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In current times that emphasize active aging, older adults are often encouraged to participate in interest classes at community centers. Adopting an ethnographic research approach to understand the subjectivities of older mothers, this paper not only sees community centers as a space for older adults for taking interest classes, but also as an infrastructure that defines relationship values. This paper examines the motivations of older mothers in urban Taiwan who have established a routine at a community center. By emphasizing the public space, that is, the values indoctrinated at the community centers, this paper investigates how community center activities offer self-care practices for older women, and how these women embody motherhood by taking care of themselves. This paper expands the notion of motherhood by investigating the subjectivities of older mothers as well as the effects of the global aging discourse on them. This study of urban Taiwan sheds light on understanding the subjectivity of aging mothers in other East Asian cities. The data of this paper were collected through participant observations at community centers, in-depth interviews, and analysis of newspaper archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Previous studies of do-not-resuscitate (DNR) or do-not-intubate (DNI) orders in stroke patients have primarily been conducted in North America or Europe. However, characteristics associated with DNR/DNI orders in stroke patients in Asia have not been reported. Methods: Based on the Taiwan Stroke Registry, this nationwide cross-sectional study enrolled hospitalized stroke patients from 64 hospitals between 2006 and 2020. We identified characteristics associated with DNR/DNI orders using a two-level random effects model. Results: Among the 114,825 patients, 5531 (4.82%) had DNR/DNI orders. Patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) had the highest likelihood of having DNR/DNI orders (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 1.76, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.61–1.93), followed by patients with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), and patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) had the lowest likelihood (aOR 0.53, 95% CI 0.43–0.66). From 2006 to 2020, DNR/DNI orders increased in all three types of stroke. In patients with AIS, women were significantly more likely to have DNR/DNI orders (aOR 1.23, 95% CI 1.15–1.32), while patients who received intravenous alteplase had a lower likelihood (aOR 0.74, 95% CI 0.65–0.84). Patients with AIS who were cared for by religious hospitals (aOR 0.55, 95% CI 0.35–0.87) and patients with SAH who were cared for by medical centers (aOR 0.40, 95% CI 0.17–0.96) were significantly less likely to have DNR/DNI orders. Conclusions: In Taiwan, DNR/DNI orders increased in stroke patients between 2006 and 2020. Hospital characteristics were found to play a significant role in the use of DNR/DNI orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the role of development management on global competitiveness in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Development management has emerged in response to improvement in public service delivery, public institution building, and human resource development in the service of the internationally accepted development goals, as the stated by the United Nations Division for Public Administration and Development Management. However, most papers employing this approach seem to stay in the theoretical discussions, and rarely apply empirical evidence to specific projects, programs, or areas. Employing the competitiveness index developed by World Economic Forum (WEF) and the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), this research connects the toolkit approach to competitiveness in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. This research finds that all of these countries have adopted a series of toolkit strategies to promote their global competitiveness. These toolkits can maintain consistent growth. In terms of theory and practice, this research employs cases-comparison strategies to reveal the theoretical components of development management, and thus advance the knowledge in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study used a water volume-based sampling method in combination with an active fog collector (modified Caltech design) to collect fog water samples during three intensive operation periods at two mountainous study sites in Taiwan. The new setup employed a sample-volume controlled system that dosed the fog water into 10 ml aliquots, which were then collected with a commercial laboratory auto-sampler. We collected fog water samples about 10 times more frequently (median sampling period 3 minutes and 45 seconds) than with traditional sampling schemes. Notably, up to over 200 samples were collected within a single fog event lasting 13 hours. The results showed that the intra-event variabilities of pH (up to over 2 units), conductivity (range almost 1000 µS cm-1), and ion concentrations ere generally higher than the inter-event variability. The variabilities exhibited particularly fast changes during phases of fog onset and dissolution; in contrast, the centers of the passing clouds at our mountain research sites were rather homogeneous. Overall, our new method showed a marked improvement in sampling speed over traditional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrant political participation is a central challenge to many Western democracies. This article, by building on the case of marriage