As I was walking home tonight, I listened to Migrapolis on my iPod. It’s a Norwegian radio show about multiculture, identity and immigrants. Last week they interviewed the daughter of the “king of the gypsies” in Norway, who never went to school, and grew up to become a drug addict. Finally, she decided to kick [...]

Why use Slideshare?A lot of people have began posting their slides to Slideshare for sharing with others. In many ways, Slideshare makes more sense to me than for example Scribd – it’s fairly easy for me to download a PDF and view it in my local viewer, but it’s a pain to have to start [...]

IssueLab, whose energetic staff member Lisa Brooks I met at Open Ed 2008, is a place for non-profits to share their research. Having worked at CARE Indonesia, I certainly know first hand that much great research is produced, and never shared, often even lost among staff changes and USB keys, so this is a very [...]

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 [...]

Although it was Eurocentric, I like to think back at the time when all serious scholars in Europe were expected to know at least French (and by association perhaps Italian and Spanish), German, English and some Greek and Latin. When you read a book, and there are frequent citations in those languages, that are not [...]

I don’t know why, but the Swedes produce a lot of good speakers. Hopefully most of you have already seen one of Hans Rossling’s presentation, if not here is one from TED 2007. And just today, through Eirik Newth’s blog, I found a link to Fredrik Härén, a Swedish guy who went to China to [...]

I have been following the Burma protests, carefully optimistic, hoping that the great powers will take this opportunity to speak up and be pro-active, especially the other ASEAN countries. Now it looks like that is not going to happen, although I keep hoping, impressed with the great courage displayed by the citizens of Burma. I [...]

In a few days Norwegians will vote for local and county representatives, and of course the newspapers and TV channels are full of debates and analysis. Today I watched the equivalent of a town hall meeting with mostly representatives from the national parties in Northern Norway on our state television channel (link in Norwegian). The [...]

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 [...]

This ia weird little story, that I don’t know all the details of. I am just researching an essay about Laos, a country I visited twice in the past. (Reading the history is very useful, and makes me realize that many of the judgments and assumptions I made about the country when I was there, [...]