Changing wages and employment by skill in Taiwan, 1978-1996: The roles of education policy, trade, and immigration

Since the 1970s, Taiwan\u27s labor market has been characterized as a smooth functioning, highly integrated and nearly full employment market, which also enjoying high growth in labor earnings. Unlike most developed countries, the average unemployment rate in Taiwan was under 3 percent over the 1978--1996 period. Unskilled labor shortage problem has forced many industrial companies to move abroad where have cheaper labor costs. In 1990, the government began to invite foreign temporary unskilled workers from the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Most foreign workers are in manufacturing and construction industries. About the same time, the Taiwan government also has been implementing several major educational reform policies. One policy was to increase the number of two-year and four-year colleges, causing the number of college graduates to increase dramatically since 1990;In this study, the impacts of these two labor supply shocks, i.e. foreign unskilled labor and local skilled labor, on the Taiwan labor market are examined using the 1978--1996 Survey of Family Income and Expenditure in Taiwan. The effects of Taiwan\u27s international trade on the relative labor demand shifts are also analyzed. We find there is little effect of imported foreign unskilled workers on employment and wages for both local skilled and unskilled workers. In the long run, foreign unskilled workers tend to be complements for both local skilled and unskilled workers. The increase in number of college graduates has, not surprisingly, reduced the returns to education for the young college graduates but not for the more experienced college graduates, suggesting that the average quality of college education has been declined and the young college graduates and more experienced college graduates are not close substitutes. Women\u27s share in every industry has been dramatically increased and the gender earnings gap in Taiwan was significantly reduced during this period, although wage differentials against women still persist. The lower-educated workers and women were favored in the prediction from the trade effect. However, the trend has been gradually shifted to the higher-educated workers

Validating a Data Quality Framework in Engineering Asset Management

Data Quality (DQ) has been an acknowledged issue for a long time. Several researchers have indicated that maintaining the quality of data is often acknowledged as problematic, but is also seen as critical to effective decision-making in engineering asset management (AM). The study presents an AM specific DQ framework, which aims to provide a comprehensive structure for understanding, identifying AM DQ problems in an organised way. The framework was examined in a preliminary case study of two large Australian engineering organisations. The empirical findings from the research were used to validate the proposed AM DQ framework. As AM data and informational needs are very different to a typical business environment, a gap exists in the availability of DQ solutions for engineering asset management. Thus there is a need for the development of DQ solutions for engineering asset management

Estimation of advective methane flux in gas hydrate potential area offshore SW Taiwan and its tectonic implications

With the discoveries of Bottom Simulating Reflectors (BSRs), large and dense chemosynthetic communities and rapid sulfate reductions in pore space sediments, gas hydrates may exist in offshore southwestern Taiwan. Methane concentrations in pore space sediments have been measured to investigate if fluids and gases are derived from dissociation of gas hydrates. Very high methane concentrations and very shallow depths of sulfate methane interface (SMI) imply the high methane flux underneath the seafloor. Linear sulfate gradients, low total organic carbon (TOC) have been combined to describe the process of anaerobic methane oxidation (AMO) and calculate the iffusive methane flux in Chuang et al. (2010). However, the appearance of concave (or non-linear) profiles of sulfate in some cores might indicate advective fluid flows. Hence, the methane flux may be much greater under advective conditions. In this study, numerical transport-reaction models were applied to calculate the methane flux including diffusion and advection of dissolved sulfate and methane and the anaerobic methane oxidation of methane. According to the modeled results of three giant piston cores (MD05-2911, MD05-2912 and MD05-2913) collected during the r/v Marion Dufresne cruise in 2005, gas bubbling or bioirrigation may occur in these site. Values of the methane flux ranging from 1.91 to 5.17 mmol m-2yr-1 and upward fluid flow velocities around 0.05-0.13 cm yr-1 are related to different geologic structures in the active continental margin. Site MD05-2912 is located on the Tainan Ridge where anticlines and blind thrusts are the dominate structures. Site MD052911 is on the Yung-An Ridge characterized by emergent and imbricate thrusts

Learning to See before Learning to Act: Visual Pre-training for Manipulation

Does having visual priors (e.g. the ability to detect objects) facilitate learning to perform vision-based manipulation (e.g. picking up objects)? We study this problem under the framework of transfer learning, where the model is first trained on a passive vision task, and adapted to perform an active manipulation task. We find that pre-training on vision tasks significantly improves generalization and sample efficiency for learning to manipulate objects. However, realizing these gains requires careful selection of which parts of the model to transfer. Our key insight is that outputs of standard vision models highly correlate with affordance maps commonly used in manipulation. Therefore, we explore directly transferring model parameters from vision networks to affordance prediction networks, and show that this can result in successful zero-shot adaptation, where a robot can pick up certain objects with zero robotic experience. With just a small amount of robotic experience, we can further fine-tune the affordance model to achieve better results. With just 10 minutes of suction experience or 1 hour of grasping experience, our method achieves ~80% success rate at picking up novel objects.Comment: Accepted to ICRA 2020. Porject page: http://yenchenlin.me/vision2action