Designing Public Innovations in Public Sector: The Process and Challenges in Taiwanese E-government

Researchers have found that a one-sided focus on technology dominates many e-government projects; ICT has been used mainly as a tool to enhance the efficiency and service delivery of the government. In fact, e-government should achieve public innovation goals, such as redesigning information relationships among stakeholders, enhancing citizen participation in the policymaking process, and reinforcing policy enforcement to create public value. These goals are more valuable, but also more complex than the digitization of existing governmental processes. Beside, only a few projects could achieve the public innovation diffusion goal among many e-government projects. Therefore, this case study focuses on a very important and successful e-government project in Taiwan – the e-invoicing project, by following the development timeline of this 12-year project to understand the reasons of loosing focus and the turning points to achieve the final success. With the results of this case study, this research address four main factors of success in public innovation diffusion: (a) cooperate with the right stakeholder: e-government projects requires intensive cooperation with both public and private organizations, otherwise the change agency has no complete control over its innovation offering; (b) the selection of the right diffusion mode: centralized innovation-diffusion is difficult to overcome the stereotyped perception that citizens hold toward the government, and thus, it is better to implement by a decentralized fashion; (c) the diversity of services: public innovations have an inherently higher complexity than commercial innovations because they intend to serve a diversity of citizens; and (d) assignment of the right change agent for the project: because the burden on the change agent is tremendous, only a few “policy entrepreneurs” can push through the innovation process, despite few material rewards

Distinct ligand binding sites in integrin alpha3beta1 regulate matrix adhesion and cell-cell contact.

The integrin alpha3beta1 mediates cellular adhesion to the matrix ligand laminin-5. A second integrin ligand, the urokinase receptor (uPAR), associates with alpha3beta1 via a surface loop within the alpha3 beta-propeller (residues 242-246) but outside the laminin binding region, suggesting that uPAR-integrin interactions could signal differently from matrix engagement. To explore this, alpha3-/- epithelial cells were reconstituted with wild-type (wt) alpha3 or alpha3 with Ala mutations within the uPAR-interacting loop (H245A or R244A). Wt or mutant-bearing cells showed comparable expression and adhesion to laminin-5. Cells expressing wt alpha3 and uPAR dissociated in culture, with increased Src activity, up-regulation of SLUG, and down-regulation of E-cadherin and gamma-catenin. Src kinase inhibition or expression of Src 1-251 restored the epithelial phenotype. The H245A and R244A mutants were unaffected by coexpression of uPAR. We conclude that alpha3beta1 regulates both cell-cell contact and matrix adhesion, but through distinct protein interaction sites within its beta-propeller. These studies reveal an integrin- and Src-dependent pathway for SLUG expression and mesenchymal transition

Cultural Perspective on Parenting, Trait Emotional Intelligence and Mental Health in Taiwanese Children

The current study aims to clarify the associations as well as the pathways through which parenting and children's emotional intelligence (EI) may influence children's mental health with a cross-sectional sample of 675 school pupils (fourth grade, mean age = 10.4 years, 310 boy, 356 girls and 9 unidentified) in Taiwan. Hierarchical regression and path analyses were used to examine the relationships between parenting styles, children's trait EI, and their psychological symptoms, with children's psychological symptoms as the dependent variable. The results showed that authoritative parenting was positively associated with children‟s trait EI, which in turn had a negative effect on children‟s psychological symptoms, whereas authoritarian and Chinese-specific parenting styles had direct negative effect on children‟s psychological symptoms. These findings shed light on the pathways of the interrelations between different parenting styles, children's trait EI, and psychological symptoms, providing theoretical as well as practical implications for children's emotional development and mental health

Influence of Socioeconomic Factors, Gender and Indigenous Status on Smoking in Taiwan.

The indigenous Austronesian minority of Taiwan is heavily affected by health disparities which may include suffering from a greater burden of the tobacco epidemic. While a lack of representative data has historically precluded an investigation of the differences in smoking between Taiwanese ethnicities, these data have recently become available through an annual population-based telephone survey conducted by the Health Promotion Administration, Ministry of Health and Welfare (previously known as the Bureau of Health Promotion (BHP), Department of Health). We used the BHP monitoring data to observe the prevalence of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke exposure among indigenous and non-indigenous Taiwanese surrounding a tobacco welfare tax increase in 2006, investigate ethnic differences in smoking prevalence and environmental tobacco smoke exposure each year between 2005 and 2008, and perform multiple logistic regression to estimate measures of association between potential risk factors and smoking status. Despite significant ethnic and gender differences in smoking prevalence, smoking status was not found to be significantly associated with ethnicity after controlling for socioeconomic and demographic factors

Apoptotic Sphingolipid Ceramide in Cancer Therapy

Apoptosis, also called programmed cell death, is physiologically and pathologically involved in cellular homeostasis. Escape of apoptotic signaling is a critical strategy commonly used for cancer tumorigenesis. Ceramide, a derivative of sphingolipid breakdown products, acts as second messenger for multiple extracellular stimuli including growth factors, chemical agents, and environmental stresses, such as hypoxia, and heat stress as well as irradiation. Also, ceramide acts as tumor-suppressor lipid because a variety of stress stimuli cause apoptosis by increasing intracellular ceramide to initiate apoptotic signaling. Defects on ceramide generation and sphingolipid metabolism are developed for cancer cell survival and cancer therapy resistance. Alternatively, targeting ceramide metabolism to correct these defects might provide opportunities to overcome cancer therapy resistance

Changes in the Nasal Colonization with Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus in Children: 2004-2009

BACKGROUND: Staphylococcus aureus is an important cause of infection, particularly in persons colonized with this organism. This study compared the annual prevalence and microbiological characteristics of methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) nasal colonization in Taiwanese children from 2004 through 2009. Risk factors for MRSA were determined for the overall study period. METHODS: Children from birth to ≤14 years of age presenting for health maintenance visits or attending 1 of 57 kindergartens were recruited. Nasal swabs were obtained, and a questionnaire was administered. The prevalence and microbiological characteristics of MRSA colonization were also calculated for two 3-year periods: 2004-2006 and 2007-2009. RESULTS: Cultures of the anterior nares were positive for S. aureus in 824 (25.8%) of the 3,200 children, and MRSA colonization was found in 371 (11.6%) children. The prevalence of S. aureus colonization decreased from 28.1% in 2004-2006 to 23.3% in 2007-2009 (p<0.01), whereas the prevalence of MRSA colonization increased from 8.1% to 15.1% during this period (p<0.0001). Multivariate analysis revealed that the independent risk factors for MRSA carriage were different for male and female children, and also among age groups. Most MRSA isolates belonged to sequence type 59 (ST59) (86.3%); however, a multiresistant MRSA clone with ST338 background emerged in 2007-2009. Ten (62.5%) of the 16 MRSA isolates expressed the genotypic profile ST338/staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec V(T)/Panton-Valentine leukocidin-positive/staphylococcal enterotoxin B-positive, and differed only in their antimicrobial susceptibility patterns. CONCLUSION: The prevalence of nasal colonization by MRSA increased among healthy Taiwanese children from 2004-2006 to 2007-2009, despite an overall decrease in the prevalence of nasal colonization by S. aureus. A multiresistant MRSA clone characterized as ST338 was identified from these children

Continual Learning for On-Device Speech Recognition using Disentangled Conformers

Automatic speech recognition research focuses on training and evaluating on static datasets. Yet, as speech models are increasingly deployed on personal devices, such models encounter user-specific distributional shifts. To simulate this real-world scenario, we introduce LibriContinual, a continual learning benchmark for speaker-specific domain adaptation derived from LibriVox audiobooks, with data corresponding to 118 individual speakers and 6 train splits per speaker of different sizes. Additionally, current speech recognition models and continual learning algorithms are not optimized to be compute-efficient. We adapt a general-purpose training algorithm NetAug for ASR and create a novel Conformer variant called the DisConformer (Disentangled Conformer). This algorithm produces ASR models consisting of a frozen 'core' network for general-purpose use and several tunable 'augment' networks for speaker-specific tuning. Using such models, we propose a novel compute-efficient continual learning algorithm called DisentangledCL. Our experiments show that the DisConformer models significantly outperform baselines on general ASR i.e. LibriSpeech (15.58% rel. WER on test-other). On speaker-specific LibriContinual they significantly outperform trainable-parameter-matched baselines (by 20.65% rel. WER on test) and even match fully finetuned baselines in some settings.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to ICASSP 202

Pathological Ace2-to-Ace enzyme switch in the stressed heart is transcriptionally controlled by the endothelial Brg1–FoxM1 complex

Genes encoding angiotensin-converting enzymes (Ace and Ace2) are essential for heart function regulation. Cardiac stress enhances Ace, but suppresses Ace2, expression in the heart, leading to a net production of angiotensin II that promotes cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis. The regulatory mechanism that underlies the Ace2-to-Ace pathological switch, however, is unknown. Here we report that the Brahma-related gene-1 (Brg1) chromatin remodeler and forkhead box M1 (FoxM1) transcription factor cooperate within cardiac (coronary) endothelial cells of pathologically stressed hearts to trigger the Ace2-to-Ace enzyme switch, angiotensin I-to-II conversion, and cardiac hypertrophy. In mice, cardiac stress activates the expression of Brg1 and FoxM1 in endothelial cells. Once activated, Brg1 and FoxM1 form a protein complex on Ace and Ace2 promoters to concurrently activate Ace and repress Ace2, tipping the balance to Ace2 expression with enhanced angiotensin II production, leading to cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis. Disruption of endothelial Brg1 or FoxM1 or chemical inhibition of FoxM1 abolishes the stress-induced Ace2-to-Ace switch and protects the heart from pathological hypertrophy. In human hypertrophic hearts, BRG1 and FOXM1 expression is also activated in endothelial cells; their expression levels correlate strongly with the ACE/ACE2 ratio, suggesting a conserved mechanism. Our studies demonstrate a molecular interaction of Brg1 and FoxM1 and an endothelial mechanism of modulating Ace/Ace2 ratio for heart failure therapy

Functional Effects of let-7g Expression in Colon Cancer Metastasis.

MicroRNA regulation is crucial for gene expression and cell functions. It has been linked to tumorigenesis, development and metastasis in colorectal cancer (CRC). Recently, the let-7 family has been identified as a tumor suppressor in different types of cancers. However, the function of the let-7 family in CRC metastasis has not been fully investigated. Here, we focused on analyzing the role of let-7g in CRC. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) genomic datasets of CRC and detailed data from a Taiwanese CRC cohort were applied to study the expression pattern of let-7g. In addition, in vitro as well as in vivo studies have been performed to uncover the effects of let-7g on CRC. We found that the expression of let-7g was significantly lower in CRC specimens. Our results further supported the inhibitory effects of let-7g on CRC cell migration, invasion and extracellular calcium influx through store-operated calcium channels. We report a critical role for let-7g in the pathogenesis of CRC and suggest let-7g as a potential therapeutic target for CRC treatment