A democratic system is stable or not relies on the political attitudes of the citizen. It is not enough to rely just on establishment of political system. More important is winning the support and trust of the general public. The trust on general public is the basis of legitimacy of ruling and it represents the level of trust of the general public to the government officials and public policy. The political trust refers to the attitudes of individual toward government official, decision of government, political figure, political phenomenon, and political code, political system as well as political structure. Whether people trust administration officials and public policy determines the level of support of people offered to present administration. In this paper, we adopted interview data in the project of ¡§Taiwan¡¦s Election and Democratization Study, 2003¡¨ in the effort to find out the difference in party identification, media contact and political knowledge based on individual background data and what are the connections between the above variables in one hand and the political trust provided to government agency and political figures on the other hand, and from which, it is hoped to find out the connection between political trust of general public of Taiwan and various factors, so as to provide governing agencies and political trust for reference in winning trust of the general public and the direction to endeavor. It is also hoped that the democratic politics of Taiwan will be more matured and secured.

Areal densities of perpendicular hard-disk drives over 500Gb/in2 have already been demonstrated, with 1Tb/in2 densities being forecasted in the near future. However, at these high areal densities the information bearing units on the magnetic storage medium are magnetically unstable at temperatures expected in hard-disk drives. To extend or bypass this limit, new developments in head and media technologies and understanding of their record, readout and noise performances are necessary. The aim of this project was to study the record, readout and noise properties of conventional and future perpendicular magnetic recording media, heads and their related technologies. The objectives were therefore to develop a flexible and robust experimental recording platform to test the performance of different heads and media, and develop the necessary readout theory to predict the replay performance. In line with the project objectives, a high-precision open contact recording tester was developed with 1nm resolution. The open nature of this system allows different heads and media combinations to be tested. A second, closed system was also developed based on a commercial perpendicular hard-drive, modified to serve as a spin-stand to provide signal and noise measurements in practical drive conditions. The readout process in perpendicular recording was modelled based on the reciprocity principle for a shielded TMR head to study the parameters that affect the readout signal performance, and for comparison with the experimental measurements. Measured signal roll-off curves showed a practical linear density of 450KFCI for the commercial perpendicular disk medium, and indicated that non-linear effects happen at linear densities approaching 550KFCI. These results were in agreement with the theoretical calculations of the replay process. Two-dimensional readout scans were found have similar or higher resolution than Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) images of the same recorded regions – indicating the versatility and precision of the developed contact tester. Inverse filtering employing the Wiener filter was used to extract the magnetic transition. The extracted transition profiles and transition extents from the replay signals had much higher resolution than MFM images measured for the same transition region, thus showing the applicability of the developed testers for in situ magnetic characterisation. The developed contact and non-contact testers allowed the investigation of a new proposed recording scheme, Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). Measured signal roll-off curves of shingled tracks indicated a rise in the signal amplitude at low densities. At higher linear densities the signal performance was the same as conventionally written tracks with guardbands. It was found that a 30% reduction in track width in SMR, increase the areal density by a factor of 1.58 above that in existing hard drives.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Diversity training continues to be an important research domain because of its practical application in modern organizations. However, research regarding best methods remains inconclusive, and little work has investigated non-demographic trainee characteristics as boundary conditions of diversity training effectiveness. The goal of this study is to test the efficacy of integrating two diversity training methods, perspective taking and media contact, specifically for resistant trainees who are high in social dominance orientation (SDO). In a sample of 373 participants, I test a proposed three-way interaction between these variables such that the effect of perspective taking on racial bias and intergroup anxiety will be enhanced by a media contact video condition, and this integration of training methods will be particularly beneficial for high SDO individuals. This hypothesis was largely unsupported, as integrating perspective taking and media interventions did not lead to lower racial bias or intergroup anxiety. Counter to expectations, the media contact video revealed a harmful effect on racial bias for those low in SDO. However, when combined with a perspective taking writing task, this harmful effect was mitigated. Supplemental analyses reveal that in the media contact video condition, the effect of SDO on racial bias was explained by a mediating mechanism, parasocial connection. Trainees high in SDO formed more negative parasocial connections with the speaker in the media contact video condition. However, those low in SDO formed strong positive parasocial connections with the speaker, and in turn, this positive parasocial connection led to lower racial bias. Implications, future research, and limitations are discussed.