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The U.S.–Taiwan Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) "Building Extreme Weather Resiliency through Improved Weather and Climate Prediction and Emergency Response Strategies" was an NSF-funded grant between universities and institutions in the United States and Taiwan that intended to understand 1) weather forecast uncertainty during extreme precipitation events and 2) how emergency managers use such information to make decisions. In this reflective paper, graduate students from the project's working groups, including climate, ensemble, microphysics, and decision science, share their experiences of being involved in this ambitious program. A notable strength of this PIRE was its opportunities for international collaboration and related cultural experiences; however, despite direct student involvement in PIRE, student experiences varied considerably (e.g., research experiences, cultural exposure). Recommendations for improvement are informed predominantly by U.S.-based graduate student experiences and are discussed with the intention of bolstering future interdisciplinary research for students and investigators. To this end, projects of this scale and scope could benefit from more frequent communication among leadership and research groups, as well as explicitly outlining and prioritizing interactions between groups to focus and strengthen collaboration toward the completion of interdisciplinary research goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Korean family planning is often characterized in terms of a progressive narrative in which the Park Chung-hee state transformed rural life (1964-early 1980s) through the successful application of social science with the help of a series of international collaborators. Similar stories are sometimes told for Taiwan and other parts of East and Southeast Asia. This paper argues, however, that Korean concerns about population issues have a much longer history, with origins dating to the late 1930s. The subsequent uses of these concerns indicate the diverse ways in which Japanese imperial training and education were successfully adapted by Korean actors to fit emerging American modernization efforts in the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study of social scientists’ information seeking and use of scholarly journals to support scholarly communication and information needs. The goals of the study are: to explore the characteristics of information needs for social scientists; to discuss the importance of scholarly journals to social scientists and their information seeking and access means; to identify article reading patterns of social scientists; and to make comparisons between scholarly journals use and reading patterns of social scientists and other scientists in Taiwan and the USA. The author used a questionnaire survey and interview methods to investigate the information seeking, use and reading of scholarly journals, and article deep reading patterns of social scientists. The target population was social science faculty members from National Cheng-chi University in Taiwan. The article explores the characteristics of information needs for social scientists and shows that scholarly journals are important information resources for university social science faculty. Social science faculty in Taiwan use scholarly journals in multiple languages, mainly English, Chinese, German, and Japanese, which is different from scientists in the United States. In addition, they use electronic journals more than print journals. The number of article readings by social science faculty members was approximately 195 readings per year and nearly 440 h were spent reading per year. In contrast to scientists in the United States, the social scientists in Taiwan read fewer readings, spent more time reading, and read older articles. In addition, the study identifies article reading patterns of social scientists and proposes a six-type taxonomy of article deep reading. The study reports the scholarly journal use and reading behavior model of social scientists and shows there are some differences in scholarly journal seeking and use by social science faculty in Taiwan and scientists in the United States. Further studies of scholarly journal and electronic journal use and reading by social scientists across countries, subject disciplines, and languages of journals are needed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]