(Geek alert). I have been working a lot on a website funded by CIDA, which has to be bi-lingual, French and English. The pages use PHP, and I ran into a lot of problems trying to reconcile French letters and PHP. I googled around, thinking that surely these problems would be well documented, but I [...]
I really should be studying, but I made my first bookmarklet. The problem I tried to solve: When students of University of Toronto sit at home using Google Scholar to search for, say, information on the text book publishing industry in Swaziland, they often arrive at articles that are subscription only. However, usually they do [...]
I remember the one time I went to PizzaHut in Wuhan, China, with some of my students. PizzaHut is extremely expensive in China, similar to a 7-course fancy restaurant in the west (compared to income), and they clearly wanted to make the best out of it. We got two salad plates that we could put [...]
EastSouthWestNorth has long been among my favorite blogs about China, providing real insights into the media and internet world by posting long translations of newspaper articles, forum postings and the like. That’s where I got the story of Fu Rong, the mayor of Lingao in Hainan, who logged on to one of the most popular [...]
YubNub was created in June 2005 as the result of a one-day programming contest in Ruby on Rails, a very rapid and neat web-framework for Ruby. It bills itself as a “social commandline for the web”, and it’s pretty neat. Let me explain. Not many people know that browsers like Firefox have the opportunity to [...]
I have long had a very ambivalent relationship to anthropology, although it has been very hard to put my finger on it. Although I realize that it is a very useful discipline, and I have read a number of very good and interesting works of ethnography (for example Golden Arches East, which I should do [...]
Update: I apologize for a) posting a broken link and b) taking so long to fix it. Thank you to those who pointed it out, and please try again, it’s worth it. I just found out that the excellent documentary on the sit-in at Harvard, that I mentioned in the last post, is available online! [...]
I came across an interesting collection of photos of high-density housing in Hong Kong (thank you, Spacing Toronto), some very aesthetic pictures. I haven’t spend much time in Hong Kong, and don’t understand the city as I wish I did, but these pictures made me think of something. When discussing the past, present and future [...]
I have known about Brigit Brock Utne, a professor in international education at the University of Oslo, for several months, since I came across her homepage, which has a very impressive CV and a list of “Where is Birgit in 2006″. Her CV reads like a list of all the things that I would like [...]
