China’s influence on Taiwan’s media and politics

Taiwan’s democracy and freedom of the press provide the Chinese authorities with an opportunity to use Taiwanese businessmen to influence Taiwan’s media outlets and politics. China uses three inter-related strategies to influence Taiwan’s media in this way: persuading businessmen with pro-China views to purchase Taiwanese media outlets, pressuring existing media owners, and placing advertisements in Taiwan’s media in order to purchase political influence. In addition, the Chinese government also employs cyber-propaganda strategy to attack Taiwanese political parties and politicians

A Crowdsourcing Approach to Promote Safe Walking for Visually Impaired People

[[abstract]]Visually impaired people have difficulty in walking freely because of the obstacles or the stairways along their walking paths, which can lead to accidental falls. Many researchers have devoted to promoting safe walking for visually impaired people by using smartphones and computer vision. In this research we propose an alternative approach to achieve the same goal - we take advantage of the power of crowdsourcing with machine learning. Specifically, by using smartphones carried by a vast amount of visually normal people, we can collect the tri-axial accelerometer data along with the corresponding GPS coordinates in large geographic areas. Then, machine learning techniques are used to analyze the data, turning them into a special topographic map in which the regions of outdoor stairways are marked. With the map installed in the smartphones carried by the visually impaired people, the Android App we developed can monitor their current outdoor locations and then enable an acoustic alert whey they are getting close to the stairways.[[notice]]補正完

Monte Carlo Method with Heuristic Adjustment for Irregularly Shaped Food Product Volume Measurement

Volume measurement plays an important role in the production and processing of food products. Various methods have been proposed to measure the volume of food products with irregular shapes based on 3D reconstruction. However, 3D reconstruction comes with a high-priced computational cost. Furthermore, some of the volume measurement methods based on 3D reconstruction have a low accuracy. Another method for measuring volume of objects uses Monte Carlo method. Monte Carlo method performs volume measurements using random points. Monte Carlo method only requires information regarding whether random points fall inside or outside an object and does not require a 3D reconstruction. This paper proposes volume measurement using a computer vision system for irregularly shaped food products without 3D reconstruction based on Monte Carlo method with heuristic adjustment. Five images of food product were captured using five cameras and processed to produce binary images. Monte Carlo integration with heuristic adjustment was performed to measure the volume based on the information extracted from binary images. The experimental results show that the proposed method provided high accuracy and precision compared to the water displacement method. In addition, the proposed method is more accurate and faster than the space carving method

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

Initialization Requirement in Developing of Mobile Learning 'Molearn' for Biology Students Using Inquiry-based learning

Inquiry-based learning is kind of learning activities that involves students’ entire capabilities in exploring and investigating particular objects or phenomenon using critical thinking skills. Recently, information technology tangibly contributes in any education aspects, including the existence of e-learning, a widely spreading learning model in the 21st century education. This study aims at initializing needs of developing mobile learning ‘Molearn’ based on inquiry-based method. By cooperating with Biology teacher community in senior high school, ‘Molearn’ provides IT-based medium in Biology learning process

Who wrote this scientific text?

The IEEE bibliographic database contains a number of proven duplications with indication of the original paper(s) copied. This corpus is used to test a method for the detection of hidden intertextuality (commonly named "plagiarism"). The intertextual distance, combined with the sliding window and with various classification techniques, identifies these duplications with a very low risk of error. These experiments also show that several factors blur the identity of the scientific author, including variable group authorship and the high levels of intertextuality accepted, and sometimes desired, in scientific papers on the same topic

Directorate of education (Guo Zi Jian) and the Imperial University (Tai Xue) in the Northern Song (960-1127)-interaction between politics and education in middle period China

The Imperial University played a significant political role in China’s imperial past. When established in the ancient Zhou, its mission was predominantly to nurture prospective officials for eventual service in government. This marks the inseparability of education and politics from the very onset of the University’s founding. Nevertheless, its diminished success in producing officials under subsequent dynasties caused a comparable diminution in the political significance of the metropolitan school. Not until the Northern Song, founded by the Zhao clan, did signs emerge of a resurrection of sorts. Three major educational reforms were attempted in the reigns of Renzong, Shenzong, and Huizong (ca. 1040-1126). In each reform, the emperor and the reform proponents envisioned an expanding role of political significance for the Imperial University. This dissertation focuses on the evolution of the metropolitan educational institutions, namely the Directorate of Education and the Imperial University, in the Northern Song. By investigating the record of conduct and extant writings as pertains to the institutional settings of the Imperial University as well as wide range of biographical sources for Northern Song men, mainly staff, students, and graduates of the Imperial University, the author seeks to gain insights into how Song emperors and policy advocates perceived the Imperial University as a political institution, how the staff and teachers at the University performed their assigned roles, and how students and graduates of the Northern Song Imperial University contributed to the political life. After highlighting the role of the Imperial University in the previous dynasties, reviewing the secondary literatures in connection with education in Song China, as well as illustrating the sources and methodology to be used in the introductory chapter, a comprehensive survey of the development of the metropolitan schools covering the entire Northern Song then follows. This narrative history not only highlights the innovations in the educational institutions per se, but also sheds light on a range of political phenomena during various stages in the Northern Song: how aristocracy evolved into meritocracy; how the reformers and conservatives created myths for political sake; how emperor Shenzong strengthened its autocratic rule by way of a comprehensive regulatory framework; how scholar-officials rebuffed in defending the “genealogy of the way”; and how the scholarly vision in recruiting officials through a countrywide school network was realized. The conclusion contains an analytical discussion of the political role of the Imperial University in late Northern Song: a tool of control and indoctrination, as well as a channel to select morally upright officials. The central issue is how successful could the Directorate of Education and the Imperial University perform these political functions. Through this study, hopefully a fuller picture of this elitist educational institution during one of its most flourishing periods in Imperial China can be restored. It is also envisioned that the political impact could be re-emphasized in future studies of political institutions, a perspective which has often been ignored in recent Chinese and Western scholarships where social history is dominant

IoT Enabled Environmental Monitoring System

Nowadays, global warming poses a serious threat to our planet. For this reason, the reduction of the gas emitted into the atmosphere is increasingly sought for its purpose. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to monitor the concentration of carbon dioxide can therefore be helpful in monitoring air quality. In this research, the integration of wireless sensor networks into IoT is implemented for environmental monitoring. Subsequently, a practical case is described consisting in the implementation of a driver for reading the value of the environmental CO2 concentration, through a sensor with NDIR technology. This paper presents a customized design of an IoT enabled environment monitoring system to monitor CO2 concentrations. Moreover, the performance of low-cost Non-Dispersive Infra-Red (NDIR) was assessed. Thereafter, data related to the operation of the sensor will be graphically reported, as well as a sampling window that is executed to perform the measurement. Finally, possible future developments of the driver will be presented