How institutions can better support international early-career researchers
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Professional demand analysis for teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages: a text mining approach on internet recruitment platforms
The rapid development of international education in China highlights the growing importance of employment analysis in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (TCSOL). This study explores the enterprise demands for TCSOL professionals using text mining techniques to analyze recruitment data collected from four major platforms: Boss Zhipin, Zhaopin.com, 51job.com, and Liepin.com. Combining descriptive statistics, LDA topic modeling, BERT-BiLSTM-CRF-based named entity recognition, and co-occurrence network analysis were used. Results show that there is a high demand for TCSOL professionals, especially for small-scale enterprises located in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Employers tend to favor candidates with at least a bachelor’s degree and 1–3 years of work experience. The topic model highlighted three central themes in job descriptions, emphasizing a shift toward a more diverse skill set. Named entity recognition identified essential attributes such as “communication ability”, “teaching experience”, “bachelor’s degree or above” and “responsibility” as core recruitment requirements. The co-occurrence network analysis revealed the importance of “teaching” and “priority” as core skill nodes. Time series analysis showed seasonal fluctuations in recruitment demand, peaking during spring recruitment and graduation periods. A hierarchical model of talent demand and development in TCSOL is proposed, integrating the perspectives of employers, job seekers, educators, and policymakers. This study provides valuable insights for aspiring TCSOL professionals, offering guidance to better align talent training with market needs and improve employment prospects.
Skill dependencies uncover nested human capital
Modern economies require increasingly diverse and specialized skills, many of which depend on the acquisition of other skills first. Here we analyse US survey data to reveal a nested structure within skill portfolios, where the direction of dependency is inferred from asymmetrical conditional probabilities—occupations require one skill conditional on another. This directional nature suggests that advanced, specific skills and knowledge are often built upon broader, fundamental ones. We examine 70 million job transitions to show that human capital development and career progression follow this structured pathway in which skills more aligned with the nested structure command higher wage premiums, require longer education and are less likely to be automated. These disparities are evident across genders and racial/ethnic groups, explaining long-term wage penalties. Finally, we find that this nested structure has become even more pronounced over the past two decades, indicating increased barriers to upward job mobility.
Increased early-season productivity drives earlier peak of vegetation photosynthesis across the Northern Hemisphere
Changes in vegetation carbon uptake are largely influenced by the timing and magnitude of the peak of the growing season (POS), when vegetation photosynthesis reaches its maximum. However, the factors controlling the timing of POS remain poorly understood, leaving us uncertain about its future trajectory. Using satellite observations and carbon flux measurements, we show that, in recent decades, increased early-season carbon uptake has been driven by both an earlier onset of the growing season and higher temperatures. In 93% of northern (>30°N) vegetation, these increases in early-season carbon uptake were associated with an advancement of POS. This ongoing shift suggests a developmental constraint on seasonal productivity, potentially limiting carbon uptake later in the season. Our findings provide a mechanistic explanation that reconciles previous observations linking earlier growing season onset, rising temperatures, and shifts in POS timing, and suggest a decrease in late-season carbon uptake with climate warming.
Toward change in the uneven geographies of urban knowledge production
More than four-fifths of the global urban population live in the Global South and East. Most urban theories, however, originate in the Global North. Building on recent efforts to address this mismatch, this paper examines the geographies of urban knowledge production. It analyzes the institutional affiliations of contributions in 25 leading Anglophone journals (n = 14,582) and nine urban handbooks (n = 252). We show that 42% of the journal articles and 17% of the handbook chapters were authored outside the Global North. However, only 15% of the editor positions (handbooks: 10%) were held by scholars based outside the Global North. This indicates that Global Northern institutions still dominate knowledge gatekeeping, whereas authors are more diverse. Additionally, more empirical journals and those with fewer Northern board members tend to publish more non-Northern authors. Our findings underscore the need for greater epistemic diversity in gatekeeping positions and broader understandings of what counts as theory to better incorporate diverse urban knowledge.
Data linkage multiplies research insights across diverse healthcare sectors
In all fields of study, as well as government and commerce, high-quality data enables informed decision-making. Linking data from disparate sources multiplies the opportunities for novel insights and evidence-based decision-making for an increasingly large range of administrative, clinical, research, and population health use cases. In recent years, novel methods, including privacy-preserving record linkage methods, have emerged. However, regardless of the method, successful data linkage is highly dependent on data quality and completeness and has to be balanced by the increased risk of re-identification of the subsequently linked data. Opportunities for the future include sharing tools for responsible linkage across silos, enhancing data to improve quality and completeness, and ensuring linkage leverages inclusive and representative datasets to ensure a balance between individual privacy and representation in research and novel discoveries. Here we provide a brief overview of the history and current state of data linkage, highlight the opportunities created by linked population data across critical research sectors, and describe the technology and policies that govern its usage.
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