Social sciences

News

08 Apr 2022
A team of international researchers, led by Associate Professor Masaki Eda of the Hokkaido University Museum, have discovered that the oldest type of poultry ever domesticated may have been geese. The study involved interdisciplinary research of bones excavated from Tianluoshan site in the lower Yangtze River valley, Zhejiang Province, China.
Shiosai art festival sustainable tourism in Japanese village of Mitarai
16 Mar 2022
The small-scale, community-led Shiosai art fair embodies a revitalizing tourism approach that has breathed new life into the aging island village of Mitarai.
The 200-year-old U Bein Bridge, located in Amarapura
09 Mar 2022
Myanmar’s military coup has created new challenges for the country’s researchers.
Social Sciences and Coivd-19: The Southeast Asia Response - Report Cover
26 Feb 2022
Policy-makers should engage more closely with social scientists to understand the socio-economic, cultural and political contexts behind the behaviours we need to change in response to global crises.
25 Feb 2022
The tourism industry’s performance was hampered first by the Easter Sunday bomb explosions in 2019 and then the COVID-19 pandemic. Sri Lanka saw a decline in tourist arrivals from 1,913,702 in 2019 to 194,495 in 2021. It is estimated that revenue declined from USD 3600 million to USD 261 million during 2019-2021, reflecting a staggering 92.75% reduction due to a fall in arrivals.
22 Feb 2022
A recent study conducted by Lingnan University and the University of Oxford proposes finds that university graduates retain rewards despite their diminishing scarcity as long as they possess good cognitive skills.
21 Feb 2022
A great deal of discussion is underway on what appears to be the latest wave of migration from Sri Lanka. While the exact scale and nature of youth migration remain unclear, the costs of brain drain dominate these discussions. The brain drain concern is valid, yet focusing on it alone can limit our understanding of the complex implications of migration. This blog argues that apart from its challenges, youth migration can also present some surprising opportunities for socio-economic development if strategically managed.
17 Feb 2022
An international team of researchers respond to criticisms on previous work that demonstrated Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) in the cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus, by 1) successfully repeating the mark test with a larger sample size, 2) showing the MSR behaviour to be the visual result of the mark not a physical response to it, and 3) showing that MSR-trained fish do not show aggression to spatially varied mirror images of themselves. Additionally, they further demonstrate potential self-awareness in L. dimidiatus by showing that they do not demonstrate MSR behaviour when visually presented with the mark on other fish and solidify the importance of ecologically relevant marks presented in previous work by showing MSR behaviour of L. dimidiatus with brown marks, meant to resemble a main food source of the fish, as opposed to no such behaviour in fish with green or blue marks.
02 Feb 2022
Despite enhanced trade partnerships in South Asia, intra-regional trade is far from reaching its theoretical potential. Similar production patterns and competitive sectors can be the causes. However, bilateral discussions to further lower trade costs continue. The ongoing Bangladesh-Sri Lanka discussions on a preferential trade agreement (PTA) will benefit from knowing the potential gains from reducing bilateral trade costs. In addition, knowledge of products with a higher potential for export gains will help optimise the economic benefits from a trade deal.
31 Jan 2022
Sovereign debt restructuring can be pre-emptive or post-default. A default is inherently costly as it can result in a sustained loss of access to capital markets. That leaves pre-emptive restructuring when a country deems itself unable to service outstanding debt.
Graphical abstract of the paper
27 Jan 2022
Despite ongoing antagonism between the peoples of China, Japan and South Korea, support for regional cooperation on issues such as climate, pandemics and pollution exists if such cooperation mechanisms are mutually managed rather than dominated by any one nation.
U Hla Myint
20 Jan 2022
Giants in History: U Hla Myint (1920 – 2017) was a celebrated economist from Myanmar. Considered a prodigy, he was admitted to Rangoon University to study economics when he was just 14 years old.
20 Dec 2021
We are pleased to announce that the DEC 2021 issue of the Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences Research (JHSSR), Vol. 3 (2) Dec. 2021 has been published ahead of time on 30 Nov 2021 and is now live at the Journal’s web page. We invite you to explore the seventh issue of our Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences Research with excellent essays.
13 Dec 2021
The lockdowns introduced in 2020 to curb the spread of COVID-19 saw the narrative “nature is healing” gain prominence. However, the notion that nature, in the absence of people, was healing fizzled out fairly quickly with the emergence of fresh environmental challenges, most notably, the resurgence of single-use plastics. This blog examines the ecological fallout of the pandemic and suggests policy options for Sri Lanka to avert the looming environmental disaster.
Asia research News - Editor's Choice
09 Dec 2021
Micro-plastics cross blood brain barrier, Stomach cancer atlas, Omicron variant isolated, 120-year-old reaction turned on its head and Reporting through the coup, all in the December Editor's Choice. Plus our latest podcast: Decentralization and Democracy in Myanmar.
07 Dec 2021
The University launches Node for Inclusive Fintech (NiFT) as thought leader in fintech sector that champions inclusivity issues to meet the United Nation’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
19 Nov 2021
A joint research team with members from Ehime University and the Ehime University Senior High School developed an e-learning program to provide university-level information education to high school students, improving their information skills to the level of second-year university students or higher.
Subjective sense of identity confusion and brain noise
19 Nov 2021
Feeling unsure of yourself? Your brain’s background noise may be interfering with the long memory signals communicated by your neurons’ electrical chatter.
