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Chart: Canada Annual Population Growth Since 1867

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Chart: U.S. Renewable Electricity Surpassed Coal in 2022

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China Is Actively Integrating Artificial Intelligence Training into Schools

Li Xin wrote . . . . . . . . .

China’s eastern Zhejiang province plans to provide artificial intelligence education to students from a younger age as part of the country’s ongoing initiatives to expand its workforce and the futuristic technology.

The province, home to tech giants like Alibaba, seeks to make AI-related information and knowledge compulsory in its K-12 education, domestic media reported Thursday, citing an announcement from the annual Zhejiang Digital Education Conference. While details are scant, the media report said that the AI component will be “massively” integrated into existing science and math curricula.

China has made AI a strategic priority over the past decade and an important element of its digital economy. AI has been highly adopted in a cluster of services from health care to finance and retail, and the country is expected to more than double its AI spending to nearly $27 billion, or 8.9% of global investment, by 2026, according to a 2022 report by the International Data Corporation.

To encourage the growth of talent in the field, China has been actively integrating AI training for young students. Efforts to push relevant subjects to K-12 students particularly came after the Ministry of Education mandated high schools to teach courses on AI, the Internet of Things, and big data processing starting 2018.

Since then, regional governments like Zhejiang have made efforts to adopt the central government’s initiative. In March of last year, the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang issued a guideline encouraging schools to build AI training centers, as well as research and experiment labs. The city aims to build 1,000 AI experimental schools and 100 AI demonstration schools by 2025.

In addition to training schools, AI-related courses from coding to programming have also gained momentum. They are some of the few extracurricular courses that are still being offered after the government implemented the “double reduction” policy in 2021 to cut down the academic burden on students brought about by private tutoring.

Offline STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) training centers and online coding courses provided by edtech giants, including Code Cat and Tencent-backed robot maker UBTech, have also gained popularity in recent years among parents who want their kids to stay abreast with new technologies.

Source : Sixth Tone

How Din Tai Fung Makes The World’s Most Loved Pork Soup Dumplings

Rebecca Shapiro wrote . . . . . . . . .

A main feature of any Din Tai Fung restaurant is a glass window that peers directly into the kitchen. Wearing baseball hats, hair nets and face masks, chefs in white uniforms stand around stainless steel tables rapidly rolling, weighing and wrapping thousands of dumplings every single day.

If the kitchen looks more like a sterile surgical theater, that’s somewhat intentional –- the company is obsessed with cleanliness, efficiency and perhaps most of all, precision.

For the uninitiated, Din Tai Fung is well known for serving golf-ball sized buns filled with juicy minced pork, known as xiaolongbao, among other dim sum dishes.

The restaurant first opened in Taipei, Taiwan in the 1970s when founder Yang Bing-yi started serving them at his cooking oil shop to subsidize his failing retail business.

By 1993, The New York Times named Din Tai Fung one of the 10 best restaurants in the world. That led to expansion in Japan, then Hong Kong, one Michelin star at two separate locations, and now 136 franchised branches worldwide.

Many say the Taiwan-based chain has created the world’s international standard for xiaolongbao. But the ones Din Tai Fung sell today differ from the original, which are said to be from Nanxiang, a town on the fringes of Shanghai, China.

“Local chefs became known for their take on the “soup buns’’ (”tang bao”) that are found in various forms all over the Jiangnan or Lower Yangtze region,” said Chinese cuisine expert Fuchsia Dunlop, author of Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China.

“In the early 20th century, one Nanxiang man opened a snack shop near the City God Temple in the center of Shanghai specializing in his hometown’s most famous delicacy, and that’s really where the cult begins,” Dunlop added.

The food is steeped in Shanghai’s culinary and cultural history. In 2006, Shanghai’s government added xiao long bao to its list of the city’s “protected traditional treasures.”

The main difference is in the dough. Din Tai Fung uses a paper-thin wrapper filled with hot, juicy minced pork that make customers wonder how the dumplings don’t prematurely burst while cooking.

But that precision is exactly why Din Tai Fung has grown to be so famous. The company streamlined a finicky dumpling and made it taste reliably great every single time it’s ordered.

“What Din Tai Fung has done has been to apply meticulous standardization to its xiaolongbao,” Dunlop says. That standardization begins in the kitchen.

At the Hong Kong branch located in Kowloon’s Mira Mall, chefs make 2000 xiaolongbao every weekday, and 3500 every weekend, which amounts to 17,000 pork soup dumplings every week. This number doesn’t include the other dumplings and dim sum offerings on the menu. And some of Din Tai Fung’s more frequented locations sell even more.

The dim sum kitchen is separated from the restaurant’s main kitchen by a short hallway. The area is divided into four sections: dough production, steaming basket arrangement, dim sum production and steaming section.

After the dough is cut and formed into small balls and weighed for accuracy, a chef rolls out the dough to create small circular wrappers, which are passed over to another chef, who adds the filling and weighs the dumpling once more. The filling is a mixture of minced pork, seasonings and a super gelatinous soup that goes from jelly to liquid form once the dumpling is steamed.

Then, the dumpling is passed to the chef who wraps the xiaolongbao in a matter of seconds with 18 exquisite folds. Some say there are 18 folds because the number is considered lucky in Chinese culture. Din Tai Fung says that after continuous testing, they found that 18 folds is the golden ratio of making the perfect xiaolongbao.

Once a bamboo basket is filled with six xiaolongbao, it’s passed over to the final section for steaming, which looks like a massive stovetop with geyser-like holes from which steam shoots out. Baskets are placed over the holes to cook.

Din Tai Fung says the steaming area is considered the most difficult and well-regarded position, since the chefs have to arrange and manage various types of dim sum with different cooking times. They’re also the last guard of quality inspection before food goes out to customers.

It comes as no surprise that making it as a chef at Din Tai Fung is no easy task, and requires undergoing constant evaluation. “Our chefs have to keep on training and testing in every stage,” a spokesperson for the restaurant told HuffPost. “They would test on every three months. If [they] fail, they have to keep on training at the same stage until they pass. We believe that practice makes perfect.”

Brian Hwarng, an Associate Professor of Decision Sciences at National University of Singapore Business School, said he spent 18 months observing Din Tai Fung’s top management at the company’s Taipei headquarters. In a case study, he wrote that Din Tai Fung staff are required to keep a daily work journal “not to monitor sales or targets but to serve as a basis for company-wide learning and continuous improvement.” Hwarng also wrote that about half of the revenue from the company’s Taiwan operation go towards staff training and benefits.

The company announced plans to open its first franchise in London sometime this year, which will be the chain’s first entrance into the European market.

While folks on the west coast of the U.S. can dine at one of 10 locations in California and Seattle, Washington, those in the rest of the country will have to travel to get their fix.

For a taste of Din Tai Fung, New Yorkers can head to Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood to eat at the recently opened Pinch Chinese, which is led by former Din Tai Fung executive chef, Charlie Chen.

But for xiaolongbao fanatics, a trip to Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong should be on the agenda next.

Source : HuffPost

Chart: SVB and Signature Failures Evoke Memories of 2008

Source : Statista

Charts: Russians Snap Up China-made Cars to Become Biggest Buyers

Russia became the biggest importer of vehicles from China in the first two months of 2023 after Western brands pulled out of the European country, according to Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).

There has recently been a spike in Russian imports of China-made vehicles, Cui wrote in a report published Saturday. The country imported almost 80,000 cars from China in the first two months of this year, almost half of the total in 2022, according to CPCA data.

Source : Caixin