Cross-Cultural Contact: A Preliminary Study on the Cross-Cultural Communication between Taiwanese Undergraduates and International Students—A Case Study on the International College of Ming Chuan University

Based on cross-cultural theory, this study applies in-depth interviewing and focus group testing to examine the difficulties and challenges faced by Taiwanese undergraduates while communicating with international students in an English immersion instruction environment at the International College and analyze how the former should adapt themselves to the cross-cultural learning environment. This study indicates that language competence is the main factor affecting local students’ adaptation to the cross-cultural environment at the International College. Low language proficiency, pertaining to either schoolwork or interpersonal communication, is the main cause of anxiety and nervousness among local students during the earlier stage of adaptation. According to the adaptation curve, the honeymoon stage experienced by local students following enrollment is extremely short and is usually accompanied by anxiety and uneasiness. Their adaptation stage comprises two aspects, schoolwork and life. Regarding the schoolwork aspect, local students face a relatively long crisis stage because only after making certain improvement in English proficiency can they gradually adapt themselves to the cross-cultural learning environment. However, in terms of the life aspect, it takes a comparatively shorter time for local students to adapt themselves to cross-cultural conflicts, and they can rapidly enter the recovery and biculturalism adaptation stages

The Construction of City Images in Micro Films: A Case Study of Taipei City Government

In recent years, with the rapid development of the media, an increasing number of corporations and even government agencies are using the new format known as the micro film as a means of advertising and marketing. In this study, we took the micro films produced by the Taipei City Government as objects of analysis to investigate the image of the city as constructed in and produced by these films. Furthermore, in this study, the symbol of image in three such micro films was studied: Love@Taipei, My Micro Tour of Taipei, and Happily Ever After. It was found that in these films, the characteristics of the city of Taipei have been presented accurately and successfully by means of the [appropriate selection of] celebrity performers, the romance narratives used, and the lively presentation of these films. Therefore, these films have foregrounded an image of Taipei that is free, friendly, diverse, and progressive; furthermore, they have successfully conveyed the idea that “Taipei is a city that is positive and capable of outstanding achievementsâ€. These films, designed to attract audiences, have been made with great skill and portray little elements of the government-run campaigns they are actually part of, thus making them even more entertaining for viewers

Joint and Cross-border Patents as Proxies for International Technology Diffusion

With the advent of globalization, economic and financial interactions among countries have become widespread. Given technological advancements, the factors of production can no longer be considered to be just labor and capital. In the pursuit of economic growth, every country has sensibly invested in international cooperation, learning, innovation, technology diffusion and knowledge, and outward direct investment. In this paper, we use a panel data set of 40 countries from 1981 to 2008 and a negative binomial model, using a novel set of cross-border patents and joint patents as proxy variables for technology diffusion, in order to investigate such diffusion. The empirical results suggest that, if it is desired to shift from foreign to domestic technology, it is necessary to increase expenditure on R&D for business enterprises and higher education, exports and technology. If the focus is on increasing bilateral technology diffusion, it is necessary to increase expenditure on R&D for higher education and technology. It is also found that outward foreign direct investment has no significant impact on either joint or cross-border patents, whereas inward foreign direct investment has a significant negative impact on cross-border patents but no impact on joint patents. Moreover, government expenditure on higher education has a significant impact on both cross-border and joint patents

International Technology Diffusion of Joint and Cross-border Patents (Revised version)

With the advent of globalization, economic and financial interactions among countries have become widespread. Given technological advancements, the factors of production can no longer be considered to be just labor and capital. In the pursuit of economic growth, every country has sensibly invested in international cooperation, learning, innovation, technology diffusion and knowledge. In this paper, we use a panel data set of 40 countries from 1981 to 2008 and a negative binomial model, using a novel set of cross-border patents and joint patents as proxy variables for technology diffusion, in order to investigate such diffusion. The empirical results suggest that, if it is desired to shift from foreign to domestic technology, it is necessary to increase expenditure on R&D for business enterprises and higher education, exports and technology. If the focus is on increasing bilateral technology diffusion, it is necessary to increase expenditure on R&D for higher education and technology

Participation and Environmental Factors of Children with Physical Disabilities in Taiwan

