The biggest challenge to encouraging innovation in Taiwan is the lack of “wildness” in education, National Science Council Minister and National Applied Research Laboratories (NARL) chairperson Cyrus Chu (朱敬一) said yesterday.
Chu made the remark at a forum on innovation technology in Taipei in celebration of NARL’s 10th anniversary.
During a discussion on how the nation’s innovation technology sector could be approved, Chu said Taiwan’s education system tends to be conservative and seldom encourages “wild” ideas.
Innovation needs new ideas and entrepreneurship requires courage, but compared with some other countries, Taiwan’s education system hardly encourages students to step away from tradition, so the current innovation culture lacks courage and creativity, he said.
National Chengchi University president Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) told the forum that innovation in the humanities also needs a new mindset based on the core features of “being people-oriented, integrating local elements and the co-creation of value.”
He said the practice of humanities innovation should be guided by imagination, developed through trial and error and spread like an ecosystem, rather than by a mindset which stresses rigid management and systematic planning.
Meanwhile, Minister Without Portfolio Simon Chang (張善政) stressed the importance and potential of working with large data sets, such as applying knowledge of human DNA to improve the precision of medical diagnoses, and urged NARL to develop more interdisciplinary databases in the academic field to inspire innovation.
According to Industrial Technology Research Institute chairman Tsay Ching-yen (蔡清彥), the nation’s institutional environment is unfriendly to both domestic and foreign entrepreneurs, as the required procedure for establishing companies is complicated and time-consuming, while the tax imposed on technology investment and applying for residency rights are problematic.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching