Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Comparative Study of Undergraduates’ Attitudes Toward Aging in Taiwan and the United States Through Student Drawings

The purpose of this study is to compare similarities and differences in the attitudes toward aging among college students from Taiwan and the United States; 128 Taiwanese students and 124 U.S. students participated in this study. The findings indicate that the majority of students from both countries viewed aging as consisting primarily of physical changes. The differences are the U.S. students’ drawings showing physical decline along with hospitals, nursing homes, or death, whereas Taiwanese students presenting physical decline as getting wrinkles, wearing glasses, or needing aid devices. U.S. students associated aging with grandparents–grandchildren relationships, whereas more Taiwanese students thought aging related to spousal relationships. This study adds to the existing literature that demonstrates the strong influence of different cultures on students’ attitudes toward aging. Further, knowledge derived from this study can be used in gerontology courses for both students and professors to lessen or correct ageist stereotypes over time.
How Indicators of Socioeconomic Status Relate to Physical Functioning of Older Adults in Three Asian Societies

The relationship between socioeconomic status and physical functioning is tested among older adults in Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines. Socioeconomic indicators are limited to education and income, and these are linked to several measures of functioning that are constructed using four specific items—having difficulties crouching, climbing stairs, lifting things, and walking. Depending on the outcome measure, samples are treated separately or pooled. Education is found to be associated with functional health in Taiwan but is a weaker predictor in Thailand and the Philippines. Income has strong associations in Taiwan and Thailand and only a moderate association in the Philippines. Interaction effects based on pooled data confirm that differences in associations exist across settings. These results lead to questions about the universality of the relationship. Explanations for differential effects are discussed, including the impact of national levels of development on health outcomes.
Physical and Human Capital Deepening and New Trade Patterns in Japan

This paper investigates the deepening of the international division of labor and its effect on factor intensities in Japan, mainly focusing on the manufacturing sector. In the first half of the paper, we analyze the factor contents of trade and find that Japan's factor content net-exports of capital and non-production labor grew rapidly while net-exports of production workers fell by a large amount during the period from 1980-2000. Interestingly, the decline in the factor content of net-exports of production workers was almost entirely caused by Japan's trade with China and Hong Kong. According to our decomposition analysis, however, most of the macro-economic change in the capital-labor ratio and the change in the skilled-labor ratio is attributable to a within-industry'shift rather than a between-industry' shift. Although we clearly see a drastic increase in VIIT and outsourcing to foreign countries, particularly to Asian countries, our empirical analysis provides only weak evidence that the deepening international division of labor contributes to changes in factor intensities in each industry. Our results suggest that specialization in the export of skilled-labor-intensive products may have contributed to the increase in the relative demand for skilled (professional, technical, managerial, and administrative) labor within industry. However, our results suggest that changes in trade patterns (specialization in capital-intensive production) cannot explain the rapid growth of capital-labor ratios in Japan.
Acute prostatitis after transrectal ultrasound-guided prostate biopsy: Comparing two different antibiotic prophylaxis regimen

Transrectal ultrasound-guided prostate biopsies (TRUSBx) are common and increasingly performed procedure. As this procedure can be complicated by infections, antibiotic prophylaxis is widely used around the world to minimize these complications, but there is no consensus on the most appropriate prophylaxis regimen. A total number of 412 patients who were referred fo TRUSBx, was devided randomely into two groups. Group 1 received routine antibiotic prophylaxis and Group 2 did not received Amikacin. Other premedications in both groups include ciprofloxacin, metronidazole, ceftazidime and povodine iodine gel. 2 days after biopsy, all patients were investigated about significant fever(eâ�³38Â°C). febrile patients were referred to urology clinic for further evaluation about acute prostatitis or septicemia. There was 210 patients in group A and 202 patients in group B. No significant difference was detected in mean age, prostatic volume, serum PSA level, re-biopsy rate and pathology report between two groups. Acute prostatitis was developed in 2 patients (0.9) in group A and 1 patient (0.5) in group B that was not statistically significant. (P>0.05) Removing amikacin from ciprofloxacin-based antibiotic prophylaxis along with local povodine iodine would not put our patients in increased risk for infectious complications after TRUSBx. Â© 2016, Oriental Scientific Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Technological Capability as a Determinant of FDI Inflows - Evidence from Developing Asia & India

