Benjamin Chen (陳昱安) didn’t know how intense a hackathon could be.
“You literally work non-stop. You don’t eat breakfast, you don’t eat lunch because you really need to finish the product,” the 10th-grader from Taipei American School says. “You feel the adrenaline rushing… It’s refreshing, I was like a new person.”
Chen became fascinated by these round-the-clock competitions to create technology or software products, and participated in 10 more before he decided to start one that focused on his twin passions of economics and technology. He says there are many hackathons that delve into social and environmental issues, but few have economics as the main theme, not to mention student-led and focused ones.
Photo courtesy of Benjamin Chen
He fondly recalls his first hackathon, where he and two teammates designed a phone app that allows people to earn virtual currency within the game by walking, encouraging them to reduce their carbon footprint.
He called up a friend who has organized several hackathons, and recruited an international team. Thousands of calls and e-mails to various institutions and companies later, and they had enough sponsors and guest speakers to make it a reality. Chen expects about 500 people to participate in the event, dubbed EconHacks, which will take place over 24 hours starting at noon on Feb. 13. Speakers will be presenting throughout the day on topics ranging from economic policy, financing a startup and virtual reality app-building. Participation is virtual and free to all 8th to 12th graders.
“The most important thing was getting the sponsors because people won’t join if you don’t have good prizes,” Chen says. Worth over NT$6.4 million, the prizes include cash rewards, various course and program subscriptions, promo codes as well as internship, exposure and funding opportunities through well-known tech-companies.
Though the specific theme will be announced during the opening ceremony, the core idea is to improve an aspect of the financial sector or help solve a current economic problem, especially anything related to COVID-19. The hackers will then form groups of one to four and begin work on a prototype.
“They’re going to be working the whole time, they’re not going to sleep and at the end they’re going to pitch their idea within a three-minute video,” Chen says.
Chen says his interest in economics was inspired by his father, who works in finance.
“Basically every conversation I have with my dad is about finance or economics, so from a very young age he expected me to do a finance job. But it’s not because he forced me or anything, I just find it very interesting and rewarding.”
Chen says the pitiful financial literacy of millennials also highlights the need to educate more young people on economics and especially how it relates to technology.
As more operations and ventures are moving online due to COVID-19, it’s important to understand this economic shift. Chen says that he hopes EconHacks will give young people more opportunities to think about such issues while rewarding the ones who are already passionate about them.
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of