Notes of a Sinophibe

Open Letter to Johns Hopkins University Press, should publicly oppose the Research Works Act

2012-01-13T04:50:00.000-08:00

Dear Ms. Keane:

I'm writing this open letter as a student of Johns Hopkins University, to urge the Johns Hopkins University Press to publicly oppose the Research Works Act (HR 3699), and to terminate your membership in the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Other writers on the Internet make the case for this better than I could, so I'd like to refer you to a few online resources.

For an overview of the proposed legislation, and some background, I recommend this recent op-ed in the NY Times, by Michael Eisen, "Research Bought, then Paid For"
Michael Eisen has also written a blog post, "Our scientific societies need to quit the Association of American Publishers", in which he makes the case that we all must apply a concerted effort to communicate to the AAP that their support of this type of legislation is unacceptable,
Here is an excellent post by Cameron Neylon, "IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa", in which he makes the case that the AAP's relentless focus on IP, as a way to generate revenue, is misguided and counter-productive,

Recently, various other organizations have publically disavowed the RWA, and/or resigned their membership in the AAP, including

MIT Press: "MIT Press distances itself from Research Works Act"
ITHAKA and the CLIR: "ITHAKA becomes the second AAP member to disavow the Research Works Act"

I would like to suggest that this is an opportunity for Johns Hopkins University Press to lead, by coming out quickly and forcefully in favor of open access to scientific literature, which is so crucial to accelerating the advancement of science. I note that you've recently started a JHU Press Blog and I think that would be an ideal venue for this type of report.

Thank you for your consideration!

Update:

Here are a few other blog posts I've seen recently urging this kind of action:

Cameron Neylon, "Update on publishers and SOPA: Time for scholarly publishers to disavow the AAP"
John Dupuis, "Scholarly Societies: It's time to abandon the AAP over The Research Works Act"

Letter regarding open access self-archiving at Johns Hopkins

2011-09-19T22:03:00.000-07:00

The following is a letter that I just sent to some faculty and staff at Johns Hopkins University, regarding their policies about open access, their instititutional repository, and whether or not they have a mandate in place requiring their researchers to self-archive their work.

I debated with myself for some time about whether or not to put this letter on my blog. I finally decided in favor of openness. I think that this might serve as a test case for others who might be interested in this issue, and who might be considering advocating for such a policy at their own universities. I will post follow-ups with the results of this experiment. Feedback is very welcome.

Hi,

This email is to inquire about Johns Hopkins' policy with regards to open access self-archiving of author’s refereed journal articles. I am a student at Johns Hopkins (recently started as a Master's degree candidate in Bioinformatics) and a software developer by trade. I also have a strong interest in open access tools, policies, and methods. So, I am writing this email to introduce myself, and to ask some questions about Johns Hopkins' policies regarding some of these issues, and perhaps to stimulate some dialog.

I have recently found and read your "Johns Hopkins Scholarly Communications Group" site, and see that it says that you are "dedicated to fostering open access". I found (most of) your names from this site, and looked up your email addresses in the JHU system.

I see that JScholarship is the primary institutional repository for JHU -- is that right? Are there others? According to ROAR it uses the DSpace software. I browsed the site for a while, but didn't find very many journal articles. Would it be fair to say that currently, not a high percentage of the research papers produced as output by JHU researches is "self-archived" on JScholarship? If that's true, is there some other repository that they do use, that I haven't found yet?

The Scholarly Communications Group site also links to the Johns Hopkins Electronic Publishing Project. From there, I found the Mark Cyzyk's and Sayeed Choudhury's excellent paper from 2008, "A Survey and Evaluation of Open-Source Electronic Publishing Systems" (Wiki home; PDF whitepaper; on JScholarship; PowerPoint slides). It looks like the system that was most favored by that paper, "Open Journal System", was installed to this Electronic Publishing Project. But, it seems that, perhaps, it is no longer being actively maintained. Is that right?

I've recently been reading a lot of the writings of Stevan Harnad, who is a strong advocate of institutional repositories, and of policies that mandate self-archiving by authors, in order to further open access to scientific research. Below are a couple of links to resources related to this, that may be of interest. (Note that there is some redundancy in the material covered by these various links.)

Does Johns Hopkins have a mandate planned or in place requiring its researchers to self-archive the products of their JHU-funded research, along the lines of the other 130 institutional, 33 sub-institutional, and 52 funder mandates currently indexed in ROARMAP (including Harvard, MIT, Duke, Oberlin, Emory and NIH)? Has this been discussed at JHU? If not, what might be some good avenues that I and other interested students and faculty could pursue to help promote this goal?

Thank you very much for your time! Here are the links/resources:

"What is Open Access and how to provide it?" - This is a blog post of an interview with Stevan Harnad, in which he very concisely lays out the case for how institutional repositories can further the goals of open access.
Self-Archiving FAQ - this is a very nice FAQ page that introduces the concepts and answers many common concerns that people have. This covers much of the same ground as the above post, but goes into more detail.
Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) is a website and organization that "is both an information service and a forum for raising and discussing issues around the mission of modern universities and research institutions, particularly with regard to the creation, dissemination and preservation of research findings." There are many useful and informative resources on this site related to promoting and implementing open access policies, as well as several examples of other universities' open access policies. Is JHU a member of this organization?
The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model - this is a very nice page on Stevan Harnad's blog, which gives a model for a policy that could be adopted to mandate that researchers deposit their works in JScholarship (or some other institutional repository).
The Right to Research Coalition - is a coalition of student groups that work to promote open access. I checked their membership page and did not see Johns Hopkins among the members. Are there any graduate student groups at JHU that would be an appropriate fit for this activity? How could I connect with such a group? I checked the list of Recognized Clubs in the GRO but didn't find any group that looked right. Would it be possible for me to start such a group?
OASIS - Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook - looks like it has a lot of useful, practical information. I haven't looked this over closely, but it looks promising.

