The Ministry of Culture yesterday announced four more nominees to serve on the board of the Public Television Service (PTS), which has not been able to convene for more than a year because of problems filling the board seats.
The nominees are former minister without portfolio Ovid Tseng (曾志朗), Acer founder Stan Shih (施振榮), former Government Information Office minister Shao Yu-ming (邵玉銘) and former DaAi TV director Eric Yao (姚仁祿).
Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) said that the nominees were heavyweights in the fields of education, technology and communication, adding that they were well-equipped to lead PTS’ development.
According to the Public Television Act (公視法), the PTS board of directors must consist of 17 to 21 members.
The government has failed to meet the minimum requirement regarding the number of directors four times, and only 13 candidates have been approved so far.
The ministry said that Shih is a prominent figure in the technology sector, adding that it hoped that he could turn PTS into a leader in the nation’s broadcasting industry in the era of digital convergence.
It said that Tseng has devoted himself to the education system as former minister of education and former vice president of Academia Sinica.
Tseng has been a leading advocate of making educational opportunities available to residents in remote areas, it said.
In addition, he launched a reading initiative for children, and promoted science education for everyone, the ministry said.
With Tseng’s extensive experience as an administrator as well as an educator, the PTS would better reflect the concerns of the public, the ministry added.
Shao was an important figure in the formation of PTS, the ministry said, saying that he had recruited Cloud Gate Dance Theater founder Lin Hwa-min (林懷民), poet Yu Kwang-chung (余光中) and other heavyweights in the cultural and communication industries to help establish the nation’s first public television system.
Yao helped set up the DaAi TV network and his professional insight would help PTS become a pioneer in the broadcasting sector, the ministry said.
The ministry said that the review session for four nominees is scheduled for Tuesday next week.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
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
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. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide