One of the most striking things in China, and a very important feature for foreigners, is the ubiquitous cybercafes. I made heavy use of them the first time I was living in China, in 2000-2001, when I had no internet at “home” (in the student dormitory). The second time, when I was living in Hangzhou, […]

I absolutely love Chinese bookstores. They are often huge, and buzzing with activity. The biggest are often called “book cities”, and the one I visited in Shenzhen a year ago was about six huge floors. On the Sunday that I visited it, it was packed with people, sitting on everywhere voraciously reading. A big difference […]

While being back in mainland China is already a great experience, and I really enjoyed all my time in Dalian and the few hours in Beijing–coming back to Wuhan is still a special event. I spent a year teaching in Wuhan Scientific and Technical University in 2000-2001, and it’s the city where I first got […]

My last week in Toronto was quite hectic, with finishing up a thesis, grading 80 exams, moving out of my apartment and temporarily suspending my life in Toronto. I watched some great movies on the plane over, although it was a long trip, and it made me think again that people who fly across the […]

Just a quick update on my plans for the summer. I am leaving on Monday for Beijing and Dalian, to participate in the OpenCourseWare Consortium conference on Open Educational Resources, organized by CORE and Dalian Technical University. Then I will visit some old friends and ex-students from the time I taught in China, and spend […]

Weng Diedie is a Chinese filmmaker who has spent several years visiting the matrilineal Mosuo tribe in South-Western China, and filmed a fascinating and beautiful tale of how their traditional music is threatened by tourism and modernization. She has already shown it to full houses at many different venues in the US, and now she […]

One incredibly progressive feature of the American constitution, is that it provides that everything produced by the government immediately enters public domain. I think this makes complete sense, and there is a slow movement among other countries to follow up, but it is something that should have happened a long time ago. Due to this […]

There is of course no doubt that what America needs most of all is neither Clinton, nor Obama, but Amitabh Singh Bachchan (somehow I managed to get his name wrong the first time around) for president. I don’t think I will ever really understand the racial relationship in the US between blacks and whites, but […]

I have mentioned my Wikipedia Offline project before (here and here), not to mention it its previous, very different, incarnation. The project is 95% functional, but is still waiting for assistance for someone who is better at Ruby or Python than me. Today I wrote up a number of bullet points, and posted a brief […]

I am currently finishing up my research on community libraries in Indonesia, and one of the interesting aspects is how they name themselves - very few choose to call themselves libraries, with Taman Bacaan (reading garden) being the most common, but far from only appellation. I thus wanted to find some statistics, and decided to […]