An Economy-wide Analysis of Impacts of WTO Tiered Formula for Tariff Reduction on Taiwan

In this study we use Taiwan as a case study to provide an economy-wide analysis of impacts on Taiwan of WTO tariff reduction schemes with different combinations of thresholds and reduction rates. The model we utilized in this study is Taiwan General Equilibrium Model with a WTO module (TAIGEM-WTO, hereafter) that is a multi-sectoral computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Taiwan's economy derived from Australian ORANI model (Dixon, Parmenter, Sutton and Vincent, 1982). Simulation results show that results are more sensitive to the scheme of tariff-reduction (i.e., Category 1, 2, and 3) than the tiered levels (i.e., A, B, C, and D) and as a strategy we should pay more attention to the arguments related to the amounts of tariff-reduction. Moreover, changes in nominal average tariff rates are more sensitive and shocks to the economy are more severe when we change the tariff reduction categories rather than the tiered levels. This conclusion also applies to the tiered reduction case when only sensitive products are considered. Finally, simulations with sector's bound rate calculated using arithmetic means have bigger effects than those using import values as weights. Therefore, sector's bound rate using import values as weights would be preferred.International Relations/Trade,

Dealing with Security Related Stress: Mindfulness on Countermeasures

Contemporary knowledge workers face information security-related stress and often struggle with responding to security threats. Employees deal with stress using different coping strategies. Some adopt avoidance coping mode to dissociate themselves with stress while some adopt approach coping mode to actively solve problems. We propose that being mindful on countermeasures of information security threats can ease stress and the negative impacts caused by stress. In addition, we also hypothesize the moderating effect of mindfulness on the relationships between security-related stress and two coping modes

Leadership and Learning in Information System Development Project Team

In addition to traditional vertical leadership, the importance of shared leadership in teams has been highlighted recently. However, despite the growing interest in team leadership, researchers pay limited attention to the relationship between specific leadership styles and learning types in teams. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a theoretical model to answer the question: “How vertical and shared team leadership styles affect exploration and exploitation of team learning?” In addition to argue the impact of leadership on both types of learning, we further hypothesize a contingency relationship between learning types and leadership styles

The Influence of Information Security Stress on Security Policy Compliance: A Protection Motivation Theory Perspective

The occurrence of security incidents will not only cause substantial loss to the enterprise but also serious damage to goodwill. An enterprise has to formulate and implement effective security policies to reduce the occurrence of security incidents. However, the process of promoting the security policy will put stress on employees. The focus of this paper is whether these pressures will affect staff\u27s compliance with the security policies based on the protection motivation theory. This study uses a survey method and 324 responses are collected. The results show that security task stress and security job stress have a significant impact on the formation of security role stress. Security role stress impacts threat and coping appraisals leading to security compliance

Probing highly collimated photon-jets with deep learning

Many extensions of the standard model (SM) predict the existence of axion-like particles and/or dark Higgs in the sub-GeV scale. Two new sub-GeV particles, a scalar and a pseudoscalar, produced through the Higgs boson exotic decays, are investigated. The decay signatures of these two new particles with highly collimated photons in the final states are discriminated from the ones of SM backgrounds using the Convolutional Neural Networks and Boosted Decision Trees techniques. The sensitivities of searching for such new physics signatures at the Large Hadron Collider are obtained

Team Leadership and Diversity Management in Information Systems Development Project Teams

Background: The interplay of diversity and leadership produces mixed findings in the literature. Based on the categorization-elaboration model (CEM) and diversity management (DM) literature, this study investigates the role of team leadership in a diverse ISD team. Further, this study examines the moderating roles of DM practices in the relationships between group diversity, team leadership, and project performance. Method: This study selected a paired survey method to test the hypotheses. Eighty-two valid paired questionnaires were received from project managers and team members in ISD projects. In addition, this study used partial least squares (PLS) with a bootstrapping technique to examine the proposed model. Results: The results show that group diversity has mixed impacts on team leadership. Furthermore, DM practices positively moderate the effect of value diversity on team leadership, as value diversity is positively related to team leadership when DM practices are more robust. At last, DM practices negatively moderate the relationship between team leadership and project performance as the effect of team leadership has weaker effects on project performance when DM practices are strong than when the practices are weak. Conclusion: This study adds to the literature by examining team leadership in a heterogenous ISD team and providing empirical evidence for the moderating roles of DM practices in team leadership processes

Is Explanation the Cure? Misinformation Mitigation in the Short Term and Long Term

With advancements in natural language processing (NLP) models, automatic explanation generation has been proposed to mitigate misinformation on social media platforms in addition to adding warning labels to identified fake news. While many researchers have focused on generating good explanations, how these explanations can really help humans combat fake news is under-explored. In this study, we compare the effectiveness of a warning label and the state-of-the-art counterfactual explanations generated by GPT-4 in debunking misinformation. In a two-wave, online human-subject study, participants (N = 215) were randomly assigned to a control group in which false contents are shown without any intervention, a warning tag group in which the false claims were labeled, or an explanation group in which the false contents were accompanied by GPT-4 generated explanations. Our results show that both interventions significantly decrease participants' self-reported belief in fake claims in an equivalent manner for the short-term and long-term. We discuss the implications of our findings and directions for future NLP-based misinformation debunking strategies.Comment: EMNLP Findings 202

Team Quotients, Resilience, and Performance of Software Development Projects

Past studies have examined actions and strategies that software project teams can take to reduce the negative impact of uncertainties, such as changing requirements. Software development project teams often have to be flexible to follow the pre-defined plans and strive to meet project goals. Sometimes uncertainty may go extreme to temporarily slow projects down and set project teams into reduced productivity. Project teams should be resilient to recover from the reduce productivity condition and move forward toward predefined goals. This study focuses on understanding the importance of team resilience for software project teams and exploring the antecedents of team resilience. Specifically, we investigate the impacts of intelligence and emotional quotient on team resilience capability, the extent to which project team can recover from the impediment and move forward. This is a research-in-progress work. A future empirical test plan has been discussed at the end

SOC Design for Speech-to-Speech Translation

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