The importance of organizational ambidexterity was stressed in different fields of management. This study was using a distinct method to measure the differences in the degree of ambidexterity to bridge the gap with the previous studies and to provide more insights in the successful management of exploitation and exploration. This study surveyed Taiwanese small and medium-sized enterprises to test the hypotheses. We issued 1000 questionnaires in total and received 234 valid ones. Results indicate exploitative and explorative capabilities exerting non-linear effect (...) on performance. Likewise, ambidexterity and its interaction with market orientation have positive influence on firm performance. This study used structural equation modeling to analyze data, as this approach is known to be particularly advantageous for the exploratory nature of this study. We also used hierarchical regression analysis to test interaction and moderating effects. The study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, we offer a clearer understanding of the complete concept of social capital, including inter-firm and intra-firm social capital, and how contributes to improving and extending existing exploitative capabilities. Second, this study outlines how market orientation can have different effects on an ambidextrous strategy that is adopted to improve Taiwanese SMEs performance. (shrink)

SummaryThis study estimates the effect of dysgenic trends in Taiwan by exploring the relationships among intelligence, education and fertility. Based on a representative adult sample, education and intelligence were negatively correlated with the number of children born. These correlations were stronger for females. The decline of genotypic intelligence was estimated as 0.82 to 1.33 IQ points per generation for the Taiwanese population.

Nowadays, many countries are promoting entrepreneurial education or the “innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity” education. Entrepreneurial education can enhance a nation’s economic competitiveness and give rise to new business. At the moment, entrepreneurial courses are mostly designed by school teachers; however, while school teachers may possess business experience, they lack in entrepreneurial experience. Hence, entrepreneurial education courses call for experts with entrepreneurial experience to contribute to course designs and assist with course teachings. Entrepreneurial education not only improves a student’s entrepreneurial skills, (...) but also enables each student to explore their personal characteristics in order to advance the collaboration efficacy of the team as a whole. This study asked six experts with entrepreneurial experience in the information industry to work with school teachers in course design as well as teaching collaboration. The course design starts with three talk sessions given by professionals who share with students their thoughts and experiences in entrepreneurial products, team organization, fund raising, and profit calculation. Following that, each student is asked to share their own thoughts on entrepreneurial products and start searching for team members and planning their project. During the course, each team receives six individual advising sessions from the professionals, with topics ranging from product modeling, feasibility, product market estimation, fundraising methods, and profit calculation. The experts also provide each team member with personal trait analysis. Last but not least, the course invites five management-level industry professionals to play the role of venture capital investor and evaluate each team’s product modeling based on their presentation. This study reviews the grades given by the experts as well as the evaluations given by the three industry managers to assess whether the entrepreneurial education course’s student entrepreneur teams satisfy the industry’s expectations. (shrink)

This study adopts a stakeholder theory framework to examine determinants of social reporting quality and empirically test the ability of the theory to explain disclosure quality in an emerging economy. Using a sample of 246 listed companies and a hand-collected dataset that included 2 years of data based on survey questions reflecting international disclosure trends, we apply an aggregate measure of quality with five facets to a variety of corporate social responsibility areas. The results support the application and demonstrate that (...) measures of stakeholder power, strategic posture, economic resources, firm size, and media visibility are related to social disclosure quality. This paper adds to the scarce evidence on social reporting in Taiwan and provides a useful method for evaluating disclosure quality. It also illustrates the impact of two dominant foreign stakeholder groups on social disclosures in Taiwan: organizational buyers in the global supply chain and listing and social rating agencies in international capital markets. (shrink)

In the early 2000s, some scholars suggested integrative ethical education as an approach to reconcile the gap between cognitive-development education, based on rule ethics, and traditional character-ethics education, inspired by character ethics in Western ethical education. Darcia Narvaez also tried to establish a comprehensive and systematic model. Nonetheless, she has indicated four questions that need further research. This paper aims to respond to Narvaez’s project and its questions from the angle of Xunzi’s ritual education. It argues that Xunzi’s thought may (...) provide some insights for Narvaez’s approach. To present this, it begins its discussion with an introduction of the main ideas of Xunzi’s thought. Later, it tries to show the insights from certain notions and elements, such as Junzi, reasoned judgment, of Xunzi’s ritual education for Narvaez’s project of integrative ethical education. Some relevant questions are also discussed. (shrink)

This paper presents an autobiographical narrative of two aspects of my history; two events that permeated my moral consciousness and influenced my political development and a sequence of changes in my dominant theoretical and epistemological perspectives. The two events were, as a teenager, the intense experience of briefly witnessing Apartheid culture and, as a young adult, becoming deeply engaged in feminist activism. My intellectual journey began in cognitive developmental theory and progressed to a cultural, discursive perspective in which the role (...) of affect is seen as integrated. The paper explores the intersection of these two strands of my moral and intellectual development and concludes with a preliminary model of action and engagement. (shrink)

