On May 25-26, the Taiwan Democracy Project (with support from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco) held its seventh annual conference entitled "How the Public Views Democracy and its Competitors in East Asia: Taiwan in Comparative Perspective.” The conference, cosponsored by the Program for East Asia Democratic Studies at National Taiwan University, brought together leading...

The author develops the first comparative empirical study of bank failures during the nineties between East Asia and Latin America using bank-level data, in order to address the following two questions: (i) To what extent did individual bank conditions explain bank failures? (ii) Did mainly the weakest banks, in terms of their fundamentals, fail in the crisis countries? The main results for Eas...

Through a case study of Chinese Family Business Groups (FBGs) in East Asia, this paper examines the relationship between the strategic behaviour exhibited by an organisational form and it's administrative heritage. To do so, we trace the origins of the strategic behaviour which scholars commonly attribute to FBGs to the environmental conditions prevailing during their emergence in the turbulent...

Differences in relative strengths and weaknesses between predators and prey under tactical contexts result in complex and dynamic contests between them. These contests are often brief and difficult to observe in marine systems. Here, we employ basic principles of underwater optics and physics to provide a conceptual understanding of mechanisms underlying predator prey interactions between white...

The incidence of cutaneous melanoma (CM) has rapidly increased over the past four decades. CM is often overlooked in East Asian populations due to its low incidence, despite East Asia making up 22% of the world's population. Since the 1990s, Caucasian populations have seen a plateau in CM mortality rates; however, there is little data investigating the mortality rates of CM in East Asian popula...

Few archaeological finds are as evocative as artifacts inscribed with symbols. Whenever an archaeologist finds a potsherd or a seal impression that seems to have symbols scratched or impressed on the surface, it is natural to want to “read” the symbols. And if the symbols come from an undeciphered or previously unknown symbol system it is common to ask what language the symbols supposedly repre...

This paper is a summary, or overview, of a much larger paper which the Centre for Confidence and Well-being has published called 'The potential dangers of a systematic, explicit approach to teaching social and emotional skills' (SEAL). This overview paper summarises some of the main arguments of the large paper. It does so by telescoping the arguments and presenting them largely without the ext...

*Fish Museum, Zoology Department, University of British Columbia, 6270 University Boulevard,Vancouver, BC,V6T 1Z4, Canada. ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research, PO Box 48561, 595 Burrard Street,Vancouver, BC,V7X1A3, Canada. Pew Institute for Ocean Science, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, Miami, FL 33149, USA. Shark Research Committee, PO Box 3483,Van Nuy...

The web software CHOP was developed to visualize the 'wobbling' in the third codon position of aligned DNA sequences. The simple features of this tool allow users to easily find regions suspected of containing coding sequences (CDSs). The program also allows visualization of the nucleotide diversity between two genomic or gene sequences by graphically plotting the percentage identity between th...

A review of various innovation indicators for the Latin American and Carribbean countries suggests that these countries are underperforming in a number of dimensions when compared to others with similar levels of GDP per capita, especially in the area of business R&D and the contribution of universities and public research institutions to business innovation. The paper presents the arguments fo...