Again, thank you very much for reading this email, and I’ll anxiously await your reply.

Chris Maloney

Proper URL Encoding and Decoding

2011-07-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

This is a reference post, on issues around encoding and decoding URLs. I've tried to summarize everything I know into a clear and concise set of guidelines. I hope you find them useful!

The character coding of all URLs is, as specified in RFC-3986, a subset of US-ASCII. US-ASCII is a seven-bit code, with characters in the range 0x00 to 0x7F. Here is a summary of the characters that are allowed and not allowed in URLs:

Excluded

0x00 - 0x1F, 0x7F (control characters),
0x20 (space),
these punctionation characters: " < > \ ^ ` { | }
All non-ASCII characters

General delimiters

these characters: % # / : ? @ [ ]

Sub delimiters

these characters: ! $ & ' ( ) * + , ; =

Unreserved

digits, letters, and these characters: - . _ ~

When dealing with URLs, Postel’s Law should apply: “Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.”

Generating URLs (what you send)

When generating URLs for others’ consumption:

Percent encoded values should use uppercase A-F for hex digits.
Excluded characters within the US-ASCII range should be percent encoded as a single byte. So, for example, a space character should always be encoded as “%20”. When the space character appears in a query string, it can be encoded either as “%20” or as the plus sign “+”.
Excluded characters outside the US-ASCII range must be first encoded in UTF-8, and then percent-encoded. For example, “Ä”, Unicode U+00C4, “Latin capital letter A with diaresis”, should be encoded as “%C3%84” and not as %C4, because it is first encoded as a two-byte UTF-8 sequence.
General delimiters, when used literally (i.e. not as delimiters), must be percent-encoded, with certain exceptions described below.
Sub delimiters should be percent encoded when their literal use would conflict with their use as delimiters. For example, in a query string, the ampersand “&” must be percent-encoded, but when in a path segment, it is okay to use it literally. When in doubt, percent-encode, because it can’t do any harm.

The two main portions of a URL that are of concern to developers are the path segments and the query string.

Path segments can include literal characters in the sets unreserved, sub delimiters, and the two general delimiters “:” and “@”. All other characters must be percent-encoded. Note that path segments should never include a slash characters “/”, even if it is percent encoded, since user agents and servers both have problems with these.
Query strings can include all of the same characters as path segments, and additionally the two general delimiters “/” and “?”.

So, for example, the following URL is legal and unambiguous:

http://example.com/doc@1:5/?back_uri=http://user:password@example.com/?foo%3Dbar

Note how, within the query string, the equals sign within the back_uri is percent-encoded as “%3D”.

Receiving URLs (what you accept)

When parsing a URL, applications should follow these guidelines:

Within a query string, convert “+”, wherever it occurs, into a space character. (Note that this must be done before percent-decoding).
Accept either upper or lowercase for hex digits within percent-encoded values
Convert percent encoded substrings into sequences of bytes, and then interpret those as UTF-8.

If the byte sequence is not valid UTF-8, then the application should either drop it completely, or throw an exception. For example, for this URL
```
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%C4rzteblatt
```
the user incorrectly encodes Ä as %C4, but the single-byte sequence 0xC4 is not valid UTF-8. So the application should either drop this invalid value completely (interpret the term as “rzteblatt”), or throw an exception. The preferred behavior is to throw an exception.
If the resultant character string contains characters outside the accepted range for the application, they should cause an exception. For example,
```
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%E8%B5%B7%E5%8F%B8%E5%A0%A1
```
which is valid UTF-8, but where the term decodes as “起司堡”, should either cause “no items found” or should result in an exception page.

Wikis in science and science education

2011-06-13T21:27:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this blog post as an open letter to the faculty of Johns Hopkins, where I'm enrolled in the MS in Bioinformatics program. It's about wikis.

Lately I've stumbled upon a few presentations and websites, from independent directions, which highlight the growing importance of the role of wikis in science. Here are a few of my encounters.

TaxPub, ZooKeys, and Species-ID

At JATS-Con last year, one of the best talks was given by Terry Catapano, on TaxPub. TaxPub is a file format for journal articles. TaxPub is interesting and novel because it allows very domain-specific, structured data to be included in with the main article content. In this case, the domain is taxonomic information -- data related to the names and descriptions of species.

ZooKeys is a new, peer-reviewed, open-access journal from Pensoft. ZooKeys uses the TaxPub format, and it's licensed under the Creative Commons - attribution license (CC-BY). This means that anyone is allowed to copy and repurpose the content, for anything whatsoever, as long as he or she gives credit to the authors.

What's special about ZooKeys is, that at the same time an article is published in the journal, it is also used to produce a wiki page on the Species ID wiki. One of the first articles produced with this new workflow describes the process better than I could. Here is the article in ZooKeys, and here's the corresponding wiki page. This allows for the content to be updated as new information is found. At the same time, referencing the original journal article is always possible.

Note that the Species-ID wiki is powered by MediaWiki, the same software behind Wikipedia. This is important, because if a scientist learns to edit Wikipedia, then he or she could also contribute to Species-ID -- and vice-versa, of course.

Encyclopedia of original research

The next encounter was with a project proposal recently put forward by Daniel Mietchen for a wiki of scientific articles. You can read more about this idea, and the philosophy behinds it, in a couple more of his blog posts here and here.

His idea is to seed the wiki with a large set of journal articles that are either in the public domain, or have been published with a license at least as permissive as CC-BY. PMC (where I work) serves a set of such articles: the Open Access Subset. These articles can be downloaded from our FTP site in their original XML format. The piece that's still missing is a JATS-to-Mediawiki converter, which would be fairly easy to write.

Pfam, Rfam, and Wikipedia

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a seminar given by Rob Finn, hosted by the NCBI Computational Biology Branch. The seminar was about Pfam (on Wikipedia), Rfam (on Wikipedia), and Wikipedia. Pfam is a database of protein families, and Rfam is a database of RNA families.