There have been questions that are directed toward the outcome of using an exemplar in moral and character education. Meanwhile, the role of the narrative in the context of moral and character education has often been viewed as being didactic and being used to indoctrinate moral lessons only. On the other hand, some scholars have also attempted to explore the significances of the exemplar and the narrative for moral and character education. In classical Confucianism, the exemplar refers to the Junzi. (...) Moreover, there were many narratives concerning the lives of the exemplars mentioned by Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi for their students to emulate and aspire to. This paper argues that the utilization of the exemplar and the narrative in classical Confucianism can offer us another perspective for conducting moral and character education. This paper firstly illustrates the notion of the Junzi as an exemplar in classical Confucianism. Then, it explores the role of the narrative of the Junzi as an exemplar in classical Confucianism. Lastly, it discusses its four implications for moral and character education, comprising: (1) assisting students to discover the commonality of their exemplars and themselves as the starting point to emulate their exemplars; (2) helping students to build their morality and character through their interaction with ‘many others;’ (3) guiding students to create a proper narrative of themselves to form an integrative view of their lives; and (4) emphasizing the exemplary function of the teacher in moral and character education. (shrink)

There have been questions that are directed toward the outcome of using an exemplar in moral and character education. Meanwhile, the role of the narrative in the context of moral and character education has often been viewed as being didactic and being used to indoctrinate moral lessons only. On the other hand, some scholars have also attempted to explore the significances of the exemplar and the narrative for moral and character education. In classical Confucianism, the exemplar refers to the Junzi. (...) Moreover, there were many narratives concerning the lives of the exemplars mentioned by Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi for their students to emulate and aspire to. This paper argues that the utilization of the exemplar and the narrative in classical Confucianism can offer us another perspective for conducting moral and character education. This paper firstly illustrates the notion of the Junzi as an exemplar in classical Confucianism. Then, it explores the role of the narrative of the Junzi as an exemplar in classical Confucianism. Lastly, it discusses its four implications for moral and character education, comprising: (1) assisting students to discover the commonality of their exemplars and themselves as the starting point to emulate their exemplars; (2) helping students to build their morality and character through their interaction with ‘many others;’ (3) guiding students to create a proper narrative of themselves to form an integrative view of their lives; and (4) emphasizing the exemplary function of the teacher in moral and character education. (shrink)

This article investigates the factors affecting how public relations autonomy, legal dominance, and strategic orientation affect crisis communicative response in corporate contexts. Communication managers, crisis managers, public affairs managers, and/or public relations managers were solicited from Taiwan’s top 500 companies to participate in a survey. The results revealed that, in contrast to public relations autonomy being the strongest and sole predictor of concession strategy, legal dominance could predict defensive and diversionary responses in crisis events. The article concludes with a discussion (...) of practical applications and theoretical implications. (shrink)

Two experiments were conducted to examine adult learners' ability to extract multiple statistics in simultaneously presented visual and auditory input. Experiment 1 used a cross‐situational learning paradigm to test whether English speakers were able to use co‐occurrences to learn word‐to‐object mappings and concurrently form object categories based on the commonalities across training stimuli. Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment and further examined whether speakers of Mandarin, a language in which final syllables of object names are more predictive of category membership (...) than English, were able to learn words and form object categories when trained with the same type of structures. The results indicate that both groups of learners successfully extracted multiple levels of co‐occurrence and used them to learn words and object categories simultaneously. However, marked individual differences in performance were also found, suggesting possible interference and competition in processing the two concurrent streams of regularities. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

Low-wage migrant workers in Singapore are legally entitled to healthcare provided by their employers and supported by private insurance, separate from the national UHC (universal health coverage) system. In practice, they face multiple barriers to access. In this article, we describe this policy-practice gap from the perspective of HealthServe, a non-profit organisation that assists low-wage migrant workers. We outline the healthcare financing system for migrant workers, describe commonly encountered barriers, and comment on their implications for the global UHC movement’s key (...) ethical concepts of fairness, equity, and solidarity. (shrink)

The relationship between intuition and ethical decision-making has been researched extensively during the past two decades. This study aimed at exploring empirically observable associations between intuition and the moral intensity of ethical decision-making processes. A scenario-based quantitative approach was used to collect data from 157 practising professional spirit mediums. It was found that only collective universal intuition had a significant positive association with the moral intensity of ethical decision-making processes. Personal experience intuition and collective archetype intuition were not significantly associated (...) with moral intensity. This may explain why previous studies were unable to gauge the effects of intuition on ethical decision-making. The results suggest that a pure mind can improve one’s ability to make decisions. Thus, decision-makers would benefit by being more attuned to their sense of morality. (shrink)

This research adopted the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology to emphasize the use of the PX Pay mobile payment app for PX Mart, the most popular supermarket in Taiwan, and examine the degree of involvement as a moderator. The influence of factors related to PX Mart’s target customer groups on their shopping intentions and usage behaviors were discussed, with subsequent benefits and optimization directions. This study indicated the following results. First, performance expectations, ease-of-use expectations, and social impact (...) enhance consumers’ behavioral intention and behavioral intention significantly influence usage behavior. Second, gender has no significant moderating effect on the proposed model. Third, age has a moderating effect from performance expectations and ease-of-use expectations, social influence on behavioral intention. Fourth, use is more significantly affected by perceived stakeholders for customers over age 50 than for those age 30–39. Fifth, the degree of involvement significantly affects the relationship between behavioral intention and usage behavior in terms of social influence and facilitating conditions effects. Finally, we provided academic and practical implications and make contributions to both the online payment industry and academia. (shrink)

