A comparative analysis on Japan and China’s FDI in ASEAN

Japan has a long history of investing in ASEAN, and China has recently demonstrated its aggressiveness in investing in ASEAN. The research plan intends to examine the perspective of the layouts of investments by Japanese and Chinese companies in ASEAN, with the aim to think about the business opportunities and implications for Taiwanese enterprises to make investment in ASEAN.Japan’s competitive advantage in the manufacturing sector has laid the basic pattern for its foreign direct investment in manufacturing in ASEAN. Japanese multinationals have established branches in ASEAN countries through direct investment to achieve the transfer of production activities to ASEAN, and to integrate ASEAN into its global production chain. China’s major investment activities in ASEAN are more related to infrastructure, reflecting its international comparative advantage of being a contractor of infrastructure construction.Due to the rapid economic growth and urbanization, China itself has quickly become the world\u27s largest market for infrastructure construction.Compared with Japanese multinational companies that have been operating in the ASEAN market for many years, Chinese companies still have a certain gap in technology, brand, transnational operations and risk management. The paper also attempts to look over China’s strategies for developing ASEAN market through two cases of Chinese auto industry investment in ASEAN

Exploring Compressed Image Representation as a Perceptual Proxy: A Study

We propose an end-to-end learned image compression codec wherein the analysis transform is jointly trained with an object classification task. This study affirms that the compressed latent representation can predict human perceptual distance judgments with an accuracy comparable to a custom-tailored DNN-based quality metric. We further investigate various neural encoders and demonstrate the effectiveness of employing the analysis transform as a perceptual loss network for image tasks beyond quality judgments. Our experiments show that the off-the-shelf neural encoder proves proficient in perceptual modeling without needing an additional VGG network. We expect this research to serve as a valuable reference developing of a semantic-aware and coding-efficient neural encoder

The Research of Online Service Recovery Based on Kano’s Model

To identify customer requirements regarding e-retailing service failures, this study applied Kano’s model to sort the e-retailing compensation elements into various categories for identifying the key elements, maximizing customer satisfaction and minimizing customer dissatisfaction based on investigation of the sample of 167 e-retailing customers. The result indicates that a psychological compensation is the basic requirement of e-retailing customer and a refund can improve customer satisfaction when any service failure is occurred. Moreover, an economic compensation is indifferent for a dissatisfied customer. The result can help the e-retailer to understand what different compensations would have diverse effects on customers and provide effective guidelines to reduce customer’s dissatisfaction caused by the service failure

Testing for the Fundamental Determinants of the Long-Run Real Exchange Rate: The Case of Taiwan

Three things have been suggested in this paper regarding the real exchange rate movements of the Taiwanese dollar with respect to the US dollar. First, the real exchange rates between the Taiwanese and the US dollar did not move as PPP predicts by cointegration test and impulse response function analysis. Also, through the analyses of impulse response functions, innovation in nominal exchange rate, domestic and foreign prices results in permanent changes in the real exchange rate. Finally, in the long-run, differential productivity growth between the traded and non-traded goods and the changes in relative unit labor cost can lead to the changes in the real exchange rates.

Whole-body vibration training effect on physical performance and obesity in mice

The purpose of this study was to verify the beneficial effects of whole-body vibration (WBV) training on exercise performance, physical fatigue and obesity in mice with obesity induced by a high-fat diet (HFD). Male C57BL/6 mice were randomly divided into two groups: normal group (n=6), fed standard diet (control), and experimental group (n=18), fed a HFD. After 4-week induction, followed by 6-week WBV of 5 days per week, the 18 obese mice were divided into 3 groups (n=6 per group): HFD with sedentary control (HFD), HFD with WBV at relatively low-intensity (5.6 Hz, 0.13 g) (HFD+VL) or high-intensity (13 Hz, 0.68 g) (HFD+VH). A trend analysis revealed that WBV increased the grip strength in mice. WBV also dose-dependently decreased serum lactate, ammonia and CK levels and increased glucose level after the swimming test. WBV slightly decreased final body weight and dose-dependently decreased weights of epididymal, retroperitoneal and perirenal fat pads and fasting serum levels of alanine aminotransferase, CK, glucose, total cholesterol and triacylglycerol. Therefore, WBV could improve exercise performance and fatigue and prevent fat accumulation and obesity-associated biochemical alterations in obese mice. It may be an effective intervention for health promotion and prevention of HFD-induced obesity

Retinal Vessel Density in Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography in Optic Atrophy after Nonarteritic Anterior Ischemic Optic Neuropathy

Aims. To compare optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT-A) retinal vasculature measurements between normal and optic atrophy after nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) subjects. Design. This prospective observational study was conducted between July 2015 and August 2016 at the ophthalmology outpatient department of a referral center in Taiwan. Peripapillary (4.5 × 4.5 mm) and parafoveal (6 × 6 mm) OCT-A scans were acquired. Measurements of the peripapillary region were obtained in two areas: (1) circumpapillary vessel density (cpVD) and (2) whole enface image vessel density (wiVD). Results. 13 participants with optic atrophy after NAION had lower peripapillary vessel density than the 18 age-matched participants in the healthy control (HC) group (p<0.001 for both cpVD and wiVD). However, the parafoveal vessel density was not significantly different between the two groups (p=0.49). The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the HC and NAION eyes were 0.992 for cpVD and 0.970 for wiVD. cpVD and wiVD were significantly correlated with the average retinal nerve fiber layer thickness (p<0.001 for both). Conclusion. Peripapillary retinal perfusion is significantly decreased in optic atrophy after NAION. OCT-A may aid in the understanding of structure-function-perfusion relationships in NAION

Structural and cognitive deficits in chronic carbon monoxide intoxication: a voxel-based morphometry study

BACKGROUND: Patients with carbon monoxide (CO) intoxication may develop ongoing neurological and psychiatric symptoms that ebb and flow, a condition often called delayed encephalopathy (DE). The association between morphologic changes in the brain and neuropsychological deficits in DE is poorly understood. METHODS: Magnetic resonance imaging and neuropsychological tests were conducted on 11 CO patients with DE, 11 patients without DE, and 15 age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy subjects. Differences in gray matter volume (GMV) between the subgroups were assessed and further correlated with diminished cognitive functioning. RESULTS: As a group, the patients had lower regional GMV compared to controls in the following regions: basal ganglia, left claustrum, right amygdala, left hippocampus, parietal lobes, and left frontal lobe. The reduced GMV in the bilateral basal ganglia, left post-central gyrus, and left hippocampus correlated with decreased perceptual organization and processing speed function. Those CO patients characterized by DE patients had a lower GMV in the left anterior cingulate and right amygdala, as well as lower levels of cognitive function, than the non-DE patients. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with CO intoxication in the chronic stage showed a worse cognitive and morphologic outcome, especially those with DE. This study provides additional evidence of gray matter structural abnormalities in the pathophysiology of DE in chronic CO intoxicated patients