I had the chance to work with the CitizenLab at the University of Toronto for a few months in my first year at UofT, helping them test the censorship systems in China (because I speak and read Chinese). I even did a translation of operating regulations for Internet cafes in China. The guys there are [...]

A fascinating article about Daniel A. Bell who works as a professor of political thought at Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Having also tough in Singapore, he offers some very interesting perspectives.
He writes about the problems he encountered in the one-party state of Singapore, where his teaching [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 am very intrigued by design, and think I recognize good one when I see it (although I cannot for the life of me create it myself), and so I thought it was interesting when I came across a blog that does nothing but post frontpages of newspapers and discuss their design. I originally came [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]