Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) yesterday promoted the Taiwan Scholarship Program for overseas students which the government launched earlier this year to internationalize domestic universities.
Tu encouraged a group of overseas students at the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology to tell their friends about the scholarships, adding that applications would be accepted at any of the nation's representative offices overseas.
The first batch of some 500 scholarship recipients will arrive in Taiwan this month, Tu said.
He said that Taiwan was lagging behind many countries in this regard, pointing out that there are about 110,000 overseas students in Japan, 80,000 in China and 11,000 in South Korea, compared with only 1,500 here.
Citing the Pingtung university's Graduate Institute of Tropical Agriculture and International Co-operation as an example, Tu said that Taiwan's universities would attract more overseas students if they were better equipped.
According to university president Chou Chang-hung (周昌弘), the institute has for a long time worked with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' International Co-operation and Development Fund and the Council of Agriculture to provide agricultural-technology training to people from the nation's diplomatic allies.
Chou said the institute was a pioneer in internationalization, launching a full scholarship program for overseas students pursuing a master's degree or doctorate in 1998 and offering 53 courses in English. More than 50 master's degree students from over 30 countries had graduated.
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
WATCH FOR HITCHHIKERS: The CDC warned those returning home from Japan to be alert for any contagious diseases that might have come back with them People who have returned from Japan following the World Baseball Classic (WBC) games during the weekend are recommended to watch for symptoms of infectious gastroenteritis, flu and measles for two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said. Flu viruses remain the most common respiratory pathogen in Taiwan in the past four weeks and the influenza B virus accounted for 55.7 percent of the tested cases, exceeding the percentage of influenza A (H3N2) infections and becoming the local dominant strain, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said at a news conference on Tuesday. There were 82,187 hospital visits for
Alumni from Japan’s Kyoto Tachibana Senior High School marching band, widely known as the “Orange Devils,” staged a flash mob performance at the Grand Hotel in Taipei yesterday to thank Taiwan for its support after the Great East Japan Earthquake. The show, performed on the earthquake’s 15th anniversary, drew more than 100 spectators, some of whom arrived two hours before the show to secure a good viewing spot. The 26-member group played selections from “High School Musical,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and their signature piece “Sing Sing Sing” and shouted “I love
President William Lai (賴清德) today called for greater mutual aid between Taiwan and Japan in a post commemorating the 15th anniversary of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, saying that “true friendship reveals itself in hardship.” The magnitude 9 earthquake, the largest ever recorded in Japan, and the ensuing tsunami left 18,500 people dead or unaccounted for, and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. It was the world's worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Japan and Taiwan share a close bond built on mutual aid and trust, Lai said on Facebook, adding that he hopes they would
RSS