Bioperversity
At the California State Fair in Sacramento. Reading Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” has twisted the sight of pigs for me…their flesh is too human.
Latest Entries
War of the Words: New Chinese Characters
脑残, nao+can, brain damaged
“Adjective, pronouced “nan“. This character is a combination of the characters for 脑残 (”naocan” brain damage).
Naocan is online lingo, used to describe someone who is not capable of thinking straight; often those whose thinking is crippled by party ideology.”
五毛, wu+mao, five cent
“Noun, pronounced “wao.” It is the combination of 五毛 (”wumao” fifty cents) Fifty cent party is another common online lingo for government-trained and paid “commentators” who do not reveal their real identity and pretend to be ordinary netizens to spin government messages.”
diang (党中央, dang+zhong+yang, Party Central Committee)
“Noun, adjective and exclamation, pronounced “diang” It is a combination of 党中央 (“dangzhongyang” – CCP Central Committee). Blogger hecaitou, author of the hugely popular “Diary of the Digital Ocean (比特海日志)”, interprets the character as “the ultimate, sacred, absolutely correct, cannot be questioned; you get the shit beaten out of you but cannot say a word.” “意思是至高无上的，神圣的，绝对正确的，不容质疑的，抽你丫没商量的。” ”
Diang, man! These nan waos must be working overtime.
From this CDT article.
Spotlight on artist Ai Weiwei 艾未未
Ai Wei Wei 艾未未
On blogging and his presence on the internet: “To use art is not enough, to describe your view, in the old traditional forms, such as painting, sculpture… as a citizen you need to express your views, writing, blogging, giving interviews, is a part of that, otherwise you will very easily be misinterpreted, or misunderstood, by the society, by the establishment I should say. “
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Guo Baofeng Called Home to Dinner
This particular instance of digital activism started with the Baidu World of Warcraft forums and ended with a Twitter-organized protest over the imprisonment of blogger Guo Baofeng.
An internet meme was created in mid-July when somebody posted the phrase “Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner!” (”贾君鹏, 你妈妈喊你回家吃饭!”) to the WoW forum on Baidu. A couple days after posting, it had been viewed over 8 million times. It eventually reached the forum’s maximum number of comments; commenters shared their versions of the fictitious Jia Junpeng’s story, among other whimsies.
It’s hard, for me anyway, to say why this little phrase prompted such a response from the forum. There’s no real pun here, no subversion to parse out. It’s quite literally what a friend would say to alert a kid named Jia Junpeng that his mom is calling him. The phrase bears a simple sentiment, perhaps more poignant to diehard WoW players spending a lot of time at the computer and neglecting simpler human interaction. An article in People’s Daily Online attempts an explanation via a Nanjing University professor at the College of Journalism and Communications, who says internet addicts’ feelings of guilt about their families prompted the huge response.
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Gathering to see the solar eclipse
Friends in Shanghai said skies were too cloudy to see the actual eclipse, but the day did indeed turn to night. Here are a few images of people all over Asia looking up into the skies, marvelling at the wonder. I love these moments.
Waauu!
Sadhus in Allahabad, India
South Korean children at the Seoul National Science Museum
Varanasi, India
Looking through welding shields in Sichuan Province, China
A view of Pudong during the morning eclipse
Bing: Input Chinese, Get Censored Results
Now, this is scary. It seems that Microsoft’s Bing is filtering out (censoring, to drop the euphemism) results for queries entered in Simplified Chinese. In the United States.
A search for “Tiananmen” in English shows these results (click to enlarge):
A search for “天安門” (’Tiananmen’ in Traditional Chinese, used in Hong Kong and Taiwan) shows fewer ’sensitive’ results, but what it does show is still shocking:
A search for “天安门” (that’s ‘Tiananmen’ in Simplified Chinese) shows these results (click to enlarge):
The search in English shows tanks and protests from 1989; the Traditional Chinese search shows casualties of the 1989 crackdown. The Simplified Chinese search shows only majestic pictures of the Forbidden City during the day, at night and in various paintings.
So, Bing is trying to filter results that are sensitive to the Chinese government. This is nothing new. But this search, I might remind you, was made from a U.S. IP address! Decision makers at Bing have applied censorship tools not just to the Chinese in China, but to anyone using Simplified Chinese in their search terms. I’m not one to go on about eating apple pie and living the American Dream, as if that could be understood in just a few silly statements, but this is upsetting to me as as American. Is Bing allowing the Chinese government to determine how the country’s language is used, even when it’s being used outside of China? Or is this a matter of stereotype, where Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans are seen as loyal to China first, U.S. second, and therefore justifiably subject to China’s policy of censorship?
Or maybe it’s neither of those, maybe this decision came down to operational convenience. Still, convenience on the international stage shouldn’t trump our nation’s right to free speech; not everyone who lives here thinks in English. Why isn’t this more a matter of pride for Bing?
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From the PCWorld article, “Bing Filters out Sensitive Results for Chinese Searches“. The screenshots were taken from a search performed on the day this post was published.
Governance and Authority in China:
All in the Family
I recently attended a Visiting Scholar Lunchtime Talk held by the Center for China Studies at Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies. (Go here for a listing of events; I really recommend them and what’s more, they’re free!)
The lecture was titled “Corporate Governance in China: An Investigation of the Interdependent Model” and was delivered by Prof. Liu Pingqing of the Department of Business Administration at the Beijing Institute of Technology. Professor Liu had taken case studies of over one hundred State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and over one thousand Private Enterprises (PEs) whose owners are from Mainland China.
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Twitter: repugnant, relevant, revolutionary?
“..as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think.”
From an interesting interview from the TED blog on Twitter’s role in Iran’s election.
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And an unrelated graph from meish.org illustrating the life cycle of trending topics. Plant tongue firmly in cheek.
Vaccine wars
Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine specialist and a colleague of my father’s at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has this feature article written about him in the latest issue of Philadelphia magazine.
I’m sorry but not entirely surprised to hear that he’s received death threats and hate mail for his status as a major influencer of our nation’s child vaccine program at the CDC, and for inventing a rotavirus vaccine which he developed at Merck and for which he received a substantial sum as its sole inventor. Citing a study done by a British gastroenterologist that claims a connection between autism and the MMR vaccine, certain members of the autism community remain very outspoken about their beliefs against vaccines.
And that’s just what this is about – belief, held so tightly as to wrench and twist scientific debate into a storm of emotions. Just read the comments after the article. Things get personal; the passionate language of Heroism and Villainy is tossed around. I disagree with author Jason Fagone’s highly personal portrayal of Dr. Offit as a piece of rather yellow journalism. But for some perspective, this article comes after waves of slanderous attempts from the other side to dehumanize him and blame him as a person. That Dr. Offit’s intentions as a doctor and scientist are being libeled as evil, elitist, and deliberately harmful by frustrated parents is repulsive and sad. He is not the enemy; he is an expert. The absolute worst he could be is wrong.
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Amazon – Vaccines: What Every Parent Should Know, by Paul Offit and Louis M. Bell
The virtue of selfishness, online
Me, Myself and My Avatar(s)
As I finish reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, I’m still trying to unravel what Objectivism proposes. I enjoyed that she chose fiction to convey her philosophy, and I’ll admit it challenged a lot of my beliefs on ethical behavior and social good.
It was a long, complicated book; I’ll keep this post short. My only objective here is to marvel at the difference in Rand’s fictional reality, where public opinion is corruptly generated by an elite group of master critics in the form of Ellsworth Toohey; and the reality of the internet, where literally everyone can find a platform to stand on and one’s critical authority can be earned by page rankings.
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