Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday said that with the steady increase in the number of visitors to the 2010 Taipei Flora Expo, he was no longer worried about too few visitors, noting the rapid increase in numbers recently.
“In fact, I am more worried that too many visitors each day could compromise the quality of the experience,” he said.
Hau was responding to media reports quoting parents who said their children’s schools had arranged for students to have outdoor education sessions at the expo twice each semester.
The reports led journalists to question whether the expo was deliberately “using schoolchildren to help artificially boost the number of visitors recorded.”
Asked if he was satisfied with the results of a survey showing that office workers who visited the expo gave it an average score of 73.2 out of 100, Hau said he accepted the views of the public.
However, he also said he was gratified most of the visitors to the expo were satisfied with it.
As of noon yesterday, the number of expo visitors had exceeded 1.4 million.
The 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo is scheduled to run until April 25.
It is home to 14 pavilions and more than 800 varieties of orchids, 329 million locally developed plant varieties, from impatiens and bamboo to bonsai trees, as well as award-winning landscape and gardening designs from 22 countries and 26 cities.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide