Standardization, compromise, or specialization: a content analysis of magazine advertisements in America and Taiwan

When researchers studied standardization and specialization of advertising, most of them only focused on comparisons of the cultural influences of the advertisements across the different nations. McCarty (1994) studied the general role in cross-cultural research and international marketing and advertising of several different cultural values, such as individualism versus collectivism: masculinity versus femininity; time orientation, activity orientation and humans’ relationship with nature. Kahle, Beatty and Mager (1994) studied implications of social values for European community communications. Astroff (1994) (1994) studied the language culture use of women in advertising. Huang (1995) studied the different cultural factors, such as norms and ethics, between American and Taiwan’s television commercials. Caillat and Muller studied the cultural influences on American and British beer advertising in 1996. Cheng and Schweitzer (1996) computed cultural values, such as tradition versus modernity, reflected in American and British beer advertising. Although many of the international studies were carried out comparing the differences among cultures it will be of more practical value to study advertising messages because the results might be able to provide guidelines for the international marketers and international advertisers to sell their products across countries. Researchers, such as Ramaprased and Hasegawa (1992 & 1992), who have been focusing on international advertising from the standpoint of creative development rather than cultural influence view advertising standardization, compromise, specialization as creative strategies. Douglas and Dubois (1977) studied how the cultural environment impacts market and advertising strategies across countries. In 1981, Kaynak and Mitchell analyzed marketing and advertising strategies used in Turkey, Britain and Canada. Kanso (1992) studied the significant differences of the cultures in international advertising. Killough (1978) researched the transfer of international advertising. Colvin, Heeler and Thorpe (1980) researched advertising strategies in three European countries: United Kingdom, France and Sweden. Dowling (1980) studied American and Australian use of informational cues in different product categories on television. Hornik (1980) compared the evaluations of international and national advertising strategies. In 1988, Hite and Fraser studied international advertising strategies of multinational corporations. Keown, Jacobs, Schmidt and Ghymn (1992) studied different information cues used in America, Japanese, South Korean and Chinese television, radio, magazine, and newspaper advertisements. Duncan and Ramaprasad (1995) studied international advertising strategy, execution, and language differences. This study is designed to separate one aspect from other various influences in advertising and to focus on advertising creative strategies in international markets by following these researchers’ guidelines

The Taiwan Civil Aviation Safety Reporting (TACARE) System in Aircraft Maintenance: An Evaluation of the Acceptance of Voluntary Incident Reporting Programs for Maintenance Personnel in Taiwan

The purpose of this research was to examine the effectiveness of the Taiwan Civil Aviation safety reporting (TACARE) system for maintenance personnel to improve aircraft safety. The research evaluated what are the issues that affect the participation of the TACARE system. The understandings of the safety culture for maintenance personnel in Taiwan were also analyzed. The research was conducted with a mixed method. The survey and interview were developed to sample the acceptance and opinions regarding the TACARE system for the maintenance personnel in Taiwan. Statistical analysis of the data from 605 survey respondents and 9 interviewees concluded the maintenance personnel in Taiwan lacked the necessary knowledge of voluntary safety reporting. The results yielded the agreement with importance of promoting voluntary safety reporting programs in Taiwanese aircraft maintenance industry

Integrable Minisuperspace Models with Liouville Field: Energy Density Self-Adjointness and Semiclassical Wave Packets

The homogeneous cosmological models with a Liouville scalar field are investigated in classical and quantum context of Wheeler-DeWitt geometrodynamics. In the quantum case of quintessence field with potential unbounded from below and phantom field, the energy density operators are not essentially self-adjoint and self-adjoint extensions contain ambiguities. Therefore the same classical actions correspond to a family of distinct quantum models. For the phantom field the energy spectrum happens to be discrete. The probability conservation and appropriate classical limit can be achieved with a certain restriction of the functional class. The appropriately localized wave packets are studied numerically using the Schrodinger's norm and a conserved Mostafazadeh's norm introduced from techniques of pseudo-Hermitian quantum mechanics. These norms give a similar packet evolution that is confronted with analytical classical solutions.Comment: Main points emphasized, less important material shortened; 24 pages, 13 figure

Mill Valley Evacuation Study

Traffic evacuation planning can be essential in saving lives in case of natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods and wildfires. We build on a case study of traffic evacuation planning for the city of Mill Valley, CA. We run a microscopic traffic simulator to examine various evacuation scenarios. We modify some crucial aspects of a previous study to make the simulation more pertinent. For a citywide evacuation, we quantify the importance of decreasing the number of vehicles per household. We find a set of changes that can significantly reduce the evacuation time by routing more traffic to the least-used highway on-ramps. We show results when evacuating various areas of the city one at a time.Comment: 9 page