Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Sage Handbook of Political Advertising

The Sage Handbook of Political Advertising. Lynda Lee Kaid and Christina Holtz-Bacha, eds. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006. 492 pp. $125 hbk. Editors of The Sage Handbook of Political Advertising, Lynda Lee Kaid and Christina Holtz-Bacha, bring strong credentials to the role of editors. Former director of the Political Communication Center at the University of Oklahoma and current professor at the University of Florida, Lynda Lee Kaid has written or edited more than twenty previous books on political communication. Coauthor Christina Holtz-Bacha is professor at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany and has also co-written or edited more than twenty books. It is important to state at the outset that The Sage Handbook of Political Advertising stresses international political advertising and is devoted to covering political advertising in Germany, the Nordic and Baltic States, Greece, the Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Turkey, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, West Africa, and South Africa. Most of these chapters are written by academics residing in the respective countries, providing the advantage of having the information explained from an insider's view. A final chapter, written by the editors, is called "Comparisons and Conclusions," but it is one chapter out of twenty-seven, and the reader is left wanting more synthesis. For the researcher studying political advertising in specific countries, however, it is an important reference work. It would also be a useful book for a graduate-level political communication class in that one could use the individual chapters covering different countries as a springboard for discussion, perhaps assigning each student to present a report to the class on a different country. Chapter 1, written by the book's editors, is called "Political Advertising in International Comparison," a title that could have served as the title of the book. This first chapter is essentially a forward; the editors explain how the book is laid out and how the countries are grouped. Specifically, the editors divided the countries into four groups. The first is the U.S. system, the only system where political advertising is totally supported by commercial and private interests. The second group of countries is those where broadcast time is provided free to political candidates, but candidates have no other recourse for obtaining direct broadcast coverage. The third group is a combination of the previous two, while the fourth group examines political advertising in what is called emerging democracies. …
Acquisition of Managerial Values in The People'S Republic of China and Hong Kong

The four managerial values of power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and individualism measured by self-reports from 350 managerial trainees in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Hong Kong provided the database for this research. The results indicate support for the convergence theory proposition that managerial values converge with increased industrialism. Further analysis revealed that it was the younger PRC managerial trainees who had values that were closest to those of Hong Kong managers of all ages.
The Impact of Chinese Tourists on Volatility Size Effects and Stock Market Performance in Taiwan

This paper investigates the volatility size effects for firm performance in the Taiwan tourism industry, especially the impacts arising from the tourism policy reform that allowed mainland Chinese tourists to travel to Taiwan. Four conditional univariate GARCH models are used to estimate the volatility in the stock indexes for large and small firms in Taiwan. Daily data from 30 November 2001 to 27 February 2013 are used, which covers the period of Cross-Straits tension between China and Taiwan. The full sample period can be divided into two subsamples, namely prior to and after the policy reform that encouraged Chinese tourists to Taiwan. The empirical findings confirm that there have been important changes in the volatility size effects for firm performance, regardless of firm size and estimation period. Furthermore, the risk premium reveals insignificant estimates in both time periods, while asymmetric effects are found to exist only for large firms after the policy reform. The empirical findings should be useful for financial managers and policy analysts as it provides insight into the magnitude of the volatility size effects for firm performance, how it can vary with firm size, the impacts arising from the industry policy reform, and how firm size is related to financial risk management strategy.
Intrapartum Antibiotic Prophylaxis and Early-Onset Neonatal Sepsis Patterns

Objective: To compare the relative effects of intrapartum antibiotic prophylaxis regimens on patterns of early-onset neonatal sepsis. Methods: We performed an historical cohort study of 17 187 infants born at our center from September 1993 to February 2000. A risk-based strategy was employed prior to July 1996 and a screening-based strategy was utilized thereafter. Ampicillin was utilized prior to March 1995 and penicillin was used thereafter. Results: There were 75 cases of neonatal sepsis, 34 (4.10/1000) in the risk-based era and 41 (4.63/1000) in the screening-based era (p = 0.62). There were fewer ampicillin-resistant isolates during the risk-based than the screening-based era (32 versus 61%; p = 0.014). The only significant change in organism-specific sepsis rates was an increase in the rate of infection caused by coagulase-negative staphylococci in the screening-based era (0.36 versus 1.46/1000; p = 0.018), but 75% of infants infected with these organisms were not exposed to ß-lactam antibiotics within 72 h prior to delivery. For the risk- and screening-based eras, respectively, the rates of Gram-negative sepsis (1.21 versus 1.46/1000; p = 0.65) and the proportions of Gram-negative pathogens that were ampicillin-resistant (70 versus 77%; p = 1.0) were similar. The drug employed for prophylaxis did not appear to affect the pattern of sepsis cases. Conclusion: In our patient population, coagulase-negative staphylococci have become the most common cause of early-onset neonatal sepsis. The cause of this shift in pathogen prevalence is uncertain and seemingly unrelated to intrapartum antibiotic exposure.
Valuation of Six Asian Stock Markets: Financial System Identification in Noisy Environments

The open financial economic systems of six Asian countries Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Japan - over the period 1986 through 1995 are identified from empirical data to determine how their stock markets, economies and financial markets are interrelated. The objective is to find rational stock market valuations using a country's nominal GDP and a short term interest rate, based on a modified version of the Dividend Discount Model. But our empirical results contradict such conventional financial economic theory. Various methods are used to analyze the 3D data covariance ellipsoids: spectral analysis, analysis of information matrices, 2D and 3D noise/signal determination and ''super-filter'' system identification based on 3D projections. The new ''super-filter'' method provides the sharpest identification of the Grassmanian invariant q of the empirical systems and the best computation of the finite boundaries of the empirical parameter ranges. All six Asian systems are high noise environments, in which it is very difficult to separate systematic signals from noise. Because of these high noise levels, spectral analysis is not reliable. By plotting all 3D q = 2 {Complete} Least Squares projections we find that only Taiwan has a clear q = 2 system, i.e., Taiwan's stock market, economy and financial market are rationally coherent. In contrast, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Indonesia have q = 1 systems, in which stock markets and economies are closely related, but unrelated to the respective domestic financial markets. Several possible economic explanations are provided. We also quantitatively establish the incoherence of Japan's financial economic system. Japan's stock market operates independently from its economy and from its financial market, which are mutually unrelated.
Mapping of Coastal Cities Using Optimized Spectral-Spatial Features Based Multi-Scale Superpixel Classification

The high interior heterogeneity of land surface covers in high-resolution image of coastal cities makes classification challenging. To meet this challenge, a Multi-Scale Superpixels-based Classification method using Optimized Spectral–Spatial features, denoted as OSS-MSSC, is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, the multi-scale superpixels are firstly generated to capture the local spatial structures of the ground objects with various sizes. Then, the normalized difference vegetation index and extend multi-attribute profiles are introduced to extract the spectral–spatial features from the multi-spectral bands of the image. To reduce the redundancy of the spectral–spatial features, the crossover-based search algorithm is utilized for feature optimization. The pre-classification results at each single scale are, therefore, obtained based on the optimized spectral–spatial features and random forest classifier. Finally, the ultimate classification is generated via the majority voting of those pre-classification results in each scale. Experimental results on the Gaofen-2 image of Qingdao and WorldView-2 image of Hong Kong, China confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experiments verify that the OSS-MSSC method not only works effectively on the homogeneous regions, but also is able to preserve the small local spatial structures in the high-resolution remote sensing images of coastal cities.
Firm-level Innovation Models: Perspectives on Research in Developed and Developing Countries

Abstract This paper provides a critical review of firm-level innovation models based on research in the industrially advanced countries (IACs) and draws implications for firms in industrialising countries such as Korea and Taiwan. The paper summarises different categories of innovation model and identifies their achievements and weaknesses, showing how a few researchers have successfully linked IAC models to innovation processes found within the more advanced developing nations such as Korea. One of the chief contributions of IAC models is that many of them go substantially into the management of innovation and the decision-making processes within the firm. However, in general, there is a lack of empirical evidence to verify existing models, weak theoretical underpinnings and, in some cases, a failure to sufficiently recognise the diversity and unpredictability of innovation processes. The paper suggests how best to use innovation models and how to overcome some of the difficulties in future research.
Witnessing Political Protest on Civic Engagement ∗

How does physically witnessing a protest in a democratic society affect citizens in authoritarian societies? Existing data are unable to answer the question by failures to capture witnesses, to construct meaningful comparison groups and to obtain information on pre-protest political behaviors. Using a quasi-experiment design, we report a first causal estimation on impact of 13 protests in Hong Kong from 2012-14 on witnesses from mainland China, We used geocoded posts from Chinese social networking site to collect a panel of Chinese users who visited Hong Kong but at different timing: treated users were physically close to one of the protests when it occurred; control users already left Hong Kong before protests and could not witness protests. With the control group and users’ ex-ante posting history, difference-in-differences methods are used to estimate changes of intensities and issues of discussion of civic and political problems. Treated users discussed more civic and political problems by 40.39% (95% confidence interval: 3.62%, 75.48%) after protests, relative to the change of control ∗Direct all correspondences to Han Zhang, Department of Sociology, Princeton University. Address: 125 Wallace Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544. Email: hz2@princeton.edu. Special thanks to Xing Xie and Nicholas Jing Yuan for the support of data collection and analysis. We thank Matthew Salganik, Paul DiMaggio, Miguel Centeno, Andreas Wimmer, Rory Truex, Rene Flores, Winston Chou, Clark Bernier, Kyle Chan for helpful comments on research design; Mark Beissinger, Ran Liu, Lynn White, for feedbacks. We would also like to thank participants in various seminars at Princeton: Digital Methods in Political Science Workshop, Political Methodology Seminar, as well as Contemporary China Colloquium.Draft version, please not spread without authors’ permission. †hz2@princeton.edu
GMM based Language Identification using MFCC and SDC Features

