Have you played with Google Labs’ NGram Viewer? It’s an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words […]
Category: Economics
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The word shanzhai has several meanings. Originally it meant a fortified mountain village, but these days it mainly refers to small, illegal factories that churn out copies of famous-brand mobile phones. In the era of relatively simple 2G phones, the industry was huge, but now everyone wants a fancy 3G smartphone, and they’re a bit too hard to fake, leaving an uncertain future for this hidden industry […]
Bloomberg’s Adam Johnson reports on the construction boom in Kangbashi, a city in China’s Inner Mongolia originally designed to accommodate around 1 million people that currently has about 30,000 residents […]
As part of their Sustainability Workshop series, Autodesk’s Introduction to Design for Lifetime video clearly and visually explains the factors we need to consider when introducing new products. It recognizes that some products should be made to last a long time, others should live shorter lives, and that there’s a grey area of products in between that are not so easy to classify; but the one thing they all need to share is a good “end-of-life” strategy […]
In an article in Caixin, George Washington University Law Professor Donald Clarke looks at the contractual role of foreign IT companies operating in China […]
Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world […]
Coca-Cola, the worlds top soft drink producer, will pour in another $4 billion in China from 2012 to 2014, announced its chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent in Shanghai recently […]
Brazilian consumers led the purchase of mobile phones, HDTVs, digital cameras and netbooks in a study by consultancy Accenture. The annual survey on electronic products and services, highlighting the emergence of “a new paradigm of consumer technology,” calls attention to the emerging countries’ thirst for consumer electronics, compared to more stable markets of rich countries […]
China is witnessing an unprecedented boom in hotel construction that is changing the face of the global hospitality industry. The country will have the highest number of hotels under construction and room openings in the world for each of the next two years, according to figures released by Lodging Econometrics, the US-based hotel retail estate market analysts […]
How can cities help save the future? Alex Steffen shows some cool neighborhood-based green projects that expand our access to things we want and need — while reducing the time we spend in cars […]