migrants' political participation in Taiwan, offers food for thought on East Asia, a region of the world that has been neglected in most academic debates on this theme. Applying "flat ontology" and drawing from a mixed methodology, involving content analysis of press releases published on political party websites and in-depth interviews with marriage migrants, this article offers a timely account of how migrant political integration and participation is a complex process. It depends not only on broader political opportunities, social, legal, cultural factors shaping political integration processes and individual political values, but also on the specificity of migrants' identities and subjectivities, including gender, perception of security, a migrant's family background, their parental status, life stage, and their perception of self in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genus Pseudophanias Raffray, 1890 is discovered in Japan and Taiwan Island for the first time, with three new species: P. yaimensis Inoue, Nomura & Yin, sp. nov., P. nakanoi Inoue, Nomura & Yin, sp. nov., and P. excavatus Inoue, Nomura & Yin, sp. nov. It is the fifth tmesiphorine genus known from Japan and the first from Taiwan. The genus Chandleriella Hlaváč, 2000 is placed as a junior synonym of Pseudophanias, resulting in the following new combinations: P. termitophilus (Bryant, 1915), comb. nov., and P. yunnanicus (Yin, 2019), comb. nov. A list of world species, and a key to East and South Asian representatives of Pseudophanias is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aims The genus Asarum sect. Heterotropa (Aristolochiaceae) probably experienced rapid diversification into 62 species centred on the Japanese Archipelago and Taiwan, providing an ideal model for studying island adaptive radiation. However, resolving the phylogeny of this plant group using Sanger sequencing-based approaches has been challenging. To uncover the radiation history of Heterotropa , we employed a phylogenomic approach using double-digested RAD-seq (ddRAD-seq) to yield a sufficient number of phylogenetic signals and compared its utility with that of the Sanger sequencing-based approach. Methods We first compared the performance of phylogenetic analysis based on the plastid matK and trnL–F regions and nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (nrITS), and phylogenomic analysis based on ddRAD-seq using a reduced set of the plant materials (83 plant accessions consisting of 50 species, one subspecies and six varieties). We also conducted more thorough phylogenomic analyses including the reconstruction of biogeographic history using comprehensive samples of 135 plant accessions consisting of 54 species, one subspecies, nine varieties of Heterotropa and six outgroup species. Key Results Phylogenomic analyses of Heterotropa based on ddRAD-seq were superior to Sanger sequencing-based approaches and resulted in a fully resolved phylogenetic tree with strong support for 72.0–84.8 % (depending on the tree reconstruction methods) of the branches. We clarified the history of Heterotropa radiation and found that A. forbesii , the only deciduous Heterotropa species native to mainland China, is sister to the evergreen species (core Heterotropa) mostly distributed across the Japanese Archipelago and Taiwan. Conclusions The core Heterotropa group was divided into nine subclades, each of which had a narrow geographic distribution. Moreover, most estimated dispersal events (22 out of 24) were between adjacent areas, indicating that the range expansion has been geographically restricted throughout the radiation history. The findings enhance our understanding of the remarkable diversification of plant lineages in the Japanese Archipelago and Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new species of semi-terrestrial sesarmid crab of the genus Geosesarma De Man, 1892, is described from central Taiwan. Geosesarma mirum sp. nov. is distinct in possessing a strong transverse crest on the inner surface of the male chela and a diagnostic male first gonopod which is relatively long and stout, with the distal chitinous part broad and spatuliform. Like most Geosesarma species, G. mirum sp. nov. has large eggs and direct development, contrasting with the only other species known from Taiwan, G. hednon Ng, Liu and Schubart, 2004, which has small eggs and planktotrophic larvae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bujan, N.; Cox, R.; Lin, L.-C.; Ducrocq, C., and Hwung, H.-H., 2018. Semiautomatic digital clast sizing of a cobble beach, Nantian, Taiwan. Surface sediment data is scarce for beaches that are made of material close to the cobble size range, partly because of the difficulty of direct sampling for sediment size analysis. An object-detection tool for semiautomatic analysis of clast geometry, originally developed for riverbeds, was applied to the coarse-clastic beach of Nantian, Taiwan. Comparison of the software with digital point counts for the common size percentiles D5, D16, D30, D50, D70, D84, and D95 indicated an average coefficient of determination of 0.990 over 10 test pictures. The surface sediment was digitally sampled at three cross-shore locations along the beach: near the shoreline, on the steep part of the beach face, and on the beach crest. Clast-size distributions, including clast area and elongation ratio, were computed from the geometry of 1000 clasts for each location and the cross-shore variance was captured. The combination of sediment characteristics with topographic measurements showed significant relations between bidimensional size and elongation of the sediments and morphology of the beach. The method can only access the clast geometry that is visible on pictures and cannot describe the full tridimensional shape. Despite this limitation, semiautomatic digital sizing is well suited to coarse-clastic beaches and has the potential to increase the understanding of coastal sedimentology over a wide range of sediment sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redistributive land reforms implemented in post-WWII Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have often been considered a substantial stimulus for these countries' subsequent economic growth. Before the reforms, there were a small number of large landlords and many small tenant cultivators, but after the reforms, tenancy effectively disappeared. This article assesses the impact of reforms on structural change and income per capita, and shows that reforms were responsible for at least half of the actual reallocation of labor out of agriculture in each of these countries in the aftermath of the reforms. By contrast, their impact on income per capita was small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human resources are increasingly crucial to the growing economies of East Asia, which are striving to diversify economically toward higher value-added product-markets to continue their growth. Human resource management (HRM) in Taiwan, based on Confucianism and influenced by Western management research and practice, has been experiencing a major paradigm shift of sorts in recent years. With Taiwan’s rapid economic growth followed by its industrial and institutional transformation, HRM in the region has been developing to cope with the increasingly competitive and fast-changing business world. As such, this study reviews HRM’s development in Taiwan over the recent decades. The reviewed studies were gathered from work published from 1990 to 2016 appearing in the Social Sciences Citation Index or Taiwan Social Sciences Citation Index Chinese journals. A detailed discussion of HRM development in Taiwan is made, along with a summarizing scheme and some comparison to HRM in other select economies in East Asia, including those of Mainland China and Hong Kong which share the same cultural lineage and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which focuses on the survey of the three new species of the genus Stegana Meigen or diptera from Taiwan. The study uses the sequencing of the DNA barcoding fragments of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I (COI) gene for the delineation of the species. Results show that two most widely distributed species among the 23 recorded species are ranging across two zoogeographic regions.

This article compares and explores forms of ‘public’ participation in the development of bioethical governance of human embryonic stem cell research (hESR) in four Asian societies, and in doing so it contributes to the wider discussions on expertise and public inclusion. The article aims to add nuance to the concept of ‘public consultation’ by focusing on the contested meanings and relationships through which public roles and public debates are defined. The analysis seeks to go beyond a straightforward comparison by interpreting public discussions of hESR as being influenced by both local conditions and interconnected global science institutions. An adequate understanding of the public participation in debates on science requires the analysis of (a) particular reasons for scientific issues to require public discussion; (b) pressures of transnational forces; (c) variability of publics relevant to bioethical regulation; and, (d) the effects of institutionalization of bioethics. This study uses data from fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2010 in four Asian countries. Most of the interviews were conducted in the local languages and concerned various kinds of public participation in bioethics activities, as well as the views of stem cell scientists on the need to involve the public in discussions on the acceptability of their research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sequence analyses on the complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region (992bp) were conducted to elucidate the population structure of kuruma prawns (Penaeus japonicus) in East Asia. Five populations including 95 individuals were collected. They are separated into the Japan Sea (JS), the north and south of the East China Sea (NECS and SECS), the Taiwan Strait (TS), and the north of the South China Sea (NSCS) populations. There are 292 variable sites without any insertions and deletions. Nucleotide diversity in the total populations is 2.51±0.07%, and the variations within populations ranged from 2.61±0.93% (SECS) to 2.29±0.16% (JS). FST values between the JS and the rest of the populations, between the NECS and NSCS populations, and between the SECS and NSCS populations show significant differences. The UPGMA tree of these five populations shows three distinct clusters; one includes the JS population; another includes the NECS population; the third includes populations from the rest of the areas. The analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) shows clear genetic difference between the JS and the rest of the populations. Additional AMOVA analysis excluding the JS population indicates significant variation between the NECS population and the other three populations. We, therefore, conclude that three distinct populations exist in East Asia; one is in the JS; another is in the NECS; and the third is distributed in SECS, TS and NSCS. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]