Language Identification (LID) is one of the most popular areas of research in speech signal processing. Now a day's lots of approaches have been used to improve performance of LID system which includes Parallel Phone Recognition Language Modeling (PPRLM), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and general Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) etc. The state-of-art LID system has been utilised lots of feature vectors like LPCC, MFCC, SDC and prosodic. Although fusion of prosodic features with MFCC features shows some improvement in the performance of the LID system. But still it is not sufficient. In this paper, a baseline system for the LID system in multilingual environments has been developed using GMM as a classifier and MFCC combined with Shifted-Delta- Cepstral (SDC) as front end processing feature vectors. In this works, we used the Arunachali Language Speech Database (ALS-DB), a multilingual and multichannel speech corpus which was recently collected from the four local languages namely Adi, Apatani, Galo and Nyishi in Arunachal Pradesh including Hindi and English as secondary languages.The performance of the LID system has been improved by combing MFCC and SDC features than its individual performances. The minimum ERR rates for the features MFCC and SDC individually are 19.70% and 11.83% respectively while minimum ERR rate for the combined features both MFCC and SDC is 6.40%. Approximately 15.00% and 6.00% of performance of the LID system has been improved while using the combining features of MFCC with SDC over the baseline systems that using MFCC and SDC features in individual respectively.
The foreign factor : the multinational corporation's contribution to the economic modernization of the Republic of China

Over the past three decades the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has achieved a degree of economic development that has attracted worldwide attention. Its economy is growing at a pace that will qualify the ROC as a developed country by the turn of the century; in Asia it will be second only to Japan in per capita income. How has the economy been able to expand as rapidly as it has? What governmental policies enable it to sustain an annual growth rate that is at the forefront of the newly industrializing countries? These centrally important questions guide Schive's study of the economic modernization of Taiwan.
Challenge and Change in East Asia: Is Democracy the Only Game in Town?

Abstract:How much progress have democracies in East Asia made toward consolidation? Approaching this question from a cultural perspective, our paper attempts to determine whether democracy has become “the only game in town” for a majority of the mass publics in six East Asian democratic countries: Japan, Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand. Using data culled from the first wave of the East Asia Barometer surveys conducted in these countries during the 2002-2003 period, we find that majorities of the Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese people prefer democracy to its alternatives at the levels of both political regime and process. On the basis of this finding, we conclude that only these three East Asian democracies are well on their ways to becoming consolidated democracies.
Attracting Convention and Exhibition Attendance to Complex MICE Venues: Emerging Data from Macao

This study presents an importance-performance analysis of multi-level attributes (event, facility and destination) evaluated by delegates attending an exhibition event in a ‘complex meetings, incentive, convention or exhibition (MICE) venue’ in greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan). The study's findings expound the relevance of various attributes in light of the emergence of complex MICE venues and destination resorts and, in particular, emphasizes the relative importance of destination – vis-a-vis facility – and core event-related attributes towards determining exhibition attendance. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Note on the Efficiency of Black Markets in Foreign Currencies

THERE EXISTS CONSIDERABLE LITERATURE on the efficiency of foreign exchange markets, with most of the empirical work supporting the hypothesis that the foreign exchange markets are weak form efficient.1 In some countries, however, trading in foreign currencies takes place in black markets which are the result of restrictions placed on the foreign sector.2 The importance of these markets in sustaining the illegal import and export of goods and assets, as well as illegal capital flows, has been growing in the past few years.3 In this paper, market efficiency tests are performed on the black market exchange rates in India, Taiwan, and South Korea. It is quite conceivable that black markets may not be efficient because the information about prices and market participants is generally imperfect: the markets tend to be thin and often segmented, and the transaction costs, as measured by the buy-sell differential, tend to be high. All these factors could hinder efficient adjustment of exchange rates to new information.4 A test of market efficiency is a test simultaneously of efficiency and of the assumptions of market equilibrium. The theory underlying financial efficiency tests has been omitted here since it is well-known and accepted. Weak-form tests of market efficiency are based on the autocorrelation functions of rates of return on currency positions, on nonparametric tests like the runs analysis, and on mechanical trading rules applied to historical currency prices in the black market. Finally, the cross-correlations between the changes in the black market rate and changes in the official exchange rate are examined to see if the black market exchange rate "predicts" the movements in the official rate.
Economic Interdependency and Exchange Rate Flexibility in East Asia