What is super cool and and unique about these databases is that they both leverage the power of Wikipedia to enhance the value of the results delivered to their users. For example, the page in Pfam for the linker histone (histone H1) contains vast amounts of data (which I don't pretend to understand), which is accessible from the various menu options both across the top and down the left side of the page. But most prominently, on the summary page, they pull out the data from Wikipedia and display it within the Pfam site itself.

Rob Finn explained that, as part of their curation of the protein data, they also help to maintain and control the quality of the relevant Wikipedia entries. So it's a very synergistic relationship. The scientists themselves, and the database curators, collaborate to improve the quality of the Wikipedia content, and then Wikipedia enhances the site.

JHU AAP Online Bioinformatics program

These are all exciting trends, and of course they just scratch the surface of the science-wiki landscape. Now I want to contrast this with my experience so far in the Bioinformatics program at Johns Hopkins. I am sorry to say it, but they are woefully behind. I want to stress that my purpose in writing this post is not to bash Johns Hopkins. I think the program is great, and I have had very good experiences in my classes there so far. I have enormous respect for my advisor, and the courses that I've taken have been well designed. And the bottom line is that I am learning a hell of lot of biology. No, the purpose of this post is to encourage the administrators and faculty there to embrace the idea of preparing future scientists to collaborate in the wonderful medium of wikis. Pointing out current inadequacies is part of that.

Last semester, I proposed to my instructor and my advisor that it would be nice if at least one assignment for each class was to make a substantive contribution to Wikipedia. The assignments I was given were mostly writing assignments on particular topics. We had one big "presentation" assignment due at the end of the semester. Each student was given a different topic to research and describe. But, when the class ended that effort was then locked away in the class' archives, never to be read by anyone again? Isn't that a shame? Here is part of what I wrote to my advisor:

You help to run a Bioinformatics program, [which is about merging the technologies] of biology and computers. Wikis are emerging as a very powerful, rich, and important medium for collaboration and providing scientific results to the public.

So I think the classes in the Bioinformatics program should all encourage students to contribute to Wikipedia. Wouldn't it be nice if at least one assignment from each class were to make a substantive contribution?

My professor from last semester said that she was interested in the idea, and would try it out this semester. I don't know if she did or not -- I still have to follow up with her and ask.

But, of course, this semester I moved on to a different class. And the whole school moved on to a new software platform for their online courses. Perhaps you've heard of it: Blackboard. So far my impression of it is ... ahem ... not good.

There are many problems with Blackboard, but I'll only focus on the problems with the integrated wiki. They are legion. This past week, I just finished participating in our first group assignment, in which we were asked to collaborate on writing the answers to various questions about two research papers. I proposed that we use a wiki for this, and suggested that we could either use the Blackboard's integrated wiki, or we could use a site that lets you create a free wiki in the MediaWiki platform -- Wikia. I pointed out that the main advantage of using Wikia would be that it would introduce everyone to the MediaWiki format -- which could be a springboard into editing Wikipedia.

Not surprisingly, my teammates chose to use the Blackboard wiki. I don't blame them at all -- because on the face of it, it would seem that Wikia is too risky. But, the problems with the Blackboard wiki started to become apparent right away. Here is a list of a few of the problems we encountered:

1. It is impossible to compare two versions of a page, to see what has changed. This is a fundamental feature of a wiki. Especially in a long article, it is absolutely required that an author be able to compare the versions, to see at a glance what has changed, so that he or she can focus just on the changes. To be fair, BB has a very limited (see the next item) ability to do this, but JHU's installation seems to be defective. It is missing a "diff.css" file, which, presumably, adds the all-important highlighting of the changes.

2. The "limited" ability I refered to above is (please be warned that the following might cause your head to explode) that you can only compare revisions corresponding to edits that you yourself have made. In other words, if I want to see my own changes ("my contributions") that's fine -- I can do that. But if I want to see what somebody else changed on a page that I myself authored -- that's impossible.

3. The wiki uses a crap browser-based wysiwyg editor that produces absolutely nightmare-inducing markup. All of my teammates found themselves frustrated by the random bizarre formatting quirks of the editor. You could tweak things to look correct in the edit view, but as soon as you clicked "submit", the formatting would be all screwed up again. It does have a "view - source" view, but if you make changes in that view, to clean things up, and then switch back to wysiwyg view, all your work is lost.

But the biggest problem is -- that it is not MediaWiki. As I mentioned above, if we're going to spend the time to learn to use a wiki, then why not learn something that can really add to our value as scientific collaborators?

My hope is that in my current class, in future group assignments, that the group I'm in, and the others, all decide to use and collaborate with the new wiki I've just set up on Wikia, the Molecular Biology, AAP, Summer 2011 wiki. I expect there might be some resistance because it is "off-site", and not part of the JHU system. If so, those would be unjustified complaints. We're living in a deeply interconnected, collaborative world, now, and more and more businesses are moving their entire infrastructures into the cloud. I think as a general principle, we should make use of the best tools wherever we find them. If this objection is a show-stopper, then the next-best thing would be for JHU to set up an installation of MediaWiki itself. It is very easy to do!

Another recommendation I have is that all the professors who teach courses, be required to obtain a minimum Wikipedia-literacy. They should be required to register their Wikipedia usernames (mine is Klortho) so that anyone can go and see their list of contributions -- and this could become a part of their CV (as it should be). We all rely so heavily on Wikipedia these days, that it is a crime that we don't do more, as individuals and institutions, to support it.

UPDATE:
Daniel Mietchen pointed out to me that the journal RNA Biology actually requires a Wikipedia article (search for "A short guide to creating your first Wikipedia article") along with the submission of any new manuscript submissions to "RNA Families Track".

pH calculation of a very small concentration of a strong acid.

2011-03-07T19:39:00.000-08:00

I have always felt that I didn't really "get" acid-base chemistry. Usually, when I'm presented with a chemistry problem, my mind just refuses to grasp what's being asked. I struggle to figure out which equations to use, and how to plug the numbers from the problem into the variables of the equation. Well, my experience this past week reassures me that I'm not the only one.

