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Older adults often experience functional decline following acute medical care. This functional decline may lead to permanent disability, which will increase the burden on the medical and long-term care systems, families, and society as a whole. Post-acute care aims to promote the functional recovery of older adults, prevent unnecessary hospital readmission, and avoid premature admission to a long-term care facility. Research has shown that post-acute care is a cost-effective service model, with both the hospital-athome and community hospital post-acute care models being highly effective. This paper describes the post-acute care models of the United States and the United Kingdom and uses the example of Taiwan's highly effective post-acute care system to explain the benefits and importance of post-acute care. In the face of rapid demographic aging and smaller household size, a post-acute care system can lower medical costs and improve the health of older adults after hospitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In international trade offset practices (in Taiwan known as industrial cooperation program, ICP) have received increased attention over the past 20 years. In the coming 10 years, the Taiwanese government may expend roughly US$16 billion for purchasing Patriot-III missiles, P-3 long-range anti-submarine planes, and diesel-engine submarines from the United States through foreign military sale, and can achieve US$8 billion ICP credit the largest in Taiwanese history. Offsets or ICP can be regarded as fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems, therefore, the fuzziness and uncertainty of subjective perception should be considered. This paper provides an alternative approach, the non-additive fuzzy integral, to deal with the fuzzy MCDM problems especially when there is dependence among considered criteria. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss with Taiwan’s ICP Optimal Offset Transaction Policy and propose a framework of drawing on ICP credit in future. This paper considers the four aspects of policy, ability, economy, and environment, to establish a set of fuzzy AHP multiple criteria decision mode to identify the evaluative criteria variables and project item’s order for ICP project. This decision mode was identified as a workable method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geofoam has the scientific name of expanded polystyrene (EPS). A block of EPS is made from particles of polystyrene through an expanding and melting process in an automatic mold machine by adding steam. The geofoam construction method employs large EPS blocks with unit weights between 12 and 30 kgforce/m3. In the 1970s, the use of EPS as a lightweight embankment in highway and earthwork developed concurrently in the United States and Norway. Most notably, in 1972, the Norwegian Road Research Laboratory placed geofoam in the approach fill of the Flom Bridge. The advantages of this construction method are that geofoam can be used not only to replace ground fill material but also to reduce the load applied to the foundation. This paper will introduce the following topics related to geofoam: the background and inspection conditions in Taiwan, United States, and Japan, the quality investigation of EPS production, and the experimental and analysis results of EPS manufacturing quality and homogenous test. This research illustrated that the quality control chart can analyze the stability of manufactured EPS. Meanwhile, the homogeneous testing method, which is put forth in this paper, can actually examine the stability of EPS manufacturing procedure. The results of this study can be used as the reference for quality control of geofoam. The issue of geofoam used for collision prevention, self-weight decreasing, and landslide resistance in geotechnical engineering will also be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to show the similarities as well as the differences of fundamental fraction knowledge owned by preservice elementary teachers from the United States ( N= 89) and Taiwan ( N= 85). To this end, we examined and compared their performance on an instrument including 15 multiple-choice test items. The items were categorized into four different types of fundamental fraction constructs, including part-whole relationship, quotient, equivalence, and meanings of operations. Each item was embedded in the area, linear, or set model except for the items constructed out of the meaning of operations. Several items were featured with a pictorial illustration. Quantitative analysis showed that U.S. preservice teachers were significantly outperformed by their Taiwanese counterparts overall. The difference between the two groups was statistically significant on 12 of 15 items. Findings suggest that preservice elementary teachers from both countries need to be better prepared in their understanding of the meaning of fraction multiplication or division operations. Findings also suggest that U.S. preservice elementary teachers need to be more knowledgeable in dealing with fraction problems embedded in a linear model. Further research is suggested to study the issues raised from the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As of 2008, surrogacy is legal and openly practised in various places; Japan, however, has no regulations or laws regarding surrogacy. This paper reports the situation of surrogacy in Japan and in five other regions (the USA, the UK, Taiwan, Korea and France) to clarify the pros and cons of prohibiting surrogacy, along with the problems and issues relating to surrogacy compensation. Not only in a country such as France that completely prohibits surrogacy within the country, but also in a country such as the UK that allows non-commercial surrogacy, infertile couples travel overseas for the purpose of surrogacy. In addition, some couples might seek underground surrogacy if the government prohibits surrogacy. If an intended parent couple and a surrogate make an agreement among themselves and then a problem occurs, they cannot ask for support from professionals or bring a case to court, as can be observed in South Korea and Taiwan. We also conclude that there is little difference between commercial surrogacy and non-commercial surrogacy in the absence of a clear definition of ‘reasonable expenses.’ In the UK, the law does not allow surrogates to receive compensation. However, in reality, there may be little difference between the amounts paid to surrogates for profit in the US and those paid to surrogates for reasonable expenses in the UK. We conclude that the issue of surrogacy demands further discussion in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Diagnosis-based risk adjustment is becoming an important issue globally as a result of its implications for payment, high-risk predictive modelling and provider performance assessment. The Taiwanese National Health Insurance (NHI) programme provides universal coverage and maintains a single national computerized claims database, which enables the application of diagnosis-based risk adjustment. However, research regarding risk adjustment is limited. This study aims to examine the performance of the Adjusted Clinical Group (ACG) case-mix system using claims-based diagnosis information from the Taiwanese NHI programme. Methods: A random sample of NHI enrollees was selected. Those continuously enrolled in 2002 were included for concurrent analyses (n = 173,234), while those in both 2002 and 2003 were included for prospective analyses (n = 164,562). Health status measures derived from 2002 diagnoses were used to explain the 2002 and 2003 health expenditure. A multivariate linear regression model was adopted after comparing the performance of seven different statistical models. Split-validation was performed in order to avoid overfitting. The performance measures were adjusted R² and mean absolute prediction error of five types of expenditure at individual level, and predictive ratio of total expenditure at group level. Results: The more comprehensive models performed better when used for explaining resource utilization. Adjusted R² of total expenditure in concurrent/prospective analyses were 4.2%/4.4% in the demographic model, 15%/10% in the ACGs or ADGs (Aggregated Diagnosis Group) model, and 40%/22% in the models containing EDCs (Expanded Diagnosis Cluster). When predicting expenditure for groups based on expenditure quintiles, all models underpredicted the highest expenditure group and overpredicted the four other groups. For groups based on morbidity burden, the ACGs model had the best performance overall. Conclusions: Given the widespread availability of claims data and the superior explanatory power of claims-based risk adjustment models over demographics-only models, Taiwan;s government should consider using claims-based models for policy-relevant applications. The performance of the ACG case-mix system in Taiwan was comparable to that found in other countries. This suggested that the ACG system could be applied to Taiwan's NHI even though it was originally developed in the USA. Many of the findings in this paper are likely to be relevant to other diagnosis-based risk adjustment methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC spacecraft constellation consisting of six LEO satellites is the world's first operational GPS Radio Occultation (RO) mission. The mission is jointly developed by Taiwan's National Space Organization (NSPO) and the United States' UCAR in collaboration with NSF, USAF, NOAA, NASA, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the US Naval Research Laboratory. The FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC satellites were successfully launched from Vandenberg US AFB in California at 0140 UTC 15 April 2006 into the same orbit plane of the designated 516 km altitude. The mission goal is to deploy the six satellites into six orbit planes at 800 km altitude with a 30-degree separation for evenly distributed global coverage. All six FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC satellites are currently maintaining a satisfactory good state-of-health. Five out of six satellites have reached their final mission orbit of 800 km as of November 2007. The data as received by FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC satellites constellation have been processed in near real time into 2500 good ionospheric profiles and 1800 good atmospheric profiles per day. These have outnumbered the worldwide radiosondes (∼900 mostly over land) launched from the ground per day. The processed atmospheric RO data have been assimilated into the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models for real-time weather prediction and typhoon/hurricane forecasting by many major weather centers in the world. This paper describes the FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC satellite constellation system performance and the mission results that span the period from April 2006 to October 2007; and reviews the prospect of a future follow-on mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how the interplay between economic resources and gender may explain the division of household labor in Taiwan, a society with the rich heritage of Chinese culture. As one of the few studies on the division of household labor among married couples in non- western settings, our analyses show both the similarities and differences between Taiwanese and American couples. Specifically, we found that men's share of household labor was explained by their income, education, gender ideology, and the number of children, which is relatively similar to previous findings in the United States. On the contrary, none of the above factors shows significant effects on women's share of household labor. Instead, we found that higher occupational status decreases women' share of household labor. Moreover, we found that unemployed husbands share less household labor and women with equal or higher occupational status relative to their spouses perform more household labor in extended families, indicating that couples in these households try to neutralize their unconventional roles through household labor participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports selected findings from a study of number sense proficiency of students aged 8 to 14 years in Australia, Sweden, United States, and Taiwan. It comments on the meaning and importance of number sense, the development of the assessment instruments, and student responses to the items. Some implications for classrooms of the findings are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]