This paper examines if exchange rate flexibility adversely affects trade integration of East Asian countries in general. The study focuses on China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. These countries pursue fixed, floating and intermediate regimes respectively. The hypothesis is that since the countries jointly organize East Asian production networks and conduct vertical intra-industry trade (VIIT), the impact of exchange rate flexibility would be negative irrespective of their exchange rate regimes. The results validate the hypothesis. The findings imply that East Asia rather than the domain of any national currency is an optimum currency area.
Molecular epidemiology of a variant of coxsackievirus A24 in Taiwan: two epidemics caused by phylogenetically distinct viruses from 1985 to 1989

In order to know the phylogenetic relationship and the route of transmission of a variant of coxsackievirus A24 (CA24v), an agent that caused four sequential outbreaks of acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis from 1985 to 1989 in Taiwan, the nucleotide sequence variations in the virus-encoded proteinase 3C region (549 nucleotides) were studied with 19 isolates. The prototype strain (EH24/70), four isolates from Japan, and two isolates from Hong Kong were used for comparison. The nucleotide sequences of the Taiwan strains from the 1985-1986 and 1988-1989 epidemics were closely related within each epidemic, while they were more distantly related between strains from two epidemics. Phylogenetic analysis by the unweighted pairwise grouping method of the arithmetic average revealed that the 19 Taiwan isolates had diverged into two groups, 1985-1986 and 1988-1989 groups. The time at which these two groups diverged was estimated to be around May 1982, more than 3 years prior to the first appearance of the CA24v epidemic in Taiwan. On each occasion, the viruses caused a 2-year epidemic and then disappeared. The Taiwan isolates from 1985 to 1986 were closely related to the Japan isolates from 1985 to 1986 and the Taiwan isolates from 1988 to 1989 were phylogenetically close to the 1989 Japan isolates, indicating that Taiwan and Japan had two common-source outbreaks. However, none of the 1988 Taiwan isolates were phylogenetically close to the 1988 Japan or Hong Kong isolates. The evidence revealed that Taiwan has had two repeated but discontinuous introductions of CA24v since its first appearance in Taiwan in 1985. None of the other CA24v strains have been detected so far.
Uterine cervical carcinoma: evaluation of pelvic lymph node metastasis with MR imaging.

PURPOSE To assess accuracy of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging in detection of pelvic node metastasis from uterine cervical carcinoma. MATERIALS AND METHODS In 136 patients (aged 26-71 years [mean, 49 years]) with uterine cervical carcinoma seen between October 1990 and July 1992, maximum axial diameter (MAAD), minimum axial diameter (MIAD), and signal intensity enhancement ratio of positive nodes were measured. RESULTS With MAAD of 1.0 cm, MR imaging had an accuracy of 90.4%, sensitivity of 62.2%, and specificity of 94.9% in detection of pelvic node metastasis. Mean MAAD and MIAD were 1.43 and 1.30 cm for true-positive nodes and 1.18 and 0.75 cm for false-positive nodes, respectively. Mean MAAD/MIAD was 1.09 for true-positive and 1.76 for false-positive nodes. With MIAD of 1.0 cm, MR imaging had an accuracy of 93.0% with 62.2% sensitivity and 97.9% specificity. No significant differences were noted in the degree of contrast enhancement between true-positive and false-positive nodes. CONCLUSION The accuracy of MR imaging was fairly high in detection of pelvic node metastasis from uterine cervical carcinoma, and MIAD was a more accurate size criterion than MAAD.
Sexual practices and dental dam use among women prisoners--a mixed methods study.

BACKGROUND Dental dams have been distributed to women prisoners for protection against HIV and other sexually transmissible infections (STIs) in some Canadian and Australian prisons for over a decade. However, we do not know whether they serve any useful public health purpose. OBJECTIVE To determine how dental dams are used in women's prisons in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. METHOD Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we investigated women's sexual practices with a focus on how dental dams are used in NSW prisons. RESULTS Although 71 of the 199 (36%) women reported having had sex with another inmate, with oral sex involved in most encounters, only eight (4%) had ever used a dental dam. The main sources of STI transmission risk among women prisoners were oral sex, manual sex and sharing dildos. Furthermore, sharing razors could also allow the transmission of blood-borne viruses, which could occur during sex in the presence of cuts or menstrual fluid. The high rates of hepatitis B and C among incarcerated women compound this risk. CONCLUSION Dental dams are not widely used by women prisoners and we question their utility in women's prisons. Oral sex is an important risk factor for acquisition of herpes simplex virus type 1, but most women in NSW prisons (89%) are already infected. Condoms and latex gloves may have more use. Condoms could be used as a barrier on shared dildos and sex toys, while latex gloves could be used to protect cut and grazed hands from vaginal and menstrual fluids.