In my Biochemistry class, we got this problem:

Calculate the pH of a solution of the strong acid HCl at a concentration of 5x10^-8 M.

This is a little bit of a tricky question, because the concentration of the acid is so low. But before getting into it, let's simplify the discussion a bit by assuming that we're talking about one liter of water. Then, the amount of acid that we're adding is 5x10^-8 moles. To me, changing from concentrations into definite amounts makes it easier to understand.

A strong acid will dissociate more-or-less completely when added to water, so this is like adding a 5x10^-8 moles of H⁺ ions into the water. Note that the number of H⁺ ions in one liter of pure water is 10^-7 moles, so this is one-half of that. To use nice, small, round numbers, it's as we had a bottle of water (a very small bottle) that has 10 H⁺ ions, and we're adding an extra 5.

My first answer was based on this simple addition. I assumed that the number of H⁺ ions after the acid was added would be 1.5x10^-7. Then the pH would be the negative logarithm of that:

This would be like assuming that if the bottle of water initially had 10 H⁺ ions, and you add 5, then in the end it would have 15.

The problem set was presented online, and after submitting our answers, we could go back and review them. The answer key gave the correct answer to this problem as "7.3". ... Wait, what? Neutral water has a pH of 7, and anything above 7 is considered alkaline. So how do you get an alkaline solution after adding a strong acid to water?

It's pretty easy to see where the "7.3" answer comes from. The usual way to solve these problems is to assume that the H⁺ concentration, after you add the strong acid, is equal to the concentration of the acid. See, for example, the first sentence of the Calculation of pH for weak and strong acids section of the pH article on Wikipedia: "In the case of a strong acid, there is complete dissociation, so the pH is simply equal to minus the logarithm of the acid concentration." So following that strategy:

But the problem is that this completely neglects the baseline concentration of the H⁺ ions in pure water. This is like assuming that if the bottle of water has 10 ions, and you add 5, then in the end it will have 5. It doesn't make sense.

In fact both of these answers are wrong. What happens, after you add the new H⁺ ions, is that some of them will react with the OH^- ions to form neutral water molecules. The solution will be at equilibrium when the equilibrium equation for water is again satisfied:

To continue with the analogy I've been using, it's as if you have a bottle of water that has 10 H⁺ ions and 10 OH^- ions. The equilibrium equation for water says that H⁺ times OH^- must always equal 100, once equilibrium has been established. Now, you add 5 extra H⁺ ions. At this point the bottle has 15 H⁺ ions and 10 OH^- ions. But that product is 150, so the solution is not at equilibrium. What happens? Well, some of the H⁺ ions will react with the OH^- ions to form water. Each time that happens, the number of H⁺ ions and the number of OH^- ions both decrease by one. So first there will be 14 H⁺ ions and 9 OH^- ions, then 13 and 8. Now, 13 X 8 = 104, so in this simple-minded example, that's as close to equilibrium as we can get.

At each step, the difference in the number of H⁺ ions and OH^- ions is always a constant, and is equal to the number of H⁺ ions that were added:

When we apply this reasoning to the original problem, we see that the difference in the concentrations of H⁺ and OH^- is a constant, which is the amount of acid that was originally added:

We want to get rid of [OH^-], so let's solve for that:

And we also know that the equilibrium equation for water must be satisified. Here it is again:

So let's plug the value for [OH^-] into that:

And then put it into the form of a quadratic equation:

Then using the quadratic formula:

Clearly, the value must be positive, so we should pick "+", not "-":

Finally, we can calculate the pH:

At first, I wasn't very confident in this solution, so I dug around on the Internet. All of the examples I could find used very high concentrations of strong acid, and used the assumption that you could take the acid concentration as the H⁺ concentration. For example, here ("Find the pH of a 0.0025 M HCl solution.") and here ("How do you calculate pH of a 0.012M solution of HCL?").

Finally I found a good discussion in this online textbook, starting at section 3.1, "Strong acids and bases". Their procedure maps onto what I did above, almost exactly. Note that they refer to the hydronium ion H3O⁺ where I referred simply to the hydrogen ion H⁺.

Equation 17 from the book is:

which is the same as my quadratic equation above -- C_a is the concentration of the acid that was added, and K_w is the equilibrium constant of water.

At one point, the authors say:

As the acid concentration falls below about 10^-6M, however, ... [H3O⁺] approaches √K_w, or 10^-7M. The hydronium ion concentration can of course never fall below this value; no amount of dilution can make the solution
alkaline!

Which is another way of saying that you can't get a pH above 7, no matter how low the acid concentration is.

UPDATE:
You might notice that I linked to an old version of the Wikipedia article above. That's because when I was looking for resources for this post, I discovered that that section on Wikipedia not only had a lot of errors, but didn't even make much sense at all. So I rewrote it from scratch -- everything under "Calculations of pH", including "Strong acids and bases" and "Weak acids and bases".

Apparent negative cooperativity in proteins with multiple ligand binding sites for the same ligand.

2011-02-23T05:29:00.000-08:00

Whew, that's a mouthful! This semester I'm taking Intro to Biochemistry, an online course from Johns Hopkins University. The following is something I wrote up in relation to a discussion question that was posed in our third week. I was bothered by something I read, and I started to tinker with the math, just to see if I could figure it out myself. Then I dusted off gnuplot, and started to make some simple plots. I'm really happy with the result, and so I'm posting it here. It's rare, in my experience, to get something to work out so nicely and cleanly, and have the math give extra insight into the physical phenomenon.

In chapter 5 of our textbook, "Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry", 5th edition, the authors describe the affinity of proteins for other molecules that bind to them, called ligands. They discuss allosteric binding, which is when the binding of a ligand to one site affects the ability of the ligand to bind to another site on the same protein. The classic case is hemoglobin. In hemoglobin, the binding of one oxygen molecule makes it more likely for other oxygen molecules to bind at the other three sites. This is an example of positive cooperativity. The book presents the following figure, which is called a Hill plot, which characterizes this phenomenon.