A fictitious soba restaurant website created for the study. The participants were provided images of the website with and without a date of establishment. The establishment year is “大正15年” (Taishō 15, 1926)
10 Nov 2021
Japanese customers have higher expectations of restaurants selling traditional foods more when they display an older year of establishment.
Visual representation of the structural equation model estimating the relations between factors of positive youth development and factors of the mental health continuum
02 Nov 2021
Ghana’s high youth population suggests that evidence-based programs specifically targeting young people’s development and mental health are key to the country’s socio-economic growth. As a result, social scientists are focusing on rigorous testing of the links between these two sides of personal thriving.
15 Oct 2021
Dozens of researchers tell Nature they have received death threats, or threats of physical or sexual violence.
11 Oct 2021
A long-standing hypothesis, the dual-structure model, posits that Japanese populations derive dual ancestry from indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherer-fishers and succeeding Yayoi farmers. We conduct paleogenomic analyses of people of the Jomon, Yayoi, and Kofun periods from Japanese archaeological sites. We identify a later influx of East Asian ancestry in the Kofun period and clarify that the genome of the modern Japanese population is composed of three ancestral components, proposing a tripartite model of Japanese origins.
(From left) Mr Matthew Mo, Director of Office of Institutional Advancement and Alumni Affairs, Prof Leonard K Cheng, President of LU, Mr Stanley Choi, Honorary Fellow Ms Christina Maisenne Lee, District Social Welfare Officer (Yuen Long) of the Social Welfare Department Miss Chan Lai-chu, Dr Joseph Lee, Chairman of Wofoo Foundation, Mrs Josephine Lee, Prof Siu Oi-ling, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Chair Professor of Applied Psychology, Mr Andrew Yao, Chairman of the LU Council and Prof Lau Chi
08 Oct 2021
With a generous donation from respected social entrepreneur Dr Joseph Lee Chung-tak, Chairman of Wofoo Foundation, the Wofoo Joseph Lee Laboratory has been established to facilitate pioneering research in Lingnan University (LU)’s Department of Applied Psychology.
24 Sep 2021
An algorithm that detects events occurring across different time and geographical scales on social media could enable a more timely response to emerging events.
16 Sep 2021
Accommodation for young people in Hong Kong has long been at the top of the policy agenda. Recent research conducted by Lingnan University in Hong Kong (LU) and the City University of Hong Kong on the younger generation’s housing opportunities finds that 26 per cent of parents who responded expect to subsidise their adult children when they buy a property. Findings also suggest reliance on the family is now increasingly frequent, and important to young adults who wish to live independently and have a choice.
15 Sep 2021
Lockdowns and restricted mobility have devastated labour markets across the world. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the equivalent of 225 million jobs was wiped out globally due to employment and working hour losses in 2020 compared to 2019 (Q4). These working hour losses are four times higher than those experienced during the global financial crisis in 2009. The COVID-19-instigated recession has affected the quantity and the quality of jobs, with increasing levels of informal types of work with lower remuneration. Restoration of labour markets is important to minimise damage to human development and increase aggregate demand, thereby boosting economic recovery. This blog looks at why it is important to have targetted policy interventions to revive the labour market by illustrating that the impact of COVID-19 is different across occupations and industries.
Digital humanities
14 Sep 2021
Social media makes it easy for us to know how friends are doing recently, and even give us clues about our friends’ social networks. But in order to know the social networks of people of the past, you may have to bury yourself in countless ancient books and put in a lot of effort to figure out their actual relationships. A historian from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) who actively promotes digital humanities research uses digital tools to study the history of the Song dynasty. For example, he is drawn to the “circles of friends” from the letters written by historical figures from the Song dynasty in China. He has been sharing his experience in applying computer and information technology to the humanities in recent years. In addition to revolutionalising the humanities research model, he hopes to gather scholars from different fields to conduct joint research initiatives.
13 Sep 2021
The MSME sector in Sri Lanka amounts to 1.017 million establishments, employing approximately 2.25 million persons. This approximates to more than 90% of total establishments in the country and 45% of total employment.
08 Sep 2021
Unprecedented declines in merchandise trade, foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, tourism and cross-border migration have all been hallmarks of the economic fallout of COVID-19. As a result, growth expectations for countries worldwide dimmed. Nonetheless, thanks in part to substantial expansionary monetary and fiscal policies being rolled out to achieve pre-COVID economic recovery levels and the development of vaccines, the contraction in global trade and economic output are less than what was anticipated. The Sri Lankan economy too has been impacted by these external developments, witnessing fluctuating fortunes in its external sector performance. This blog discusses the impacts of global economic developments on Sri Lanka’s external sector and suggests ways to cushion them.
Researchers find that climate change adaptation brings health co-benefits
03 Sep 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased attention on links between public health and the planet’s health — areas traditionally addressed in separate science and policy circles. Now, an international research collaboration conducted the first comprehensive review of urban climate change responses and potential human health improvements.

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