I didn't make it to Philly, but caught some of the panels on webcast. Now video is up!

relaunched website for ARTiT magazine

"Asia Matters for America (AMA) provides a hub for American and Asian audiences to explore the importance and impact of Asia in the United States by State and Congressional District. AMA provides government, academia, civil society, media and business with an interactive website that graphically displays useful trends and accurate data on how Asia matters at the U.S. state and local level." Via H-ASIA

BEIJING (AP) — Beijing's notoriously dirty air got cleaner during last summer's Olympic Games, but the weather played a larger role than the government's massive pollution control measures, a new report says.
The first major study on air pollution during the Olympics found that conditions in Beijing were far worse than at other recent Olympics, even with the government's cleanup campaign. Particulate levels often exceeded what the World Health Organization considers safe.

The report was published Friday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, and funded by the National Science Foundation in the U.S. and the National Science Foundation in China.

Via Language Hat. Includes many links on Asian and American languages.

Conference Saturday and Sunday at Qinghua.

News in English from China's excellent Caijing magazine.

Large amounts of statistical data on China, including census, provincial statistical yearbooks, etc. May require university login.

Project hosted at Harvard to catalog online information resources for research on East Asia.

"The case of Ms. Deng is only the most recent and prominent of several cases in which the Internet has cracked open a channel for citizens to voice mass displeasure with official conduct, demonstrating its potential as a catalyst for social change."

Software: Interest groups around the world are using mapping tools and internet-based information sources to campaign for change

Sustainable John guest post on deep wells that access ground water for geothermal energy use.

Paper that created time-space map for transit in europe

Map of Europe with travel time by rail rendered as distance.

The theme of the 7th Chinese Internet Research Conference, "The Chinese Internet and Civil Society: Civic Engagement, Deliberation and Culture," is designed to bring together scholars and professionals to examine the Chinese Internet from socioeconomic, political and cultural perspectives. While there has been significant research on the political implications of the Internet in China, we have yet to fully understand the changes the Internet is fostering in civil society, or on the intersection between the market and the state, as well as the Internet's cultural implications for identity formation, emergent cultural phenomena and social networking. This conference seeks to explore these uncharted areas through sessions on Public Sphere and Deliberation; Censorship, Surveillance, and the State of the Chinese Internet; Civil Society in China - Challenges and Opportunities; Women and Minorities; Civic Engagement and Participation; Panics, Nationalism; and Grassroots Culture, among others.

"I was surprised when I won. In the past, there have been people suing like me, but either the court did not take the case or they failed. This is the first successful case in China of a netizen or internet user suing their internet service provider," Hu told the Guardian.

"While hardly akin to the secret trip to China that Henry Kissinger made when he was President Nixon's national security adviser, the climate meeting — which included White House science adviser John Holdren and former Undersecretary of State Frank Loy — was not heavily advertised, and the group did not issue any statements when it returned. Together, the group members consented to the "Chatham House Rule," under which they agreed they could repeat generally what was discussed, but not identify who said what."