Participation is a critical health and education outcome of children and can be optimized by environmental supports. Children with physical disabilities often experience participation restriction and environmental barriers. Research is limited in describing participation in everyday activities of children with physical disabilities and identifying environmental barriers faced by those children in Taiwan. This chapter presents data of 94 children with physical disabilities aged 2–6 years and their families in Taiwan. Children with physical disabilities were primarily children with cerebral palsy (36%) and developmental (motor) delay (34%). Parents completed the Chinese version of Assessment of Preschool Children’s Participation (APCP-C) and the Chinese version of the Child and Adolescent Scale of Environment (CASE-C) by structured interview to assess pattern of participation and impact of environment factors to their children’s daily life. Participation of children with physical disabilities differed on the basis of level of severity, but not age and sex. Parents reported increased impacts of problems with the quality and availability of family and community resources than problems with assistance/attitude supports and physical design and access. The findings provide a profile of children’s pattern of participation and environmental barriers that impact participation in Taiwan

Applying Information Integration Theory on the Modeling of Price Forecasting – An Example of Online Trading on Ebay

Because of the booming of internet technology and the great promotion internet portal, on-line exchange is more popular in the recent years. This study attempts to integrate concepts of Information Integrate Theory; Anchoring and Adjustment Method to explore the buyer’s trade behavior between two different cultures. After observing the historical data on Yahoo’s Taiwan and Yahoo’s America, the anchoring effect and order effect during the process of a C2C auction is proposed in this study. Chinese buyers seem willing to pay much their attention on pricing during the whole process of an auction than American people do. But, the same phenomenon does exist for American doing a bid on a higher-priced luxury commodity. It sounds for a luxury product, there is a common pricing strategy existed between people of two different cultures. The results provide a very promised direction for knowledge capture and decision analysis for trading, and more works for data mining on pricing for different commodities, cultures, or other kinds of variables related to products and members of market might be a possible future approach for building a knowledge management system for a pricing mechanism for the market

The influence of expertise and experimental paradigms on the visual behavior of tennis athletes in returning a serve

To return a serve, one must pick up information from the server’s kinematics and anticipate the ball trajectory. Although the perceptual requirements are important, the literature diverges in terms of the differences between experts and novices as well as the importance of the experimental paradigm (in-situ vs. video-based) for the results. This study aimed to address both concerns. We compared experts’ (n=7, 20.6±1.1 years of age) and novices’ (n=7, 20.0±0.4 years of age) visual pattern when returning a serve (Experiment 1) and the influence of the experimental paradigm in experts (Experiment 2). Experts fixated more and longer the upper body and ball, while novices showed a more distributed pattern and with longer fixations outside of the server’s body. Also, the pattern was different when comparing in-situ and laboratory settings, differing mainly in fixation frequency. The influence of expertise was observed in qualitative (relative) and quantitative (absolute) measures of visual behavior with the setting having an important influence. Thus, studies should be as close to the actual situation if trying to understand experts’ behavior

Potassium {4-[(3S,6S,9S)-3,6-dibenzyl-9-isopropyl-4,7,10-trioxo-11–oxa-2,5,8-triazadodecyl]phenyl}trifluoroborate

[[abstract]]The reported compound 4 was synthesized and fully characterized by 1H NMR, 13C NMR, 11B NMR, 19F NMR, and high resolution mass spectrometry.[[booktype]]電子版[[countrycodes]]CH

On Optimizing Signaling Efficiency of Retransmissions for Voice LTE

The emergence of voice over LTE enables voice traffic transmissions over 4G packet-switched networks. Since voice traffic is characterized by its small payload and frequent transmissions, the corresponding control channel overhead would be high. Semi-persistent scheduling (SPS) is hence proposed in LTE-A to reduce such overhead. However, as wireless channels typically fluctuate, tremendous retransmissions due to poor channel conditions, which are still scheduled dynamically, would lead to a large overhead. To reduce the control message overhead caused by SPS retransmissions, we propose a new SPS retransmission protocol. Different from traditional SPS, which removes the downlink control indicators (DCI) directly, we compress some key fields of all retransmissions' DCIs in the same subframe as a fixed-length hint. Thus, the base station does not need to send this information to different users individually but just announces the hint as a broadcast message. In this way, we reduce the signaling overhead and at the same time, preserve the flexibility of dynamic scheduling. Our simulation results show that, by enabling DCI compression, our design improves signaling efficiency by 2.16\times, and the spectral utilization can be increased by up to 60%