Piracy is the greatest threat facing the music industry worldwide today. This study developed and empirically tested a model examining the antecedents of consumer attitude and behavioral intention toward music piracy behavior. Two types of music piracy behavior, unauthorized duplication/download and pirated music product purchasing, were examined. Based on a field survey in Taiwan, the results showed that attributive satisfaction, perceived prosecution risk, magnitude of consequence, and social consensus are very important in influencing customers attitude and behavioral intention toward two (...) types of music piracy behavior. In addition, singer/band idolization can affect the attitude and behavioral intention in the case of pirated music product purchasing. Perceived proximity was found to affect the attitude and behavioral intention in the case of pirated music product purchasing. However, it only influenced behavioral intention in the case of unauthorized duplication/download. (shrink)

Moral thinking and communication are critical competencies for confronting social dilemmas in a challenging world. We examined these moral competencies in 70 college students and graduates from Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Participants were assessed through semi-structured written interviews, Facebook group discussions, and a questionnaire. In this paper, we describe the similarities and differences across cultural groupings in (1) the social issues of greatest importance to the participants; (2) the factors influencing their approaches to thinking about social (...) issues and communicating with others; and (3) the characteristics of their moral functioning in terms of moral awareness, moral judgment, moral discourse, and moral decision-making. (shrink)

BackgroundBreast cancer patients are at elevated risk of depression during treatment, thus provoking the chance of poor clinical outcomes. This retrospective cohort study aimed to investigate whether integrating Chinese herbal medicines citation into conventional cancer therapy could decrease the risk of depression in the long-term breast cancer survivors.MethodsA cohort of patients aged 20–70 years and with newly diagnosed breast cancer during 2000–2008 was identified from a nationwide claims database. In this study, we focused solely on survivors of breast cancer at (...) least1 year after diagnosis. After one-to-one matching for age, sex, and baseline comorbidities, breast cancer patients who received and did not receive CHM treatment were enrolled. The incidence rate and hazard ratio citation for depression between the two groups was estimated at the end of 2012. A Cox proportional hazard model was constructed to examine the impact of the CHM use on the risk of depression.ResultsDuring the study period, the incidence rate of depression was significantly lower in the treated cohort than in the untreated cohort [8.57 compared with 11.01 per 1,000 person-years citation], and the adjusted HR remained significant at 0.74 in a Cox proportional hazards regression model. The corresponding risk further decreasing to 43% among those using CHM for more than 1 year.ConclusionFinding from this investigation indicated that the lower risk of depression observed in breast cancer patients treated with CHM, suggesting that CHM treatment should be considered for disease management toward breast cancer. Yet, the optimal administered dose should be determined in further clinical trials. (shrink)

Ruyu HungNational Chiayi UniversityThis collective writing is intended to portray the contour of philosophy of education in contemporary Taiwan, resounding many beautiful counterparts in EPAT (Bies...

One of the interpretive devices that Ch'eng-kuan (澄 觀) is famous for having employed to distill the essence of the vast Mahāvaipulya Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra (Tafang-kuang fo-hua-yen ching 《大方廣佛華嚴經》 was a series of variations on the contemplative theme (kuan-men 觀門) of the complete interfusion (yüan-jung 圓融) of the scripture's three chief protagonists (san-sheng 三聖) ── the Buddha Vairocana (Pi-lu-che-na 毘盧遮那) and the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī (Wen-shu-shih-li 文殊師利) and Samantabhadra (P'u-hsien 普賢). By aligning these three powerful sacred persons with a number of philosophical (...) categories that he believed to be central to the sūtra ── categories like "cause" (yin 因 ), "fruition" (kuo 果 ), "faith" (hsin 信 ), "understanding" (chieh 解), "insight" (chih 智), "practice" (hsing 行), "principle" (li 理), etc. ── he provided a focal point at which the rich and vivid meditative and liturgical lives of Hua-yen devotees could be made to converge with their philosophical reflections. -/- Although Ch'eng-kuan invoked this device in several of his writings, his most concerted development of it is a short essay entitled San-sheng yüan-jung kuan-men, which appears to have been written relatively late in his long career. Like many important Hua-yen texts, this essay seems to have been lost in China not long after its author's death. However, it was preserved in Korea and Japan and from the latter country was reintroduced to China in the last years of nineteenth century. Neither in China nor in the West has it yet been adequately studied. -/- The core of the present article is a critical edition of the Chinese text of the essay based on a careful comparison of all available versions and presented together with a copiously annotated English translation. The edition translation are preceded by a brief interpretive introduction and followed by an appendix in which are given: a detailed discussion of the work's textual history, detailed accounts of its various editions, and descriptions of its several surviving paraphrases and commentaries. (shrink)

Yüan shu shih wei Mei-kuo ta hsüeh sheng chʻu hsüeh fa lü erh tso, ku chʻi nei jung tsʻe chung Ying Mei fa lü ti yen chiu.