China

Barcamp Shanghai 10 – March 3rd!

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Barcamp Shanghai is coming again soon, and this is the 10th! I’ve been honored to help organize 6 of these so far (this will be the 7th). This bar camp will be at the Haworth Showroom in Jing’an district, March 3rd starting at 10am. I was recently interviewed by Settling Magazine about unconferencing, take a look at me trying to sound smart.

Beginning of Barcamp 8 from Techyizu's flickr account

I am just so thrilled about the group of people that has formed around barcamp — Techyizu was spawned from Barcamp organizers and community members. XinCheJian’s founders met at a Barcamp, I’ve made hundreds of friends, and we have together built an amazing community of people. Let’s keep it growing!

2011 Shanghai Air Quality Report Card, Part 2

Feb 17th, 2012

by Mark.

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In Part One, I put up graphs of the last 11 years of API readings for Shanghai, China. The graphs were big, crowded, whacky and JPGs, so it is hard for readers to see anything really tangible. So with the power of statistics, let us see how we can make these more useful, shall we?

Reminder: I make no claims of any sort about the accuracy of the source data, which was gathered from the Shanghai Environmental Education Center. The site and the ministry do not go into detail about their methods, testing sites, or any other pertinent details, which ruins the fun. (click to biggify, as usual)

Year on Year 30day avg PM10 for Shanghai China, 2000-2011

This is a year on year graph of the 30 day running average. That’s a mouthful, but it’s relatively simple, each data point is an average of the 29 previous days and itself. This helps smooth things out without decimating the real shifts in Air Quality, good or bad. Click through for SO2 and NO2, and more fun graphs!
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Foxconn worker sees a finished iPad for the first time

Feb 8th, 2012

by Mark.

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With all the new attention being paid to China-based electronics manufacturing, CNN manages to realize that Foxconn has a plant in Chengdu, and it blew up recently. Then they show up and make a story, which I will now summarize:

FAIL.

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Football in China, the ultimate talent gap?

Dec 20th, 2011

by Mark.

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Last week we saw some very big news coincide with interesting articles examining the state of Football (not pointyball) in China. It’s such a great moment, I have to do a massive link dump and analysis of the Nicolas Anelka coverage and the Economists’ excellent article about Chinese Football, which dropped fortuitously only days after Anelka’s signing. JUMP!

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