RECONSTRUCT THE IDENTITIES ON CULTURAL AND LANGUAGE TRANSITION IN TAIWAN

Since 1980s, the marriage pattern in Taiwan has had a huge change for a large number of female immigrants both from Southeast Asia and Mainland China started to immigrate to Taiwan. It is called “Marriage Migration.” Researches concerning female immigrant spouses’ homeland cultures and familial identities were seldom discussed; however, it is till recent years that the stories of those female immigrants were fully presented/ represented by means of various narratives. For instance, many films, photos, and the contexts exquisitely depict conflicts between female immigrants and their cross-cultural marriages, families, children and even their families of origin. There are three kinds of narratives in immigrants’ writing: oral/confessional narrative, textual narrative, and documentary films. The first is based on female immigrants’ description orally with their own languages and then being translated into Chinese, or they write with simple Chinese. For example, the Taiwanese female artist, Lulu Shur-tzy Hou, played as a medium in depicting seven female immigrant spouses by means of the firstperson monologue in her three episodes Look Toward the Other Side: Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan (2005-2009). These episodes probed into the question of spouses’ self-identity whilst living in an exotic place. Then, the Textual narrative tends to focus on the mother-daughter relationships and Pepe Wu’s three short stories in Moving Skirts will be discussed. It usually illustrates the mother figures with madness, aphasia, or also absence from home. All mothers are silent without voices. Finally, in the documentary films, Out/Marriage and Let’s not be Afraid display that women not only play as mothers, wives, daughter-in-laws, but as a defenders to protect their rights. This research will explore the following issues in female immigrants from Southeast Asia in Taiwan: (1) cultural and National identities; (2) motherhood and the mother-daughter relationships; (3) narrative writing. It will definitely provide a new perspective in Asian ethic and women’s writing and set up a landmark toward research possibilities of diasporic females studied by the approaches of displacement

Getting healed from a globalised age : a study of the New Age Movement in Taiwan

The aim of this qualitative study of the New Age Movement (NAM) in Taiwan was to test the ideas about 'self-religion', 'reflexive modernisation' and 'globalisation' that underlie many sociological accounts of the New Age phenomena. It also explored the neglected issues of emotions and embodiment in New Age practices. By means of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 40 participants in New Age activities, participant observation in two New Age courses about healing and documentary analysis, my project produced the following four conclusions. First, the characteristics of New Age spiritualities in Taiwan, such as 'spiritual but not religious' and 'transformational but not salvational', differ from those of the country's main religions and new religious groups. But many people in the NAM seek a new balance between 'tradition and modernity' or 'new age spiritualities and "old age" religions'. Second, changes in emotional states are critical for participants in New Age activities in terms of 'being healed' through a process of self-transformation. Participants experience emotional identification, display and experience, whilst also internalising a set of feeling rules based on the 'emotion ideology' of New Age spiritualities. Third, analysis of interviewees' biographical reconstructions of their experiences shows that the New Age can be regarded as an integral part of late modern society in Taiwan. Not only is the NAM mainly about self-reflexivity but it also influences the life politics of its followers. It can therefore serve as a source of 'alternative' expert knowledge in late-modern society. Fourth, the structure of the NAM in Taiwan can be described as a loose, web-like network. Furthermore, the globalised aspects of the movement cannot be regarded simply as an expression of 'Westernisation' or 'Americanisation', but should be properly understood as a process of 'parallel glocalization'. This thesis is an original combination of conceptual analysis, theoretical ideas and empirical investigation. Its main contributions are, on the one hand, to have integrated the New Age in Taiwan into theorising about late-modernity and globalisation and, on the other, to have placed emotions and healing at the center of the study of New Age activities

Quadratic distances on probabilities: A unified foundation

This work builds a unified framework for the study of quadratic form distance measures as they are used in assessing the goodness of fit of models. Many important procedures have this structure, but the theory for these methods is dispersed and incomplete. Central to the statistical analysis of these distances is the spectral decomposition of the kernel that generates the distance. We show how this determines the limiting distribution of natural goodness-of-fit tests. Additionally, we develop a new notion, the spectral degrees of freedom of the test, based on this decomposition. The degrees of freedom are easy to compute and estimate, and can be used as a guide in the construction of useful procedures in this class.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053607000000956 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Context of Cloud Computing/Services Adoption in Business: A Systematic Review with Activity Theory perspective

Cloud computing has been established as a prominent research topic with the rise of a ubiquitous provision of computing resources over the last decade. According to literature review, previous studies are found focusing on the technical issue mostly; however, accompanying with the cloud service developing progress, there are a wide range of applications for adopting cloud computing/services and without an overall comprehension. This study aims to proposed a conceptual framework to systematically explore the activities and elements related to cloud computing/services adoption in business. The research framework is found useful for understanding the context of cloud computing and services and the preliminary findings are helpful to further explore the related activities and relationships behind on cloud computing/services adoption in business