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Wadah Khanfar on AlJ's struggle to get on the air in US. Includes interesting insights on their Tunisia coverage despite being banned from the nation
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Very clever paper from Gregory Grefenstette & Julien Nioch on estimating the relative sizes of languages represented online by examining word frequency within a language corpus. Would be very fun to replicate results today, though unclear any search engines provide the necessary features.
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Indian users prefer sites in local languages, even if they've got some English fluency. India as a laboratory for how sites, companies may need to handle language online.
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Powerful article on the paucity of translations from languages other than English… and the uncomfortable truth that only 3-6% of what's published in English-speaking nations is translated.
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I'm not sure where the data is from, but this appears to be an excellent collection of comparative Facebook usage data. The country penetration data is harder to believe, mostly because its using old data for internet users per country…
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Agro-forestry is helping the Sahel recover from sustained drought, increase agricultural productivity. The key is not planting trees, but cultivating those that sprout and intermixing trees with crops. Really fascinating side story about how colonial and post-colonial property laws led to the wholesale removal of trees and envi disaster.
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How a US-based grad student with rudimentary Arabic became a channel for info during the Egypt January 25th protests