fulbright Taiwan online journal

fulbright Taiwan online journal

Tag: English

Mathematical Modeling: The Formosan Landlocked Salmon

In recent decades, dam removal has become a frequently-used strategy for restoring natural stream habitats because dams deteriorate river channels and often lead to decreased diversity of species. Taiwan has many short and steep rivers in the high mountains, where strong rainfall creates high water velocity. As a result, the government constructed many check dams to prevent the collapse of riverbanks and to lessen sediment transport to lower elevations. As of 1999, Taiwan had over 3,000 check dams. The Chichiawan Stream and its tributaries in central Taiwan are the last refuge of the Formosan salmon. Dam establishment and agricultural development have degraded this habitat.  These key factors are considered the main reason for the decline in the abundance and range of the Formosan salmon after the 1960s. The salmon population declined to about 200 individuals by 1984, at which time the Taiwanese government listed them as an endangered species. The salmon abundance in the entire Chichiawan basin has ranged between 1,000 and 5,500 since 2005. The Chichiawan Stream basin had 11 check dams in 2000, covering a length of less than 10 km. These dams have disturbed the salmon’s habitat in multiple ways. For instance, the presence of dams creates

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This Invitation

“It began with an invitation from the Fulbright Program to spend a year in Taiwan and now an invitation for the audience to enter into the choreographer’s world: an invitation to dream, to wonder, to be innocent, to feel pain…to sacrifice, learn, re-learn, let go…to die, to live…” Created as the culmination of her year as a Fulbrighter in Taiwan, this work titled This Invitation represents Amber Kao’s journey of returning to the country from which her family came, and her discordant experience as an outsider in a culture where she looks like she should belong. This works alludes to two influential figures in the choreographer’s life that unintentionally led her back to Taiwan this year: her grandmother who immigrated to the United States to raise her and her piano instructor and artistic mentor, Professor Logan Skelton. The dual influence of tai chi dao yin and contemporary dance technique is interwoven throughout this theatrical and choreographic work.  This piece comprises a sound score that includes voices of young children and a recording of a poem, both of which the choreographer composed and compiled. This Invitation I have for you this invitation, Feel free to accept or decline. I’d like for

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Smart Sensors for Safer Bridges: An International Collaborative Effort

Bridge Scour      The erosion of soil, sand, and riverbed materials near bridge foundations due to flowing water (or wind in some cases) is a phenomenon known as bridge scour. Despite our awareness of its occurrence, bridge scour remains one of the deadliest causes of overwater bridge failures worldwide, particularly in the United States and in Taiwan.      For instance, a notable scour-induced bridge collapse in the United States was the Schoharie Creek Interstate Highway Bridge incident in Mohawk River, New York, which happened in April 1987. The 32-year-old bridge collapsed due to extensive flood-induced scouring at one of its piers, and 10 people lost their lives. In Taiwan, similar incidents have occurred as well. More recently in September 2008, Typhoon Sinlaku brought heavy rainfall across many parts of Taiwan. The Houfeng Bridge collapsed due to flooding and severe scouring near one of its piers, although it was suspected that long-term riverbed degradation following the Chi-Chi earthquake in 1999 also contributed to its failure.      Events like these could be traced back through the histories of both countries. Even worse is that overwater bridge collapses after scouring continue to occur and threaten public safety. The inability to

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Chinese Buddhist Poetry and Academic Lineages in Taiwan: Part Two of Two

     In this two-part essay, I survey two important academic lineages in Taiwan and their contributions to the study of Chinese Buddhist poetry. In the first part, I focused on the cohort of scholars that worked and trained at National Chengchi University. In this second part, I examine the other major lineage. In addition to tracing the origins of this second group, I highlight some recent works and offer a more in-depth summary of their contents.        The other major school of scholarship on Buddhist poetry is associated with National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) and National Taiwan University (NTU). Though still connected to traditions of East Asian scholarship, these scholars distinguish themselves through their engagement with contemporary Western scholarship. They frequently refer to their distinctive style of scholarship as cultural analysis.         These scholars tend to ground their work in historical disciplines (intellectual history, literary history, social history) rather than pure philosophy or literary analysis. They also set themselves apart by looking beyond the received canon. Though not as numerous as the members of Chengchi school of thought, the NTNU-NTU practitioners of cultural analysis are influential and hold positions at Taipei’s three most prestigious institutions:

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Chinese Buddhist Poetry and Academic Lineages in Taiwan: Part One of Two

     Chinese Buddhist poetry and literature remains largely unstudied in Western academia. The study of Buddhist poetry requires facility with the disparate fields of Chinese literature and Buddhist studies. These demands are a formidable challenge even for native speakers of East Asian languages. Nonetheless, several generations of East Asian scholars have made significant inroads into this field of inquiry. In this two-part essay, I will briefly outline two important academic lineages in Taiwan and their contributions to the study of Chinese Buddhist poetry.        Thanks to the generosity of Fulbright Taiwan, this past year I have had the honor of working at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy (ICLP) under the supervision of Professor Liao Chao-heng (廖肇亨). My interest in the intersections of Chinese Buddhism and literature has been nurtured by the large and active community of scholars at Academia Sinica.         When I had the opportunity to participate in conferences, attend lectures, or visit campuses and Buddhist temples, I was impressed by the breadth and depth of scholarship around Taiwan. The island, with its close connections to Japan and the West, is particularly well-suited to scholarship on Buddhist literature. Taiwan’s academic legacy

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Personal Experiences and Reflections at University of Washington

     This article aims to share my (academic) experiences at University of Washington, Seattle during the autumn quarter 2014. For 1st year PhD students in the Economics department, it is typical that almost all our efforts are invested in taking core courses and preparing for the qualifying exams. In other words, it’s good to have a research agenda, but students are encouraged to fully concentrate on core courses and exams. Therefore, I will take this opportunity to share my personal experiences and reflections, and will not discuss my research in this article.        The first thing that required a period of adjustment was food. Unlike Taiwan, the cost of living in Seattle is high, giving funded students such as myself, who typically try to make the best use of their stipends, greater incentives to cook by ourselves instead of eating outside. However, cooking for oneself also takes a lot of time and, for a Ph.D. student, time constraints are an important issue. To avoid cooking every meal, thus crowding out my time to study and spending an unreasonable amount of money, I finally decided to cook about once or twice a week and portion out the food

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Brief Thoughts on Living and Travelling in Taiwan

My wife and I moved to Taipei with a certain amount of trepidation. The benefits were clear: she could take time off work to learn Chinese and all the materials that I would need to finish my dissertation were available. Yet it was a nerve-wracking prospect to spend nearly a year away from our dog, whom my father-in-law is looking after, in a place where only one of us spoke the language and neither of us had been. Now, ten months later, it was proven to be one of the best choices we could have made. We had heard Taiwan was an easy place to live, but had not realized it would be easier than anywhere we had lived before. Between the friendliness of the people, the ease of transportation, the cost of living, and the abundant access to work materials, it has been more pleasant than we could have imagined. Most of my time this year has been spent working on my dissertation. The wide-ranging and easily accessible materials at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica allowed me to go from just two chapters to a full dissertation. The desk they provided and my extremely

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Computer-aided detection and analysis of early cancer region in gastrointestinal endoscopy magnified narrow-band images

Introduction Gastric cancer is the fourth most-common cancer worldwide and is also the second-largest cause of cancer death. Early detection and prompt treatment remain the best measure to improve patient survival rates. Recent advances in endoscopy technologies, including magnification and narrow-band imaging (NBI), provide clinical doctors with new tools for the early detection of abnormal lesions in the stomach by demonstrating abnormal mucosal surface morphologies. However, the current practice of endoscopy magnification and NBI rely heavily on clinical doctors’ own experiences. Moreover, the meticulous examination of each frame of magnified images in the whole stomach can be very time-consuming. As a result, significant interpersonal variability in the performance of endoscopy diagnosis between individual endoscopy doctors is likely. This semester, we have collected sample images of both the normal mucosa and the abnormal lesion in the stomach from various patients provided by Dr. Noriya Uedo in Department of Gastrointestinal Oncology in Osaka Medical Center for Cancer and Cardiovascular Diseases, Osaka Japan. Currently, there are 10 normal gastric corpus, 10 normal gastric antrum, and 100 abnormal lesion images in our database. Two of the computer-aided diagnosis algorithms in endoscopy for automatic detection of high-risk lesions on the magnified NBI endoscopy images are

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My Fulbright Experiences

I was delighted and honored to learn that I had been named a Fulbright Senior Scholar while on sabbatical leave from SUNY-­‐Buffalo -­‐ not merely on account of the award’s prestige or the actual monetary support it entails, but most importantly because it represented a golden opportunity to deepen my knowledge in the field of pre-­‐mRNA splicing by learning from an international expert in the land of my birth, which I had left thirty years ago. This paper contains reflections on my stay in Taiwan as a Fulbright Senior Scholar over the past 6 months. Cultural Experiences: It has been over 30 years since I left Taiwan for the United States and in the intervening time, I have managed a handful of short visits. While I am as familiar with the language as anyone who lives here – meaning I can read the local newspapers, watch the local television, and on the whole lead my daily life without difficulty here in Taiwan – there is still a bit of disconnect in term of idiomatic word usage and appropriate situational responses. On reflection, I would rank the lack of personal space and/or distance as the most important adjustment I had to

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Taiwan: An Ideal Place to Conduct Research on the Qing Dynasty

     As a PhD candidate in late imperial Chinese history, already four months into a ten-month Fulbright grant period in Taiwan, I have two goals for this brief essay. First, I want to set forth the reasons why Fulbright Taiwan has provided an ideal environment for my research. Second, I want to suggest that Taiwan is an excellent place to do in-country research on the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Given the vast trove of archives now open to scholars in mainland China and given that various Taiwanese institutions have digitized many of Taiwan’s archival collections and generously placed them on-line (in some cases, accessible from anywhere), some scholars may no longer consider Taiwan a worthwhile destination for in-country research on Chinese history. To the contrary, my experience has been that the combination of nearly unrestricted access to superbly curated archives, a vibrant and welcoming intellectual community, an incredible system of libraries and research centers, close proximity to mainland China, the concentration of excellent scholars and academic institutions in one place, a clean and modern environment, and Taiwan’s own history as a Qing frontier combine to make Taiwan an ideal location for in-country research on the Qing. After four months, I

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Research & Reflections

fulbright taiwan online journal