I believe you incorrectly stated the founder of Trend Micro and Sina.com in your editorial "More choice, more risk" (Feb 17, page 8). The founder of Trend Micro is Steve Chang (張明正) and the acting CEO of Sina.com is Daniel Chiang (姜豐年), not Daniel Ng.
Jimmy P. Sharp
Trend Micro, Inc.
Editor's reply: Thank you for bringing to our attention this error, which resulted (in addition to a misspelling) from the fact that, prior to joining SINANET.com in 1996, Chiang was president of Trend Micro, Inc. We apologize to all those concerned. The full sentence should have read: "Where people like Steve Chang, wildly successful founder of Trend Micro (an anti-virus software firm), and Daniel Chiang of Sina.com (one of the biggest Chinese-language Web portals) have gone (Tokyo and Hong Kong), other Taiwanese stars-in-the-making would be certain to follow."
Social values and R&D
I definitely agree with Hwan Lin's farsighted suggestions about promoting Taiwan's national R&D spending ("Develop-ment Needs Action, not Talk," Feb. 17, Page 8). Increasing the R&D budget as a proportion of GDP is certainly very critical to a country's technological, industrial and economic development.
However, we may also need to think about another important factor -- social values -- which cannot be improved solely through spending money.
"How to make more easy money" is a mainstream Taiwan social value today. This tendency can be seen in most young people's job-hunting, as well as their job performance. Fewer and fewer university graduates are willing to study further, particularly in the basic hard sciences. Even graduates with doctoral or master degrees are less interested in doing research, preferring instead jobs with higher salaries or shares of stocks in technology parks.
No wonder Morris Chang (張忠謀), the CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (台灣積體電路公司, TSMC), said "[There are] tons of PhD employees in TSMC, but less than ten of them are creative and innovative."
In addition, Taiwan needs to advocate the pay-for-use concept. I believe that much of the software used are illegal copies, which means that the users did not pay the license fees. This behavior erodes individuals' and enterprises' incentives: invention and innovation.
The Taiwanese people are smart and Taiwanese enterprises are rich, but how to make them feel respected and comfortable in doing research or increasing input in R&D is a big challenge for society.
In sum, changing social values to improve Taiwan's technological, industrial and economic development is even more difficult than increasing national R&D outlay in GDP.
Johnny Chi-Chen Chiang
Columbia, South Carolina
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