To answer the wi-fi question, I was in Hong Kong airport.  We used our miles to get an upgrade to business class, so we were able to use the lounge and the wi-fi that comes with it.

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I'm back in Beijing for a few days to attend the ICT-Asia-France symposium. (For some reason, the website is offline--has been for a couple of days now; should I be worried?) In a nutshell, the French are funding research in various ICT technologies. I'm hoping that the symposium will open up some funding opportunities for our faculty and students.  More about it when I get back.

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Re: The previous Beijing visit, just last week.  I was part of the Philippine contingent attending the Education Forum for Asia 2005.  The purpose of the forum was to raise issues regarding education in Asia.  The discussions were interesting--rather high level as many of the speakers were education ministers--but I must confess that the discussions focused primarily on China, so any mention of the rest of Asia was incidental.

It's difficult to say at this point how these discussions will benefit the Philippines in general and Ateneo in particular, but then again, I suppose these sort of ripples take time.