The positive cooperativity is apparent for hemoglobin (in red) because, within a certain range, the slope of this plot is greater than one.

For a protein with only one ligand-binding site, the characteristic equation is:

where L is the concentration of the ligand, K is the dissociation constant, and the term on the left is:

A note about my notation: in these equations, "L" and "P" are the concentrations of the ligand and the unbound protein, respectively. These are given in Lehninger and elsewhere as "[L]" and "[P]". I've just adopted a shorthand with [L] → L and [P] → P. But note that for the concentration of the bound protein-ligand complex, I still write "[PL]". If I wrote it as "PL", it would be ambiguous. So "[PL]" means the concentration of protein-ligand, and "PL" means "[P][L]", the product of two different concentrations.

Since , we get:

And taking the log() of both sides yields the characteristic equation above. In that equation, the log-log plot is linear with a slope of one. Again, the Hill plot for hemoglobin shown above, which has two binding sites that exhibit positive cooperativity, has, within a specific region, a slope greater than one.

The authors then describe negative cooperativity, which would be exhibited if the binding of a ligand to one site makes it harder for a ligand to bind at another site. They say that true negative cooperativity is rare.

The question that bothered me came from Lehninger, p. 180, problem 2, case (b): "The protein is a single polypeptide with two ligand-binding sites, each having a different affinity for the ligand." Our professor, Dr. Schwartz, indicated that this has "apparent negative cooperativity" as opposed to "true" negative cooperativity. In the solutions manual that accompanies our textbook, page S-54, it says, with regards to this case, "The higher affinity ligand-binding sites bind the ligand first. As the ligand concentration is increased, binding to the lower-affinity sites produces an nH < 1.0, even though binding to the two ligand-binding sites is completely independent."

Hmm... when I read that, I was a little bit skeptical. Intuitively, it seemed to me that the net result of two independent ligand sites, even if their affinities differ, should act like a single independent ligand site with some affinity in the middle. So I ventured to try to do the math on my own.

Now, if the protein has two binding sites, that are not cooperative at all (independent), then

As a check, notice that if , then this reduces to , same as above.

But what I really want is a function that depends only on L and the two Ks. P1 and P2 are also variable, and depend on L. To get expressions for those in terms of L, there is one more constraint that we can apply: that the sum of the concentrations of the bound and unbound sites, for site 1 and for site 2, is a constant, and is the same: the total concentration of the protein T:

We can use this to solve for P1 in terms of L and two constants K1 and T:

Likewise,

We can plug these into the above equation and, simplifying a bit (notice how T drops out),

To make it look prettier, we can define two new constants, the mean Km and the product Kp:

Then,

Finally,

The term inside the log() on the right of the equation is like the dissociation constant K for the whole complex – but of course it’s not constant, it varies with L. However, you can see that this term does approach a constant value as L → 0 and as L → ∞:

If K1 and K2 are very different, for example, if K1 << K2, then this term simplifies further:

So when the concentration of the ligand is very low, the influence of the binding site with the lower dissociation constant (higher affinity) predominates, and the whole protein acts like something with one binding site that has a dissociation constant twice this lower value (one-half the affinity). When the concentration of the ligand is high, the influence of the binding site with the higher dissociation constant (lower affinity) predominates, and the whole protein acts like something with one binding site that has a dissociation constant one-half the higher value (twice the affinity). In a critical range where L is roughly between 2K1 and K2/2, one line transitions into the other.

So, the following plot shows this curve in the range between -8 and -2, for values of K1 = 1μM (-6 on the x-axis) and K2 = 100μM (-4). It is the curve “Double(x)”, in blue. For comparison, I also plotted the straight-line graphs that this curve asymptotically approaches, “Single1(x)” and “Single2(x)”.

This is a two-part graph. Below the main part is another graph giving the slope of the Hill plot. You can see that within the range of interest, it dips well below one. This, then, is the apparent negative cooperativity.

Why this is important

Even though this result was described in the solutions manual of our textbook, it was not described in the main text. That text includes this statement (p. 164): "The slope of a Hill plot is ... a measure of the degree of cooperativity. If n_H equals 1, ligand binding is not cooperative." The latter part of this statement is demonstrably false. If the two ligand binding sites have different affinities, and they are not cooperative, then the slope will be less than one. If in this case the slope is measured to be 1, then that's an indication of positive cooperativity. In fact, the case where there is a slope of one and no cooperativity is the degenerate case where the two ligand binding sites have identical affinities. Except in the case (as in hemoglobin) where the protein is made up of identical subunits, I would guess that most of the time, the ligand binding sites should be expected to have different affinities. This needs to be taken into account when using the Hill plot for assessing cooperativities.

Appendix: Gnuplot script file

# Unit3-ApparentNegCoop.plt
# $Id$

set xr [-8:-2]

# Here are our constants

K1 = 1e-6
K2 = 1e-4
Km = (K1 + K2) / 2
Kp = K1 * K2


# I want a plot with log10(L) on the horizontal, so:  x = log10(L)
L(x) = 10 ** x

Factor(L) = (Km + L) / (Kp + Km * L)
Tp(x) = Factor(L(x)) * L(x)
Double(x) = log10(Tp(x))

# For comparison, we'll also plot the graph you'd get for a protein with one
# ligand binding site with value K1*2, and another for with K2/2:
Single1(x) = x - log10(K1 * 2)
Single2(x) = x - log10(K2 / 2)

set term x11 0
plot Single1(x), Single2(x), Double(x)


# Now take the derivative and plot the slope of the graph
u(x) = Km + 10 ** x
v(x) = Kp + Km * (10 ** x)
slope(x) = 1 + 0.43 * (1/u(x) - Km/v(x)) * (10 ** x)

set term x11 1
plot slope(x)

Why don't the ordinary Chinese people here in the U.S. protest their government?

2011-01-15T20:47:00.000-08:00

Hu Jintao will visit the U.S. again very soon, and I have a few questions for my Chinese friends.

Why is it only the Falun Gong that protests? The last time Hu visited the U.S., in 2008, I went down to Washington Square, and was disappointed to find that the vast majority of protesters were Falun Gong. Why is it that ordinary Chinese citizens and immigrants living here don't also protest? Why is it that the only two choices are: to be with the Falun Gong, or to show support for the CCP?

Forget about the big, controversial issues like Falun Gong, Taiwan, and Tibet; I just want to ask all of you, are you all happy with the Chinese communist government? Happy with the fact that they have Liu Xiaobo in prison? What about their treatment of Hu Jia and a hundred other activists? Happy with the harassment and intimidation of human rights lawyers?

When was the last time you went back to China and tried to get on the Internet? Are you okay with the Great Firewall and the fact that people in China don't have the freedom to read what they want, so that they can make up their own minds about important issues? Don't you know you couldn't even have this discussion if you were in China -- that it's impossible to send any email in cleartext with the words "Falun Gong"? And forget about trying to write a blog post or a comment that's critical of the government - they are all deleted within hours (if not minutes) of being posted.

Are you happy with the one-party system in China? With the fact that it is not democratic - that people can't vote for their own representatives in government? With the fact that the state completely controls the media?

Protesting in front of Hu Jintao doesn't mean that you're betraying your country. There is a difference between China and the Chinese Communist Party. Americans protest their government all the time, and although a few right-wing extremists would call them traitors, they are not. Why should loving your country mean you're not allowed to criticize it?

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?

2010-11-05T20:45:00.000-07:00

This book looks like it is probably very good -- too bad I don't have time to read it. I read over the introduction, and here are some money quotes:

Religious fundamentalists are on course to take over the world through demography.

...

Even if everyone else died off, homo religiosus would endure.

...

There is no necessary reason why the road ahead will not twist in an illiberal direction, leading to an outcome as violent as anything witnessed during the bloody twentieth century.

...

As Scandinavia shows, there is a strong case to be made that the least religious countries are the most advanced.

...

Sceptics and proponents alike fail to probe the soft underbelly of secularism: demography.

One of the reviewers says that "Kaufmann doesn't fall into the trap of mindless alarmism", but, you know what? I'm alarmed.

35 mile jog/walk in and around MD, DC, and VA

2010-10-25T18:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a perfect day for jogging, and, being in training for the upcoming JFK 50, I decided to take a long run/walk in and around DC.

I mapped it out with MapMyRun.com, and found out that even after a year, it still sucks. But anyway, here's the route I took.

The weather was perfect, and the Fall colors were spectacular, all along the route. I brought my camera, and took a bunch of pictures (too many). Unfortunately, I haven't spent the time to learn to use the camera very well, and the colors in the photos do not even begin to compare to the real thing. Here's the slideshow (I recommend putting it on "Fast").

Finally, I listened to a pretty good selection of songs on the way, of which I prepared a sampler. I used Audacity to create a ten-minute long mp3 that's just the first minute or so of ten different (completely different) songs. Here's the list:

Junior Reid - Big Boss Man
Geto Boys - Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta
Perez Prado - Peanut Vendor
Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene Part 2
The Belle Stars - Iko Iko
Outkast - Hey Ya
Fatboy Slim - Wonderful Night (Radio Edit)
Flo Rida - Right Round
David Bowie - Real Cool World
Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene Part 4

Fans of the movie "Office Space" will recognize a couple of songs from there.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

2010-10-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

I just found this excellent article in The Atlantic on the problems that pervade medical research. It focuses on a "meta-researcher" named John Ioannidis. As a meta-researcher, he researches medical research.

The article is amazingly well written, but it is long, so I'll just provide some quotes:

Wasn’t it possible ... that drug companies were carefully selecting the topics of their studies — for example, comparing their new drugs against those already known to be inferior to others on the market — so that they were ahead of the game even before the data juggling began?

...

An obsession with winning funding has gone a long way toward weakening the reliability of medical research.

...

The range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.

...

“There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

...

To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously.

...

How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

...

“The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.

...

Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.”

...

Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.

...

Ioannidis initially thought the community might come out fighting. Instead, it seemed relieved, as if it had been guiltily waiting for someone to blow the whistle, and eager to hear more.

...

In fact, the question of whether the problems with medical research should be broadcast to the public is a sticky one in the meta-research community. Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do

One thing that struck me that I think is very significant is that the author describes the medical community's reaction to some of these conclusions. They were unanimously "relieved", and not at all surprised. I think that speaks volumes -- if this were about pseudo-scientists or cranks, they would almost certainly circle the wagons and sharpen their pitchforks (sorry for the mixed metaphor). But in fact, it seems clear that the individuals are good people wanting to do real science and uncover the truth, but that they are trapped in a system that's beyond their control.

Lei Feng

2010-03-10T20:55:00.001-08:00

Lei Feng is an interesting phenomenon in China. The Wikipedia entry about him (English) is pretty short and interesting. Very little is actually known about him, and he died an utterly prosaic death, crushed by a telephone pole as he was directing a truck to back up.

After his death, Mao and the communists decided to make an icon of him, and he and images of him were used as a propaganda tool. This was in 1963, and the "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng" campaign did a lot to emphasize the class struggle and to strengthen the cult of Mao.

What's fascinating to me now is the dichotomy between those (in China) who still take his "legacy" seriously, and those who poke fun at images of him.

Here are some more links to interesting Danwei articles:

Splitting characters

2010-01-21T21:20:00.000-08:00

I always like tricks that can be played with Chinese characters, and I recently came across this joke:

不矢口亻十么日寸候 , 亻奄口斤言兑矢豆亻言也有辶寸氵虑敏感字节白勺言兑氵去 , 于是 , 亻奄学会了扌斥字 ......后来, 亻奄米青礻申分歹刂鸟~

The cute thing about it is that many of the characters are split in half vertically, and written as two characters, one for each the left and right halves. Here's the original:

不知什么时候,俺听说短信也有过滤敏感字节的说法,于是,俺学会了拆字 ...... 后来, 俺精神分列鸟

It's one of many ways that clever people over there have devised for evading censors. Recently, the government has announced that it will begin to monitor and censor text messages sent on cell phones. The above joke refers to that, a translation of it is

I don't know when I heard that text messages will be screened for sensitive words, so I learned to split characters. Soon, I became schizophrenic.

As pointed out in the same blog post, often benign messages might get caught up in the sweep, because of unlucky juxtapositions. For example, the message "你妈的红烧肉棒极了" means "Your mother's roasted pork is excellent", but contains two sensitive words, "妈的", "your mother's", which is shorthand for "mother f--cker", and "肉棒", which is "meat stick", slang for ... well, that's pretty obvious.

Global warming -- it's real

2009-11-09T21:19:00.000-08:00

Lately I've become an avid reader of Greenfyre's blog. I know a lot of my friends and family are still pretty ignorant of this issue. I wish I could communicate more effectively how serious it is. Anyway, I encourage everyone to get involved.

Goodnight, my little dreamer, Steve.

2009-10-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we said goodbye to my best friend for the last thirteen years. Steve, my dog, was an angel of the highest rank. She turned thirteen this month, and lately she's been in a lot of pain, with severe arthritis, and almost completely unable to walk.

I put a collection of pictures up on Smugmug. Unfortunately, I don't have many digital photos of her from before about eight or nine years ago. I have a few print photos, but haven't had a chance to scan them yet.

I have known Steve since she was a small puppy. My ex-wife and I got her from Animal Rescue when she was about six weeks old, and we were instantly smitten. The shelter had named her "Dakota", and we changed it to Steve. My brother-in-law Brad said that was the only time he could remember, that he preferred the shelter name of an adopted animal.

I remember when she was a little puppy teaching her to play "pull-the-thing". At first, she didn't quite understand why I would give her a rope, and then immediately yank it away, but she caught on very fast. It remained her favorite game for her entire life. She would fasten onto something with a death grip, and pull as hard she could, growling ferociously. I liked to get my face down next to hers while tugging, and growl right back at her. She couldn't get enough of this game. Often while I was studying or working, she would come up to me with one of her rope toys in her mouth, eagerly waiting for me to take the bait.

Another thing that was very special about Steve was her dreaming. Ever since she was little, she had vivid, near-constant dreams whenever she slept. At first it was disconcerting, how violently she thrashed about. But so cute! She would kick her legs, and bark, and you could watch her eyes flitting all over the place. Once I swear I watched her, in her dream, as she chased a rabbit across a field, then stopped and dipped her head and started to drink some water from a mountain stream. The dreaming was so noisy though, that until I discovered earplugs, it was impossible to let her sleep in the same room. You would just be getting to sleep when you'd be yanked back awake by the scratching of her claws and her muted dream-barking.

We had Steve for about three or four months when we decided that she needed a companion, and we went back to the same shelter and got her sister and litter-mate, Jade.

Steve was always more mature and mild-mannered than Jade. Jade was a "hellion" (the word that the shelter used) from the first day. By comparison with Jade, any other dog would have seemed easy to manage. I wish that I could claim that I always loved Steve and Jade equally, but I just can't deny it: Steve was my favorite. I think it's because Jade was often a bit of a bully, and I always tend to route for the underdog. Here they are in a pretty typical pose from that time, with Jade sitting on top of Steve:

Steve and Jade, both beautiful girls, though they fought loudly and often, were constant companions. They grew up in a house on the bay, and so became water-loving dogs. Another favorite game, when the weather was warm enough, was to swim out into the water to chase a stick, and bring it dutifully back. It was pretty amazing how far they would swim, when they were in their primes.

They were always in competition with each other. Jade was always a little bit faster of a runner, but Steve was the better swimmer, so that made it interesting. They both loved the beach -- I think mostly because all manner of things would float up, providing an amazing panoply of rich, enticing odors and tastes. I would often turn away for a moment, only to turn back and recoil in horror to see some rotten, skeletal monstrosity that they had dug up and were excitedly munching on.

We would always say that Steve was our good dog, and Jade was our bad dog. (Fortunately, Jade never learned English quite well enough to understand this sentence.) We were kidding about Jade being a bad dog, of course, but it was definitely true that Steve was easier to manage. To be able to let them outside to play, but not have them run all over the neighborhood, we first decided to try an electric fence. Steve learned to accept it right away, and was no problem. Jade, on the other hand, learned to ignore it right away, dashing straight through the "no man's land" regardless of how many volts it sent through her skull. And so, the electric fence idea fell flat.

Then, I built a real fence of concrete, wood, and chicken wire. Again, Steve had no problems -- she was quite content to hang out and play in the back yard. Jade, on the other hand, actually learned to pull the chicken wire apart strand by strand with her teeth, and make her escape.

Steve and Jade loved to hunt squirrels and rabbits. Those were two words of English that Steve, especially, understood very well. Just mention the word "squirrel", and she would run to the back door and look all around and up in the trees. I'm pretty sure she knew the difference, because if you said "rabbit", she would look all over the place, but not up in the trees. We would always look for squirrels and rabbits whenever driving in and out of my or my parents' neighborhoods. Usually, I would spot one first, and say, "There's a squirrel!", and they would go crazy. Sometimes, I would let them out of the car to give chase. This was not a good idea, I know, but they always had so much fun with it that I just couldn't resist. They never did actually succeed in catching one, I don't think. But once, I did get into an argument about it with one of my parents' neighbors.

