A Taiwanese high school team won a silver medal at the 23rd International Young Physicists’ Tournament in Vienna, Austria, on Thursday.
The five-member team was required to solve 17 scientific problems and present their findings at the tournament.
Participants from 23 countries took part in the competition, where Singapore, Austria, New Zealand and South Korea were among the winners. Taiwan finished overall in sixth place, said Kao Hsien-chung (高賢忠), chairman of the Department of Physics at National Taiwan Normal University.
Kao said the contest has grown in importance and an increasing number of countries have participated in recent years. This year marked first-placed Singapore’s second time in the tournament. Taiwan’s silver was a great achievement for a country participating for the first time, Kao said.
During the tournament, students from around the world engaged in vigorous debates in English. Apart from the academic training, participating in the event was a good experience for the Taiwanese students, Kao said.
The delegation included Franklin Liu (劉富蘭克林) and Chu Chun-yu (儲君宇) from Concordia Middle School, Hsieh Tsung-lin (謝宗霖) from Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School and Lin Yu-cheng (林于程) and Chen Wei-hsuan (陳暐軒) from Kaohsiung Municipal Kaohsiung Senior High School.
Three graduate students from National Chiao Tung University earlier this month received a winning prize with a design of a smart electricity meter at an international technology competition.
The meter, called “SmarterMe,” won the Embedded Development category at this year’s Imagine Cup that was held in Warsaw, Poland, from July 4 through July 9 under the theme “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.”
The students, Chen Yung-chi (陳勇旗), Lai Yi-sheng (賴易聖) and Lin Ming-chun (林明駿) said the meter was designed to help conserve energy and thus save money and reduce carbon emissions.
While most meters record overall electricity consumption, Lin Ming-chun said, the smart meter itemizes the amount of energy used by individual appliances like air conditioners and electric kettles and sends a detailed report to the user’s mobile phone via text messaging.
It also transmits information on lowering energy consumption, he said.
For example, when air conditioners are in use, the system gives suggestions for temperature settings that would cut energy consumption and reduce the electricity bill by 10 to 20 percent per month, he added.
Citing US research findings, the students said that if consumers are aware which appliances use the most energy, they could lower consumption and thus cut their home electricity bills by 25 to 30 percent.
The Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition hosted by software giant Microsoft.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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