An investigation by the Ministry of Science and Technology has found that former minister of education Chiang Wei-ling (蔣偉寧) was not involved in academic fraud, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Lin Yi-bing (林一平) said yesterday.
Lin told a Taipei press conference that Chen Cheng-wu (陳震武), the twin brother of former professor Chen Cheng-yuan (陳震遠, also known as Peter Chen), had put his brother’s name on an article submitted to the Journal of Vibration and Control, which also carried Chiang’s name, without Chiang’s knowledge or consent.
The journal’s publisher, US-based SAGE Publications, earlier this month withdrew 60 papers submitted by Chen Chen-yuan, accusing him of creating false e-mail accounts to give his articles favorable peer reviews.
Five of the 60 papers listed Chen Chen-wu as the main author, with Chiang cited as a coauthor.
Lin said that of those five papers, only one listed Chen Cheng-yuan as a coauthor, which would make it the “only fraudulent one” of the five.
The ministry would contact SAGE Publications to brief it on the details of its probe, he said.
“The former minister of education was not involved in the alleged academic fraud,” Lin said.
With regard to questions in academic circles about Premier Jiang Yi-huah’s (江宜樺) unfinished translation of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, which he began in 1990 and for which he received a NT$500,000 grant from the then-National Science Council (now the Ministry of Science and Technology), Lin said that Jiang, of his own initiative, returned NT$282,000 to the ministry in March.
Lin said that Jiang has not finished translating the footnotes in Arendt’s book.
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