally, Taiwan IC industry’s FDI amount into China is predicted to cumulatively increase, which supports the industrial clustering tendency for Taiwan IC industry. Particularly, the FDI prediction of Lotka-Volterra model performs superior to that of the conventional Bass model after the forecast accuracy of these two models are compared. The prediction ability is dramatically improved as the industrial mutualism among each IC production stage is taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last two years, a series of beam parameters measurement, subsystem checkout, installation of various sensors, control program modification and hardware upgrade made the top-up injection possible in practical routine operation. Top-up injection is an operation mode in which the beam current in the storage ring is maintained above certain level by frequent injections. The routine current stability is in the range of 10-3 for long period of operation. The Top-up injection provides advantages in operation such as lower emittance, higher current, smaller coupling, smaller ID gaps, exotic bunch filling patterns, and higher bunch charge. It also provides constant thermal loading on all components in the storage ring and the optics components of beamlines, as well as constant signal to the beam position monitor. Discussions on the results of some measurements of booster and storage ring, the requirement of hardware upgrade and the summary of routine Top-up operation will be presented in this paper. © 2007 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Working Group for Women in Physics in Taiwan was registered to the Physical Society of the Republic of China (PSROC) in December 1999 and was formally announced at the 2001 annual assembly of PSROC. In 2003 the group became a formal committee under PSROC. The current committee includes seven female and two male members. In the last 10 years, many milestones were achieved. In particular, the percentage of female physics faculties in universities and research institutes has increased to 12% from 8% within the last 10 years. In this paper we will present the results of our survey on the changes of the percentage of female physics faculties/students within the last 10 years and express our need to improve the working environment for female faculties in Taiwan in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]