The Global Competitiveness report has been published for the year 2006-2007 with some interesting changes in the world ranking. "Switzerland, Finland and Sweden are the world's most competitive economies according to The Global Competitiveness Report 2006-2007, released by the World Economic Forum on 26 September 2006. Denmark, Singapore, the United States, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom complete the top ten list, but the United States shows the most pronounced drop, falling from first to sixth." Here's a summary of the Asian ranking: Singapore - 5 Japan - 7 Hong …

If you could research anything that's related to Asian culture - China, Taiwan, Chinese culture or expat life in Asia, what would it be about? What are you interested in? - In the past few months I've been contemplating about a research subject. The main theme for such research combines subjects that I've been involved with academically and professionally - being related to organizational behavior, business and information technology - with subjects that I'm passionate about - being mainly related to Asian cultures. I believe I must have had dozens of chitchats with various people discussing with them their views and observations. Most discussions were fascinating and could have served an interesting essay or an academic paper, if only for …

This post will include some quick links to Asian related interesting stories that I found on the web recently. It's the least I can do to show my appreciation for the interesting things that I find in the blogs that I read almost everyday: How many bloggers are there in China? China Digital Times quotes the CNNIC report suggesting that there are 7.7 million active bloggers in China, estimated to reach 10 million by the end of the year. Talk Talk China finds another fine addition …

How many Israelis travel to Taiwan every year? Not many, at least judging by the amount of resources available for Israelis on Taiwan. While China is slowly becoming a hot spot in the Asia tourism, Taiwan is still far behind and there are very few Israeli websites that cover Taiwan. - Lately, a new big travel website has been launched, supported by a well-established Israeli brand Masa-Acher (loosely translated as "A different kind of journey"). Masa is known to most Israelis as the number one travel magazine in Israel. I was relieved to find out that Masa had a few short articles about Taiwan. The first one was written in 2001 titled "Ghost month" : "In Taiwan's Ghost …

Google has recently launched a new service that indexes archived news of the past 20 decades. This service allows easy searching of the Internet's news archive database, reading more about happenings in world's history. News and history junkies take heart: Google's new News Archive Search lets you search back over twenty decades worth of historical content, including scads of articles not previously available via the search engine. "The goal of this service is to allow people to search and explore how history unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, [...] "Much like news, we are grouping related articles together from a given time period" [...] One of the most interesting features of the new service is how it automatically creates …

I'm still a rookie when it comes to Chinese cuisine, but the few steps that I've taken in the road to Chinese food enlightenment have been a real treat. I believe the closest that I got to having a full Chinese meal was last year's Chinese new years with Vanina's family and that was a glorious meal. Trying out a different thing dish everyday in Taipei has brought a few interesting experiences, but was mostly an extraordinary delight. -  What is the Chinese cuisine? Hmmm… I can't really lay out the characteristics, but it's pretty simple for me to make it out when I see it, and it's quite distinguishable from Korean and Japanese cuisines. …