The Tenpō Famine of the 1830s was one of the worst in Japanese history, with the poor weather causing escalating rice prices as a major cause. To better understand how historical weather anomalies affected crop prices in Japan and ultimately led to the famine, researchers developed a new framework to analyze historical weather data. The results were published in Scientific Reports on February 18.

In a new report, Brookings experts examine how a more integrated European energy system could strengthen energy security, while also furthering sustainability and affordability.

About The Study: Nationwide telemedicine adoption was not significantly associated with changes in visits or spending, either overall or when stratified by urbanicity, payer type, or area-level social vulnerability, thus easing concerns about large utilization and spending increases from telemedicine expansion.

Faculty of Economics and Law, Piacenza-Cremona Campus, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Earns AACSB International Accreditation

Okayama University of Science has established two new interdisciplinary centers aimed at addressing societal and regional challenges through innovation and collaboration. Launched on April 1, the Center for Quality of All Lives (“IkimonoQOL”) promotes research and development to improve the well-being of animals and the people who care for them by combining expertise in veterinary medicine and engineering. The Entrepreneurship Center supports students and researchers in transforming ideas and technologies into businesses through entrepreneurship education, startup support, and partnerships across academia, industry, government, and local communities. Together, the centers are expected to strengthen the university’s role as a hub for innovation, regional revitalization, and human resource development.

Researchers at University of Tsukuba examined Japanese-language Instagram advertisements to determine how the linguistic features of ad copy are associated with click-through rates (CTR). The findings reveal marked differences by product category. While linguistic expressions related to health risk and discrepancies between a current and an ideal state were positively associated with CTR in supplement advertisements, expressions related to visual perception, positive emotion, and motion were associated with higher CTR in cosmetic advertisements. This study provides one of the first large-scale empirical examinations of the association between linguistic features in Japanese-language Instagram ad copy and CTR across product categories.

Immigrants play an essential role in the workforce in Canada and around the world, but immigrants face a host of hurdles trying to translate their knowledge, skills and abilities in ways that employers can recognize and value. A new UBC Sauder study created a cutting-edge machine learning model to review more than 13,000 research papers, dating from 1888 to 2022, and from fields including economics, sociology and anthropology. They found the lack of recognition of degrees, certificates and licenses make it especially difficult for immigrants to effectively translate their human capital in the host market.