Open University of Kaohsiung

Abstract A large amount of furnace slag is produced from steelmaking every year. The resultant by‐products will severely damage the natural environment and ecosystems if not treated properly. Businesses worldwide have thus been striving for slag recycling and solving various complex problems. In this study, basic oxygen furnace slag (BOFS) was regarded as an adsorbent to adsorb phosphate in water. In addition to a physical–chemical property analysis of the by‐products, the present study explored the performance of basic oxygen furnace slag in adsorbing phosphorous (P) with different size settings, and observed the surface structure of fused basic oxygen furnace slag.The results revealed that free‐state Ca accounts for the majority in basic oxygen furnace slag content, demonstrating the removal of nearly all phosphorous in water. The results of Fourier‐transform infrared spectroscopy (FT‐IR) on basic oxygen furnace slag with >200 mesh size revealed complex wave crests at the fingerprint region (570–980 cm−1). The result signifies that the basic oxygen furnace slag samples comprise strong Si─O and O─Si─O bonds within silicate minerals. Moreover, basic oxygen furnace slag samples with a particle size >200 mesh contain very high content of lime (CaO) (reaching 49.5%). This property fully demonstrates that basic oxygen furnace slag samples in a small particle size were more active as an aggregate. This study found that the Langmuir adsorption isotherm model (R2 = 0.997) is slightly better than the Freundlich adsorption isotherm model (R2 = 0.984), which shows that the process in which basic oxygen furnace slag adsorbs P is monolayer adsorption, and the adsorption energy is more uniformly distributed among BOFS samples. This study also found that basic oxygen furnace slag samples melted at 1200°C can effectively encapsulate some heavy metal pollutants and form stable glassy slag. The change proved that a fused basic oxygen furnace slag sample could effectively encapsulate heavy metal pollutants and formed glassy‐state slag with high stability. This mechanism would reduce the likelihood of heavy metal leaching when basic oxygen furnace slag serves as a subgrade aggregate, permeable material, or concrete aggregate in the future.

Abstract The steel industry in Taiwan produces more than 3 million tons of steelmaking slag per year on average. Conventional solidification and landfilling methods are no longer suitable for the highly populated small island as a wide area is needed for such methods. This study aims to improve the quality of polluted water bodies using desulfurization slag – a recycled product resulted from steelmaking – as an arsenate adsorbent. Experimental results revealed that desulfurization slag pH and metal ions including Ca, Mg, Fe, and Mn affected the behavior and content of arsenate existing in an aqueous solution. The concentration of Ca among these metal ions is the highest in the aqueous solution, which facilitates the formation of calcium hydroxyarsenate and is therefore more critically beneficial than other metal ions in removing As in the aqueous solution. Additionally, desulfurization slag samples with particle size of >200 mesh had a greater specific surface area compared to those in other particle sizes, suggesting preferable As adsorption ability of slag with higher mesh numbers. Such desulfurization slag samples were thus used in subsequent adsorption experiments in this study. The energy dispersive spectrometry results confirmed that the >200‐mesh group comprised the highest metal oxide content in terms of As removal. This study found that under different Cl− and SO42− concentrations, the covalent bond effect did not significantly affect the slag's ability to adsorb As. According to the adsorption isotherm experiment results, the Langmuir model (R2 = 0.998) outperformed the Freundlich model (R2 = 0.961) possibly because the former is suitable for situations with even energy distribution and monolayer adsorption, while the latter is often applied to scenarios with uneven distribution and multilayer adsorption, indicating that the adopted desulfurization slag adsorbed arsenate through the mechanism of monolayer adsorption. There are many useful contents in the desulfurization slag. In terms of sustainable use of resources, desulfurization slag is worthy of economic development and reusing if recycled. Currently, there is little research and information on desulfurization slag in Taiwan. Hopefully, this study will be helpful for future development and application of desulfurization slag in recycling techniques.

In the field of fuzzy utility mining, the characteristics of transaction time have been a widely studied topic in data mining. However, using a single-conditional threshold for all items does not suffice to reflect the true properties of items. This paper, therefore, proposes a multi-conditional minimum threshold approach which considers the temporal behavior, the importance in items, and the usage of linguistic terms to mine high temporal fuzzy utility itemsets. The multi-conditional minimum thresholds are utilized to assist users in deciding appropriate standards for itemsets in mining when its contained items have different importance. An extended two-phase model and a corresponding mining approach are designed to handle the temporal fuzzy utility mining problem with the multi-conditional minimum thresholds. Finally, the results from the experimental evaluation show the effectiveness of the proposed approach under different settings.

The issue is mostly attributable to the growth of maritime, inland shipping, waterborne transport and trade demand in the freight sector. This fundamental problem is being a key concern for the European Commission because it leads to adverse health and environmental effects. To solve the emission issues, shore-side-power emerges as an initial solution to mitigate the unwanted environmental impact of ships at berth. In addition to this, port development must be in line with the emerging ships technologies as most of the ships are moving forward All-Electric-Ship (AES) concept. However, the use of shore-side-power is still new, although the international standard was recently available, shore-side-power still facing technical challenges like power supply/demand power, different voltage, and frequency level on the ship and port side. Therefore, the integration of microgrid technologies in conventional seaports aims to become the initial step to the future “green port.” Furthermore, microgrids research has significantly increase self-sustainability for the future port because of their efficient on-site integration and coordination of renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic systems, wind turbines, and energy storage system. This challenging solution will provide more benefits to end-users as well as fuel cost savings and high system reliability.

