Japan's labor shortage remains a serious issue with 51% of companies reporting that they did not have enough employees, according to survey results released last week. As the labor market continues to shrink, companies have raised worsening labor shortages as one of the biggest concerns that could cause their performances to decline, with 313 companies having gone out of business in the fiscal year of 2023 as a result. Data compiled by Teikoku Databank showed that out of the over 27,000 companies surveyed in April, labor shortages were most notable in the field of information technology engineering. Over 70% of companies in the industry said they didn't have enough workers, with some saying that despite the ongoing boom in artificial intelligence technologies, they had to give up on projects because they were under-resourced.

From a nation defined by cricket, steam engines and horses to a celebrity-obsessed, football-mad country, Britain has undergone huge cultural changes between 1800 and 1950. The history of the country is well-documented in books, but a new analysis has used a different source, newspapers, to pinpoint exactly when these shifts in culture took place. A group of computer scientists have developed artificial intelligence software to analyse articles from 120 British newspapers between 1800 and 1950, and revealed key turning points in our culture. In 2011, a huge analysis of five million books taken from over 200 years provided the first clues to what insights can be gained from analysing words on such a huge scale. But the project was criticised for only counting words, and ignored the context they were based in.