Background Back in May 2007, when I attended the World Book Day in Jakarta, I heard about plans to purchase the copyrights for school textbooks, and make the books freely available, to alleviate the problem of students who could not afford to purchase them. I thought it was a very interesting idea, but hoped that [...]
Caveat I have spent over one and a half year of my life living in China, and a significantly larger part visiting it, learning the language, watching movies and soap-operas, reading blogs, discussing it with Chinese and non-Chinese, and in general thinking about it. There is still so much I don’t know or understand, but [...]
Note, this post is based on a book review I wrote for school. It’s a very good book, and I wanted to share some of the main topics. I cut down about 40%, especially my own analyses (which were tenous at best). This is my first attempt at posting something not written originally for the [...]
I first became aware of the process of unionizing the workers at SODEXHO during a meeting, where we were shown the excellent movie “Occupation” about students staging a sit-in at Harvard university – the second wealthiest non-profit in the world, after the Vatican – to fight for living wages for the university staff. They also [...]
I have written about information I found on brain drain, during my research for a thesis, earlier. The topic proved very interesting, especially as I started exploring topics like the anthropological impacts of remittances on communities in the developing world, and I would like to read much more about it. However, every thesis has a [...]
Ever since I came to Canada, I’ve been noticing a lot of small things about how things work, that I liked or didn’t like. One thing that annoyed me a little bit was the large amounts of change that ended up in my wallet. Partly because prices in Canada end up being so weird, because [...]
I had the good fortune to listen to Sachs speak at the biannual CIDA conference in Ottawa last year. Although I had read things about him before the meeting describing him as some sort of “economic hitman”, I was impressed by his presentation. Now I just finished reading his book End of Poverty, Economic Possibilities [...]
I just finished reading “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. He makes many arguments in the book, many of which I agree to, although I think he is quite a little bit too optimistic about technodeterminism and the whole world becoming equal and happy. One of his starting thoughts, which I quite liked, is [...]
This is simply awesome! I wish I had thought of that; Kiva is a website gives you the option to make direct microcredit loans to small entrepreneurs in developing countries. You can choose to donate as little as 25$ through Paypal, and throughout the duration of the loan (usually 6-12 months) you get updates from [...]
Something that I have thought about a lot lately, is changing concepts of what a university is, and how it works. Some of the reasons that I have been thinking so much about this stems from the idea of elite universities in North America. They have always been fascinating to me, because I come from [...]