This study treated elderly learners at Open University of Kaohsiung who participated in online distance learning as samples. By a literature review and questionnaire survey, it probed into elderly learners’ perceived reactions and feedback for network learning using consumer electronics products and analyzed the general situation and relationship between elderly learners’ needs and obstacles in network learning with consumer electronics products. By empirical research, this study investigated a total of 472 elderly learners aged at least 55 years old in elderly programs at Open University of Kaohsiung, for-credit continuing education courses, and on-the-job courses of universities in different counties and cities around Taiwan. This study found that elderly learners with a lower educational level encounter more significant learning obstacles in network learning using consumer electronics products. In addition, this study found that when elderly learners’ needs to apply consumer electronics products are higher, their network learning obstacles will be lower. Based on the findings, this study suggested that it shall help elderly learners with lower educational level reinforce learning knowledge and competence to apply consumer electronics products to avoid obstacles for network learning.

Drawing on cognitive theories of graphic comprehension and on systemic functional semiotics, the intention of this study is twofold: first, to examine the effects of image design on reading comprehension of science texts; second, to investigate the process of meaning-making when reading image and verbal text. An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that image designs with salient tree structure can cue better reading comprehension about the concept of the biological classification system. A 5-phase interview was developed to investigate the reading comprehension in different textual conditions. 12 Taiwanese students from year 7 were assigned as the participants either in a control group to read the text with the textbook images or in a treatment group to read the same texts but with a salient tree structure image designed to be more coherent with the textual information. The participants are further identified in terms of low, medium, and high level of prior knowledge on the topic according to a pretest. The results support the hypothesis which shows the textbook image did not efficiently activate as many theme-related meanings as the tree-structure one. Moreover, there are many misunderstandings embedded in the design of the textbook image which might also be potential risks for the other readers. The influence of prior knowledge on the reading comprehension was negligible. Implications are drawn for the importance of image design in textbooks and biology pedagogy, and value of extended large-scale research in this area.

\nThis study regarded adult in-service students who are familiar with project management courses as the subjects and collected data through questionnaires for confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis. The aim is to construct a “C Theory” questionnaire scale that encompasses the essence of Chinese management philosophy like decision-making of Taoism, leadership of Legalism, tactics of School of Military Strategists, creativity of Mohism, and coordination of Confucianism. Furthermore, management performance scales were constructed for learning and growth, internal operation, customer satisfaction, and financial control, while the questionnaires and statistical analyses were expected to probe into the impact of “C Theory” on project management performance. This study found that the application and practice of “C Theory” have a high and positive correlation with project management and a significant influence on the improvement of performance. It is therefore suggested that management methods in “C Theory” be appropriately used in project management in order to enhance the efficiency of project management and facilitate the achievement of project management targets.\n

This study treated adult in-service students of adult education institutions as the subjects and collected data through a questionnaire survey. This study conducted confirmatory factor analysis, and reliability analysis in order to develop questionnaire on “Occupational Performance of Teachers in Adult Education Institutions” and “Instructional Satisfaction in Adult Education Institutions”. The collected data were analyzed to discuss the occupational performance and instructional satisfaction in adult education institutions, as well as the correlation between the two and their predictability. It is found that occupational performance and instructional satisfaction in adult education institutions are highly positively correlated and greatly predictable. It is therefore suggested that teachers in adult education institutions work actively to deliver their occupational performance so as to enhance instructional satisfaction and help students to achieve their learning objectives in an effective manner.

On the basis of the 46 competence elements in the International Project Management Association (IPMA) ICB Version 3.0 and the PMP competence guidelines in PMBOK® Guide -- Fifth Edition by the Project Management Institute, this study formulates a “Preliminary Draft of the Taiwan Project Management Competence Scale”. After expert review, a pretest was developed for the Taiwan Project Management Competence Scale. With adult students in adult education institutions as the respondents, a pretest was conducted in order to collect data. Confirmatory factor analysis, and reliability analysis were then conducted to construct the “Taiwan Project Management Competence Scale”, which covers the four dimensions of project management of cognitive and conceptual competences, behavioral and technical competences, contextual competences, and moral and ethical competences. It is intended that this scale could be used as reference in future investigations into and measurement of project management competence in Taiwan, thus, facilitating the diagnosis, improvement, and refinement of performance in terms of project management competence.

Robust template design for cellular neural networks (CNNs) implementing an arbitrary Boolean function is currently an active research area. If the given Boolean function is linearly separable, a single robust uncoupled CNN can be designed preferably as a maximal margin classifier to implement the Boolean function. On the other hand, if the linearly separable Boolean function has a small geometric margin or the Boolean function is not linearly separable, a popular approach is to find a sequence of robust uncoupled CNNs implementing the given Boolean function. In the past research works using this approach, the control template parameters and thresholds are usually restricted to assume only a given finite set of integers. In this study, we try to remove this unnecessary restriction. NXOR- or XOR-based decomposition algorithm utilizing the soft margin and maximal margin support vector classifiers is proposed to design a sequence of robust templates implementing an arbitrary Boolean function. Several illustrative examples are simulated to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method by comparing our results with those produced by other decomposition methods with restricted weights.