During 2006-07, FDI inflows into India were more than double than those in 2005-06. Indeed, during April-January 2006-07, inward FDI into India at US$16.4 billion, was far higher than the annual average inflow of US$2-3 billion during the late 1990s. In recent years, India has also emerged as one of the leading FDI destinations in Asia. On the whole, the pattern of FDI inflows to developing Asia itself has changed significantly over the years. Some leading Southeast Asian economies (for example, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines) no longer attract as much FDI as they used to in the past. This is in sharp contrast to some East and Southeast Asian economies that continue to draw large FDI (for example, China, Hong Kong and Singapore). In the above context, this paper attempts to explain the country-wise variations in the pattern of FDI flows to developing Asian economies by empirically identifying locationspecific features influencing such flows. The paper argues that some countries in the region, which have developed long term sources of comparative advantages in the form of superior technological capabilities and supporting infrastructure have consistently attracted greater volumes of export-oriented FDI. These attributes are also crucial for explaining the steady improvement in FDI flows to India. The paper finds that with production processes becoming increasingly complex and technology-intensive, developing countries like India, must devote greater attention to the development of R&D and frontier technologies, failing which, they might lose out in the race for FDI. [Working Paper No. 193]
Civil resistance and power politics : the experience of non-violent action from Gandhi to the present

Foreword on the Arab Spring Preface Acknowledgements Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors List of Initial Questions 1. Civil Resistance and Power Politics 2. People Power and Protest: The Literature on Civil Resistance in Historical Context 3. Gandhi and Civil Resistance in India, 1917-47: Key Issues 4. The US Civil Rights Movement: Power from Below and Above, 1945-70 5. The Interplay of Non-violent and Violent Action in Northern Ireland, 1967-72 6. The Dialectics of Empire: Soviet Leaders and the Challenge of Civil Resistance in East-Central Europe, 1968-91 7. Civil Resistance in Czechoslovakia: From Soviet Invasion to 'Velvet Revolution', 1968-89 8. Towards 'Self-Limiting Revolution': Poland, 1970-89 9. Portugal: 'The Revolution of the Carnations', 1974-75 10. Mass Protests in the Iranian Revolution, 1977-79 11. 'People Power' in the Philippines, 1983-86 12. Political Mass Mobilization against Authoritarian Rule: Pinochet's Chile, 1983-88 13. The Interplay of Non-violent and Violent Action in the Movement against Apartheid in South Africa, 1983-94 14. The Intersection of Ethnic Nationalism and People Power Tactics in the Baltic States, 1987-91 15. The 1989 Demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and Beyond: Echoes of Gandhi 16. Civil Resistance and Civil Society: Lessons from the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989 17. The Limits of Prudence: Civil Resistance in Kosovo, 1990-98 18. Civil Society versus Slobodan Milosevic: Serbia, 1991-2000 19. Georgia's 'Rose Revolution' of 2003: A Forceful Peace 20. Ukraine's 'Orange Revolution' of 2004: The Paradoxes of Negotiation 21. The Moment of the Monks: Burma, 2007 22. A Century of Civil Resistance: Some Lessons and Questions
Subjective Norms and Customer Adoption of Mobile Banking: Taiwan and Vietnam

Many Taiwan companies have plants in Vietnam. Vietnam is an important economic partner of Taiwan. To service customers, banks must have services in both Taiwan and Vietnam. Restated, banks must find ways to effectively promote mobile banking services to Taiwan and Vietnam customers. However, the adoption of mobile banking has increased gradually in Taiwan, but banks in Vietnam have difficulties to apply services actually. As the security of phone banking is the customer's primary concern, customers may accept unfamiliar technology via subjective norm. To understand how subjective norm affects customer acceptance, this study examines mobile-banking adoption in Taiwan and Vietnam in terms of the effects of subjective norm, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, and attitude toward and intention to adoption mobile banking services. Models were compared using data collected from 440 Vietnamese and 372 Taiwanese respondents. Analytical results reveal that subjective norm and facilitating conditions explain differences in adoption between Taiwan and Vietnam. Subjective norm affects positively effort expectancy, performance expectancy, and facilitating conditions in Taiwan and Vietnam. Subjective norm also positively affects attitude toward and intention to adopt mobile banking services in Vietnam, but not in Taiwan. Facilitating conditions affect attitude positively, but not affect intention positively in Taiwan. Facilitating conditions positively affect attitude toward and intention to use mobile banking services positively in Vietnam. Finally, managerial implications for banks, based on findings, are given.
The Construction of Beauty: A Cross‐Cultural Analysis of Women's Magazine Advertising

As a media genre, advertising offers a unique opportunity to study how the beauty ideal is constructed across cultures. This research analyzes the content of advertisements from women’s fashion and beauty magazines in Singapore, Taiwan, and the U.S. to compare how beauty is encoded and found a noticeable difference between the portrayals of women from the U.S. and from the two East Asian societies in terms of sexual portrayal. In addition, Asian ads contained a large proportion of cosmetics and facial beauty products whereas the U.S. ads were dominated by clothing. These findings suggest that beauty in the U.S. may be constructed more in terms of “the body,” whereas in Singapore and Taiwan the defining factor is more related to a pretty face. The article also discusses how feminist critiques of the sexual objectification of women in advertising may need to be considered within their historical, Western context of origin.
Disclosure (Discernibility) and Compliance of Accounting Policies: Asia-Pacific Evidence

