• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publications close
• SG close

This study examines the short-term employment changes in the US after hurricane impacts. An analysis of hurricane events during 1990-2021 suggests that county-level employment changes in the initial month are small on average, though large employment losses (>30%) can occur after extreme cyclones. The overall small changes partly result from compensation among opposite changes in employment sectors, such as the construction and leisure and hospitality sectors. An analysis of these extreme cases highlights concentrated employment losses in the service-providing industries and delayed, robust employment gains related to reconstruction activities. The overall employment shock is negatively correlated with the metrics of cyclone hazards (e.g., extreme wind and precipitation) and geospatial details of impacts (e.g., cyclone-entity distance). Additionally, non-cyclone factors such as county characteristics also strongly affect short-term employment changes. The findings inform predictive modeling of short-term employment changes and help deliver promising skills for service-providing industries and high-impact cyclones. Specifically, the Random Forests model, which can account for nonlinear relationships, greatly outperforms the multiple linear regression model commonly used by economics studies. Overall, our findings may help improve post-cyclone aid programs and the modeling of hurricanes socioeconomic impacts in a changing climate.

Semiconductor chips have been a so-called critical technology since their inception in the 1960s, and designing and fabricating them gives states power as well as status on the global stage. To maximize their power and status, states will rationally seek to acquire the capabilities to build the infrastructure required for their own chip industry. However, not all states are successful in their attempts to do so. The complexity associated with chip technology has meant that only a handful of firms in a small number of states control different parts of the supply and value chain, further amplifying the chip industry's strategic value. While some East Asian states—namely Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—feature prominently in this elite club, the largest economy among them, China, has struggled to master advanced chip design and fabrication despite its political will to do so and significant state investment. A common explanation is that China's efforts to develop its chip industry have been hindered by its strategic rivalry with the United States, which controls essential intellectual property and technology. However, this explanation is insufficient, and the apparent failure of China’s indigenous innovation policies merits a closer look. This essay argues that the institutional setup—in particular, the extent of state versus private-sector involvement—explains the variation observed in East Asian states’ pursuit of chip industry development. Specifically, China’s state-dominated institutional setup has led it to over-allocate resources to “paper tigers,” which have hindered the advancement of its domestic chip industry.

Electricity, first introduced in Colonial Malaya as early as the 1890s, and by the 1920s became the major source of power in the tin-mining industry. Surprisingly, despite its vital role in the economy, electricity has received little attention in Malaysian historiography. In the country’s main tin-mining center, Kinta Valley, Perak, the Perak River Hydro-Electric Power Company with its head-office in London, played a significant role in supplying electricity for mine operator. Since early 1920s, British Government aimed to develop hydroelectric power by building dams on the Perak River. They viewed the Perak River as an important source of hydroelectric power for electrifying Colonial Malaya especially for tin mining-industry. Financial constraints forced the British Government, however, to hand over responsibilities to the PRHEPC. This article aims to identify how PRHEPC managed the development of electricity supply facilities and its significance to the tin miners in the Kinta Valley before 1940. The PRHEPC diversified its energy facilities development strategies to guarantee electricity supply to mine operators covering a wide area. Their ability to exploit the Perak River through the construction of a large-capacity hydroelectric station and the strategy to combine steam generation and grid supply systems allowed the PRHEPC to effectively supply electricity to a large number of mine operators in the Kinta Valley. The development was financially beneficial to the power companies because this capital-saving approach allowed them to generate electricity at a far lower price than the fossil fuel power stations for their consumers. Cheap energy allowed mine operators to minimize the cost of the tin mining operation, particularly the sector shifted from labour-intensive to a capital-intensive business strategy. To dominate the tin mining sector, the operators greatly invested in modernizing mining methods through utilization of machinery such as the high-cost dredges. It was therefore imperative for mine operators to obtain cheap energy to offset the cost of investments. This case study clearly displayed the development of the tin mining sector in Kinta Valley was not merely influenced by electricity use, but also its economical generation through hydroelectric.

As we increasingly emphasise the importance of developing future-ready outcomes for learners, we will need to also expand new capabilities to measure such outcomes. AI, big data, and analytics are examples of such new capabilities. Ideation is one of six habits of practice we have identified that will prepare students for the future. In this paper, we present a means to computationally appraise ideation quality as one such capability. We have developed a heuristic to appraise the ideation quality of university student essays using natural language processing, a branch of artificial intelligence concerned with the understanding of human languages. Our heuristic allows for ideation quality to be quickly quantified in the form of an ideation score. So, instead of going about the process blindly, we now have a means to provide a point of reference to allow students to give measured consideration to their ideation. Unlike a learning outcome, a future-ready habit is more of a predisposition. Consequently, it is not coherent with conventional assessments, which rather seek to evaluate than to guide. This heuristic represents an outcome of our evaluation of a new problem space in education and is, at the same time, a novel expansion into a space that exploits new capabilities.

Despite the extensive literature on the retrieval of digestible starches from archaeological contexts, there are still significant concerns regarding their genuine origin and durability. Here, we propose a multi-analytical strategy to identify the authenticity of ancient starches retrieved from macrolithic tools excavated at Upper Paleolithic sites in the Pontic steppe. This strategy integrates the morphological discrimination of starches through optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy with single starch chemo-profiling using Fourier transform infrared imaging and microscopy. We obtained evidence of aging and biomineralization in the use-related starches from Palaeolithic sites, providing a methodology to establish their ancient origin, assess their preservation status, and attempt their identification. The pivotal application of this multidisciplinar approach demonstrates that the macrolithic tools, from which starches were dislodged, were used for food-processing across the Pontic Steppe around 40,000 years ago during the earliest colonization of Eurasia by Homo sapiens. Nanyang Technological University Published version This work was supported by NTU (Singapore) SUG grant M4081669.090 Unfolding the complexity of nutrition at the dawn of modern humans—a multi-layered digital 3D storytelling approach and by the research carried out as Visiting Professor at L. Vanvitelli-University of Campania Multi-proxy approach to starchy food diet and consequences for contemporary diseases of civilization, granted to L.L., and Patto per lo Sviluppo della Città di Venezia (Comune di Venezia, Italy) (A.M. and E.B.). The study of the stone tools from: Brinzeni I was performed within the project 20.80009.7007.02 at the Institute of Zoology, Republic of Moldova; Kostenki 14 was allowed by A. Sinytsin, recipient of the RSF № 20-78-10151 project and in the frame of the state assignment FMZF-2022–0019 of IHMC RAS, Surein I was allowed by G. Klopachev (MAE RAS) and carried out in collaboration with N. Skakun and V. Terekhina, recipients of the RFBR and RPF according to the research project No 19-59-25002.