Excerpt: Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse

Taipei 101, the blue-green glass tower that reigned for six years as the world’s tallest building, is everywhere in Taiwan. Its image appears on advertisements, magazine covers, brochures, guidebooks, and billboards; the soaring structure itself is visible from nearly everywhere in Taipei City. As ubiquitous as Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl TV tower—and considerably more graceful—Taipei 101 has become the iconic image of contemporary Taiwan

Finding Performance Issues in Database Engines via Cardinality Estimation Testing

Database Management Systems (DBMSs) process a given query by creating an execution plan, which is subsequently executed, to compute the query's result. Deriving an efficient query plan is challenging, and both academia and industry have invested decades into researching query optimization. Despite this, DBMSs are prone to performance issues, where a DBMS produces an inefficient query plan that might lead to the slow execution of a query. Finding such issues is a longstanding problem and inherently difficult, because no ground truth information on an expected execution time exists. In this work, we propose Cardinality Estimation Restriction Testing (CERT), a novel technique that detects performance issues through the lens of cardinality estimation. Given a query on a database, CERT derives a more restrictive query (e.g., by replacing a LEFT JOIN with an INNER JOIN), whose estimated number of rows should not exceed the number of estimated rows for the original query. CERT tests cardinality estimators specifically, because they were shown to be the most important component for query optimization; thus, we expect that finding and fixing such issues might result in the highest performance gains. In addition, we found that some other kinds of query optimization issues are exposed by the unexpected cardinality estimation, which can also be detected by CERT. CERT is a black-box technique that does not require access to the source code; DBMSs expose query plans via the EXPLAIN statement. CERT eschews executing queries, which is costly and prone to performance fluctuations. We evaluated CERT on three widely used and mature DBMSs, MySQL, TiDB, and CockroachDB. CERT found 13 unique issues, of which 2 issues were fixed and 9 confirmed by the developers. We expect that this new angle on finding performance bugs will help DBMS developers in improving DMBSs' performance

Smart-1 Moon Impact Operations

This paper describes the operations to control the Moon impact of the 3-axis stabilized spacecraft SMART-1 in September 2006. SMART-1 was launched on 27/09/2003. It was the first ESA mission to use an Electric Propulsion (EP) engine as the main motor to spiral out of the Earth gravity field and reach a scientific moon orbit [1]. During September 2005 the last EP maneuvers were performed using the remaining Xenon, in order to compensate for the 3rd body perturbations of the Sun and Earth. These operations extended the mission for an additional year. Afterwards the EP performance became unpredictable and low, so that no meaningful operation for the moon impact could be done. To move the predicted impact point on the 16/8/2006 into visibility from Earth an alternative Delta-V strategy was designed. Due to their alignment, the attitude thrusters could not be used directly to generate the Delta-V, so this strategy was based on controlled angular momentum biasing. Firing along the velocity vector around apolune, the remaining Hydrazine left from the attitude control budget was used, to shift the impact to the required coordinates

Debugging Native Extensions of Dynamic Languages

Many dynamic programming languages such as Ruby and Python enable developers to use so called native extensions, code implemented in typically statically compiled languages like C and C++. However, debuggers for these dynamic languages usually lack support for also debugging these native extensions. GraalVM can execute programs implemented in various dynamic programming languages and, by using the LLVM-IR interpreter Sulong, also their native extensions. We added support for source-level debugging to Sulong based on GraalVM's debugging framework by associating run-time debug information from the LLVM-IR level to the original program code. As a result, developers can now use GraalVM to debug source code written in multiple LLVM-based programming languages as well as programs implemented in various dynamic languages that invoke it in a common debugger front-end.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, accepted at 15th International Conference on Managed Languages & Runtimes (ManLang'18

German Involvement in Xiamen After the First Opium War 1842-1917

英美于第一次鸦片战争后在厦门的历史已有详细而广泛的研究和记载,然而,德国的 影响却几乎被忽略。本篇论文将通过对德国在“不平等条约”时期对厦门影响的研究来 填补这一空白。本文认为,第一次鸦片战争后,德国对厦门的影响在中德于1861年签 订的第一份条约之前已经开始,于第一次世界大战前结束。不过当地影响是次要的, 德国的利益中心在于航运业。尽管德国人在中国的沿海贸易和船只租赁并不少见, 但与厦门有业务往来的不多。由于在厦门的德国人少于50人,当地的德国建筑屈指 可数,其中包括两座领事建筑、一个旅馆、少数的贸易公司和几个私人场所。除了厦 门的第一所公共图书馆由德国人所建外,当时的社会福利...While American and British life in Xiamen after the First Opium War has been well re- searched and documented, German influence has widely been ignored. This thesis fills this gap by investigating German spheres of influence in Xiamen during the era of the “Unequal Treaties”. It argues that the German involvement after the First Opium War started before the first treaty between China and Germa...学位：艺术学硕士院系专业：人文学院/人文学院国际硕士_中国哲学学号：1012013115459

Chen Shui-bian: on independence

Chen Shui-bian achieved an international reputation for his promotion of Taiwan independence. Whilst that reputation may have been well earned, the analyses on which this conclusion is based are frequently flawed in two ways. First, by using an undifferentiated notion of independence, they tend to conflate sovereignty with less threatening expressions of Taiwanese identity and pro-democracy discourse. Second, by failing to take into account the impact of immediate strategic context, analysts ignore a fundamental element of democratic political communication. In our empirical analysis of more than 2,000 of Chen’s speeches, we seek to avoid both flaws by unpacking the concept of independence and taking into account Chen’s strategic relationship with his primary audiences. Our findings challenge popular portrayals of Chen, but more importantly they have strong implications for policy makers and students of political rhetoric with regard to current and future ROC presidents