Chiayi City, Tainan, as well as Kinmen and Taoyuan counties were on Friday named among the world’s Smart21 Communities by the New York-based Intelligent Community Forum (ICF).
The Smart21 list looks at cities, counties and rural communities that have decided to apply digital tools to build local economies and societies so that they can prosper in an age of “digital disruption,” the forum said.
The number of finalists from Taiwan fell by one this year compared with last year, but was still the highest in Asia.
Kinmen County made it onto the list of finalists for the first time.
Canada has the most finalists with a total of 11 localities named, including Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Pickering and Sarnia-Lambton County, Ontario, the forum said.
Three Australian cities also made the list, while the US, Finland and France were represented by only one city each, it said.
The 21 finalists were chosen from almost 400 cities worldwide based on quantitative and qualitative data they submitted on various parameters, including broadband infrastructure, innovations and sustainability.
The data were evaluated by a group of analysts led by Norman Jacknis, a former director at Cisco, the forum said.
“This year’s list contains more surprises than we have seen in a long time,” ICF cofounder Louis Zacharilla said in a statement. “Over half of them are Canadian communities that have been working on their programs for years and arrived on the list. We also see Taiwan and Australia continuing to embrace broadband and the ICF Method effectively.”
“While these are diverse places, they all connect this year as places that take the humanization of data seriously. Data has no value unless it is put in the service of a better, more prosperous region, city or town,” Zacharilla added.
The 21 finalists are to vie for a place in the Top 7 Intelligent Communities of 2018 in February next year, which leads up to the Intelligent Community of the Year award to be announced in London in June.
Taoyuan and Chiayi were listed among the Top 7 Intelligent Communities of 2017, but Melbourne was awarded first prize.
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