Speaking into a microphone attached to a "groundbreaking" voice translation system yesterday, National Chiao Tung University vice president Lee Chia-huang (
"The system just `heard' what I said and translated it into Hakka," Lee told a press conference on the latest breakthroughs from Chiao Tung and National Tsing Hua universities -- two institutions that are churning out cool gadgets, oft-cited academic theses and billion-dollar businesses after receiving the equivalent of tens of millions of US dollars in subsidies from the Ministry of Education last year.
Chiao Tung's new translation technology was the least of its achievements; the school has just developed a rubber-based solar energy cell boasting a record-breaking energy transfer rate of 5.2 percent, a Chiao Tung press release said.
Although the prototype cell isn't market ready yet, it represents a big step toward lessening the world's dependence on fossil fuels, it said.
Tsing Hua demonstrated its business-oriented approach to putting government cash to good use. The university has "spun off" eight publicly listed companies boasting a combined market value of more than NT$50 billion (US$1.5 billion) since receiving NT$1.2 billion in subsidies last year, a press release said.
"We saw how universities like Stanford and MIT were involved in the creation of innovative, high-tech companies, and we sent our professors there to learn how to foster spin-offs," said Tsing Hua's head of research and development, Lin Yung-lung (林永隆).
Yahoo, Cisco Systems and Google are shining examples of how companies can arise from academia, he said.
Yesterday's conference was one in a series featuring the achievements of 12 universities that have been awarded billions of dollars since January last year as part of the education ministry's five-year, NT$50 billion "Awards Plan for Outstanding Universities."
The plan had been proposed by President Chen Shui-bian (
Even now, much of the subsidies remain frozen, mostly because of pan-blue lawmakers, who refused to approve NT$20 billion of the subsidies last year, alleging that the ministry dispersed funds inconsistently.
Vice Minister of Education Chou Tsan-der (周燦德) pleaded with lawmakers in the legislature's Education and Culture committee in March to retroactively free up last year's frozen funds and pass a separate NT$50 billion budget for the awards plan in the 2007 to 2008 academic year. The budgets are still pending legislative review.
Chou met with stiff opposition from pan-blue and Taiwan Solidarity Union legislators, who demanded that he submit a report explaining why some schools had been selected for subsidies ahead of others, and a justification for the amount of funds per school.
Of the passed amount, Tsing Hua received NT$1.2 billion last year, while Chiao Tung received NT$800 million.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift