Thai Food in Taiwan: Tracing the Contours of Transnational Taste

This essay examines the recent proliferation of Thai restaurants in Taiwan, relating their development to different streams of transnational migration from Thailand, Myanmar and mainland China. Thai restaurants in Taiwan take many forms from low-cost 'ethnic' restaurants around the Taoyuan train station and in more peripheral areas, catering mainly to migrant workers from Thailand, to upmarket restaurants in city centre locations, catering to a 'cosmopolitan' clientele with high levels of economic and cultural capital. The paper traces the contours of transnational taste in Taiwan where Thai food has been adapted to suit local demand. In this context, as elsewhere, notions of culinary authenticity are contested, revolving around specific ingredients, recipes and dishes as well as notions of provenance, décor and other aspects of material culture. The paper examines the process of authentication, focusing on the culinary claims made by differently-located stakeholders. It also considers the material as well as the symbolic construction of 'taste', a term whose multiple meanings provide a valuable way of rethinking transnationality. As well as providing a case study of the evolution of culinary culture in a non-Western context, the paper sheds light on the role of food in defining Taiwan's contemporary political culture through notions of cosmopolitanism and modernity

Electronic transformation of government in the U.K.: a research agenda

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory research project into future e-Government (electronic Government) initiatives. The Virtual Institute for Electronic Government Research (VIEGO) project aimed at identifying and further developing the research agenda of e-Government based on a solid practical ground. As such, the paper offers a novel methodology in identifying the road map for future e-Government initiatives based on a series of workshops organised around the U.K. hosting a mixture of stakeholders involving both academics and parishioners. The analysis of the VIEGO workshops depicted that an e-Government research agenda involves a combination of social, technological and organisational issues at both governmental and individual citizen level, ultimately driven by empirical case-based experience and active participation in e-Government processes. Unlike other propositions for the future of e-Government offered in the e- Government literature, raised research questions not only originated from an analysis of e-Government literature but also on the outcome of brainstorming, reflections and contemplations throughout the duration of the project

Transitive factorizations of permutations and geometry

We give an account of our work on transitive factorizations of permutations. The work has had impact upon other areas of mathematics such as the enumeration of graph embeddings, random matrices, branched covers, and the moduli spaces of curves. Aspects of these seemingly unrelated areas are seen to be related in a unifying view from the perspective of algebraic combinatorics. At several points this work has intertwined with Richard Stanley's in significant ways.Comment: 12 pages, dedicated to Richard Stanley on the occasion of his 70th birthda

Measuring research progress in photovoltaics

The role and some results of the project analysis and integration function in the Flat-plate Solar Array (FSA) Project are presented. Activities included supporting the decision-making process, preparation of plans for project direction, setting goals for project activities, measuring progress within the project, and the development and maintenance of analytical models

Comment on "Finite Size Corrections to the Radiation Reaction Force in Classical Electrodynamics" [arXiv:1005.2617]

In [1, arXiv:1005.2617] effective field theory methods have been employed to compute the equations of motion of a spherically symmetric charged shell of radius R, taking into account the radiation reaction force exerted by the shell's own electromagnetic field up to O(R^2). The authors of Ref. [1] have stated that the known result for the self force of the shell as can be found from Eq. (16.28) of the textbook of Jackson [2] (see also Chap. 4 in the review of Pearle [3]) is incorrect, in that the term linear in R should be absent. We claim that this conclusion of Ref. [1] is incorrect, and that the textbook result, Eq. (1) does hold.Comment: 1 pag