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.
Archived entries for Hmm
Spotlight on artist Ai Weiwei 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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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.
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.
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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Hello world!
Welcome to my realm! Over time this site will contain my professional portfolio, as well as provide a space for periodic updates on topics of interest to me, favorite photos, etc – an “internet journal” you might call it. Hm, there’s gotta be a better word for that.
Thanks for your patience while I get it up and running, and I hope you’ll come visit me again!
Amy