This project extends the work of Tower, Hancock and Taplin (1999) on the extent of compliance with International Accounting Standards (IAS) in six Asia-Pacific countries. Sixty annual reports from companies in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand are analysed to create several compliance indices based on all universally applicable IAS rules at the time. The compliance ratio is computed as an aggregate value, split into measurement and disclosure categories. These ratios are also calculated on a standard-by-standard basis. Moreover, a new Discernibility Index is evolved to generate insights into patterns of non-disclosure. The results show higher levels of compliance with disclosure issues (95.5%) than measurement issues (77.7%). The lowest overall compliance rates were found for IAS 7, Cash Flow Statements, IAS 22 Business Combinations and IAS 28 Accounting for Investments in Associates. In terms of the Discernibilty Index, companies in the four Asian countries with British colonial links had lower levels of non-disclosure than Philippines or Thailand entities. The more profitable companies also tended to have a higher proportion of discernible (disclosures) items for measurement issues. The levels of non-disclosure have very distinctive standard-by-standard patterns. The findings have important policy implications. The level of discernibility (disclosures) is low with strong country and topical trends exhibited. Therefore, de facto harmonisation is difficult to measure and country/company variances suggest that the goal of regional comparability has not been achieved. There is a need for change in the status quo level of non-disclosure of Asia-Pacific companies. In line with public theories of regulation, a call for more direct government intervention is made.
Exchange Rate Cooperation in East Asia - Why a Basket Approach may be best

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, the issue of the choice of exchange rate regime for East Asian (EA) countries re-emerged. The crisis had demonstrated, amongst other things, that unilateral exchange rate regimes (including de facto dollar pegging) hadnt coped very well in the 1990s faced with massive capital inflows into the region (Kwan et al., 1998), with the possible exceptions of Singapore and Taiwan. The immediate response to the crisis was that a corner solution might be better. Either keep convertibility and fix the currency, preferably backed up with a currency board, but abandon monetary independence; or keep monetary policy and convertibility but abandon currency management and adopt a free float. But a hard peg is perceived to be too rigid for most countries in EA and the potential costs of a clean float are seen to be too great for emerging economies with weak financial infrastructure because of the risks of serious currency misalignment and destabilising speculation. The objective of this paper is to address some of these counterfactuals by looking at the impact of alternative exchange rate regimes on the volatility of the NEER and the bilateral rate against the US$ for nine EA countries after the Asian financial crisis. 9 Our counterfactuals include a UBP, a CBP, and a hard peg against the US$, but in contrast to previous counterfactual exercises, such as Williamson (1998a) and Ohno (1999) which compute the weights for effective exchange rates on the basis of simple bloc aggregates, we apply a more disaggregated methodology using a larger number of trade partners. We also utilize ARCH/GARCH techniques to obtain estimates of heteroskedastic variances to better capture the time-varying characteristics of volatility for the actual and simulated exchange rate regimes.
Day of the week effect in emerging Asian stock markets: evidence from the GARCH model

This paper investigates the day of the week effect on seven emerging Asian stock markets returns and conditional variance (volatility). The empirical research was conducted using the GARCH model and daily returns from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand from January 1990 to June 1995. Results obtained indicate the significant presence of the day of the week effect on both stock returns and volatility, though the result involving both the return and volatility are not identical in all seven cases. Results also show that these effects may be due to a possible spill-over from the Japanese stock market.
The Balassa-Samuelson Effect in a Developing Country

Some Asian countries experience small real exchange rate appreciations or even a real depreciation despite a fast growth in tradable productivity. A key-characteristic of these countries is that they are constrained on capital inflows. Is the Balassa-Samuelson theory still valid in those countries? Are there other factors likely to explain real exchange rate (RER) changes? To address these questions, we develop a two-sector model in which a small open economy faces a constraint on capital inflows. In this setting, the RER does not only depend on productivity, but also on other factors like the rate of time preference, the age dependency ratio or the level of the external constraint. A calibration of the constrained economy model seems to match at least qualitatively empirical evidence for China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, between 1970 and 1992. Copyright © 2006 The Author; Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Population Dispersal from Major Metropolitan Regions: An International Comparison

Of the eighteen countries studied in this paper, eleven (Japan, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Denmark, New Zealand, Belgium, France, West Germany, East Germany, and The Netherlands) show either a reversal in the direction of net population flow from their sparsely populated, peripheral regions to their densely populated core regions or a drastic reduction in the level of this net flow. In the first seven of these eleven countries, this reversal or reduction became evident only in the 1970s; in the last four, its onset was recorded m the 1960s. Six countries (Hungary, Spain, Finland, Poland, South Korea, and Taiwan) have yet to show an attenuation in the movement of persons into their most densely populated regions. Some possibly unreliable British data likewise fail to reveal a slackening in the "drift south" of the British population. Three additional discoveries described in this paper are the following: (1) Migration continues strong into the capital regions of the three Eastern European countries studied here (Poland, Hungary, and East Germany). However, the low natural increase of these regions has blunted their expansion. (2) Though domestic migration into the capital regions of France, Sweden, and Norway has declined dramatically, foreign immigration into these regions remains at a high level. (3) Net domestic migration into the core regions of Sweden, Japan, and Italy, countries separated by vast distances, fluctuate from year to year in a remarkably similar manner.
The Determinant Factors of Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT)’s Performance: Evidence from Asian REITs

Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) is one of the asset class investment options that come into view among investors whose searching for an alternative investment. It was considered as less risky as opposed to equities, bond, property, trust fund and others related investments materials with potential for earnings enhancement. REIT is a company or a trust that pools fund from individual investors, acquires and operates income-generating real estate, and distributes the income derived from their own properties as dividends. Securities Commissions (SC) has defined REITs as “property trust fund” or as an investment trust investment vehicle that invests or proposes to invest at least 50% of its total assets in real estate. An investment in real estate may be by way of direct ownership or a shareholding in a single-purpose company whose principal assets comprise real estate (SC, 2005). The development of REITs in Asian began with the introduction of Japan REITs in 2001, and then followed by Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia. Likewise, not with standing global economic uncertainties, Asia real estate investment trusts (REITs) were highly sought-after by investors. As according to Professor Graeme Newell in a report by the Asia Pacific Real Estate Association (APREA), most Asia REIT markets achieved higher returns, lower risk and superior risk-adjusted performance than their respective stock markets, especially since the Global Financial Crisis (APREA, 2012). Hence, Asian REITs had become an attractive alternative for global investors thus examining REIT’s performance is the vital factor that investors consider when they allocate capitals for their investments (Yu, The Determinant Factors of Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT)'s Performance: Evidence from Asian REITs
Exploring East Asian Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions about the Effectiveness of their Preparation for Study Abroad for Academic Success in U.S. Universities

In this study we used grounded theory framework to explore how preparation for studying abroad affects the academic success of East Asian undergraduate students in U.S. universities. Based on interviews with 12 participants from China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, we found that knowledge of English language and American culture, which is closely involved with their preparation for study abroad and their undergraduate study in the United States, are two core categories affecting East Asian students’ academic success. High levels of preparation for study abroad help East Asian students better adapt to American universities. At the same time, East Asian students spend more time on English proficiency tests than learning the culture both before and after they arrive to the United States, which can be detrimental. We suggest that U.S. universities provide more support for cultural adaptation such as learning communities to have active cultural exchanges within context.
Interlaboratory agreement in a polymerase chain reaction-based human papillomavirus DNA assay.

Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute. Bethesda. Maryland 20892 LA. W. H. , K-L L. , M. 5.1; Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Bronx, New York 10461 ER. D. B.1; Institute of Epidemiology, National Taiwan University, Taipei. Taiwan. Republic of China [C-J. C. , S-L. Y.l; Roche Molecular Systems, Alameda, Califomia 94501 IT. Z.l; Chiron Corporation. Emeryville. California 94608 [C. E. Gb; Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, National Taiwan University Hospital IC-Y. HI; and Taipei Institute of Pathology, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China IT. W. HI; The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21205 IT-C. W. , M. M. MI; and Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, DC 20306-6000 IT. J. 0, J. D. S. ]
Early sexual debut: Voluntary or coerced? Evidence from longitudinal data in South Africa--the Birth to Twenty Plus study.

BACKGROUND Early sexual debut, voluntary or coerced, increases risks to sexual and reproductive health. Sexual coercion is increasingly receiving attention as an important public health issue owing to its association with adverse health and social outcomes. OBJECTIVE To describe voluntary and coerced experience at sexual debut. METHODS A longitudinal perspective among 2,216 adolescents (1,149 females, 1,067 males) in a birth cohort study in South Africa, analysing data collected on six occasions between 11 and 18 years. RESULTS The median age of sexual debut was 16 years for females and 15 for males. Reported coerced sexual debut included children < 11 years of age. Males reported earlier sexual debut with both voluntary and coerced sexual experience, than females (p < 0.0001). Sexual coercion at early sexual debut among both male and female adolescents occurred mostly through sexual intercourse with older adolescents and partners of the same age. CONCLUSION The identified time periods and age groups need to be targeted for interventions to delay sexual debut and prevent sexual coercion among young people. More research is needed to understand underlying predisposing risk factors for sexual coercion at sexual debut, both early and not early.