When she was about six years old, in July and August of 2002, she developed a lump on her left front leg. I took her to a couple of different vets, and consulted with my sister (who is also a vet). At first they thought it might be an infection, but it grew rapidly and was causing her a great deal of pain. Eventually she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a very nasty bone cancer that dogs often get, and that is almost always fatal. They said, and I read, that by the time they're first seen, 90% of bone cancers have already spread out of control.

That was a blow, but I decided to go ahead and have her leg amputated, even though the vet I spoke to said that it would only do a little to relieve her pain, and probably wouldn't prolong her life. Here she is a couple of days after the surgery:

Well, the days, weeks, and months passed, and we always had that feeling of waiting for the second shoe, but amazingly, the cancer did not come back. She got another seven years of life. During all that time, she had many adventures, like playing hockey, jumping in the snow, herding llamas, chasing (but not catching) many squirrels and rabbits, many trips to the beach, and of course, many many naps.

At first, she was almost as fast with only three legs as she had been with four. It was amazing how quickly she adapted, and if she saw a squirrel or a rabbit, she would chase it with just as much enthusiasm as ever, her front leg doing double the work.

After she lost her leg, I would still take both her and Jade out to chase sticks and balls, but Steve was now decidedly slower than Jade was. So every other throw, I would hold Jade's collar for two or three (okay, sometimes four) seconds to give Steve a head start. Jade didn't like this at all, but it seemed to work out.

For the last four years, both Jade and Steve have lived with my parents. I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Thank you!! I was in China for three of those years, and for the past year, I and my wife Sonja have gone over there almost every weekend.

Recently it was hard for Steve. As many large dogs do, she had hip problems. With only three legs, and with worsening arthritis in her hind legs, she got slower and slower. After a while, she just didn't have as much interest in chasing sticks and balls. That was not her thing anymore. But back then she was still an enthusiastic "pull-the-thing" player. So it was challenging for me, trying to maintain a game of "pull-the-thing" with Steve, while at the same time throwing the ball for Jade. Anyway, we managed.

Later, each time we took her on a walk, she wouldn't go quite as far as the preceding time, before deciding to plop down and rest. She would sit and look at Jade and me, as if to say, "You two go on ahead, I'll wait here for you till you come back." So we did. But if we ever disappeared from her view, she would struggle to her feet and hop slowly along in the direction that we'd gone. As soon as she saw us again, she'd settle down for a bit more rest.

So we got a wagon for her. First we fashioned one out of a couple of hand trucks and a sled:

Later, we bought a great used Radio Flyer wagon, just like one that I had when I was a kid. It made a perfect carriage for the queen:

She loved to ride around in the wagon, and survey her domain.

Recently though, she even started to lose interest in playing "pull-the-thing", and that's when I knew that her age was really catching up with her. I think it hurt her teeth. I would pick up a stick, and walk nonchalantly past her, holding the stick within her reach. She would still make a token attempt to grab it, but that was about all she could manage. I would still, of course, try to pretend that she had wrested it from my grasp, and she'd hop a few feet in the other direction while I "chased" her. Here's our last game of "pull-the-thing", that we played yesterday on the beach:

Yesterday evening, after she had a nice dinner, we euthanized her, and she went away very peacefully.

I think everybody who knew her, loved her. We will miss you, Steve!!

Baltimore marathon

2009-10-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I ran in the Baltimore marathon, and finished with a time of 3:52:28, which I'm very happy with. My goal had been to do it in under four hours, so, voila!

I ran it with two co-workers, Eric Pascarello and Kathi Canese, plus about 3000 other people who managed to finish.

I was struggling in the two weeks leading up to it. I had been having some bad pain in my achille's tendon, and it was interfering with my ability to train long distances. Then, about two weeks ago, I was out for a long run, and not having much heel pain, when all of a sudden I got a brutal cramp in my calf. I made the mistake in the first couple of seconds of trying to run through it, but it got worse very fast, and I almost keeled over. After that, stretching just made it worse, and I had to hobble all the way back home. One week ago the calf was still bothering me, and I was very pessimistic about being able to finish this race.

Then, Friday night, everybody had to go to the exhibition to pick up their race packet, and I happened on a podiatrist at a booth. He recommended I use tiger balm, and so I picked some up that night, and applied two patches the morning of the race. I think that helped, because I ran pretty strong for the first twenty miles or so -- enough to really surprise me.

At mile twenty or twenty-one, I started to feel twinges of cramping, and I immediately backed way off my pace, and tried to run stiff-legged for a while. Not long after that, I came upon a medical tent, and stopped, and asked if they had any tiger balm (figuring that mine had probably already worn off). They said they had icy-hot, which came in a goo, so I slathered some on both calves. I still had some on my hands, and as I started running again, I wiped my hands on my shoulders and the back of my neck, because they were feeling sore, too. Man, was that a mistake! After just about five minutes, I felt like my neck was on fire, and not in a good way.

Anyway, I managed to finish, though the last several miles were as tough as could be imagined. After I crossed the finish line and started walking again, I felt myself teetering more than once. When I got home, I slept for about four hours.

The marathon was great for two big reasons. The first is that the course winds through the whole city, and you really get to see a lot of Baltimore, including some beautiful parks. The second is that almost the whole way, the streets are lined with lots of folks who come out to cheer you on. It really helps. The downside of this marathon is the hills, especially the last one at about mile 22. It was pure torture.

Next: the JFK 50, just 36 days, 9 hours, 13 minutes and 26 seconds away!

Global warming and George Will

2009-10-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

Last week George Will wrote yet another completely whacked-out op-ed column, which appeared in the Washington Post, denying global warming.

I remember reading an earlier column of his from April 2nd, called Climate Change's Dim Bulbs. Back then, I didn't know what to believe. I admit I had a bias towards believing that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) was a real issue and a real problem, but I hadn't done much reading about it. Will writes persuasively, and after finishing his column, I felt frustrated, because I just didn't know where to go to get the truth.

In particular, this quote set me back a bit: "according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998". If that were true, it seemed to me, that was a pretty persuasive argument that climate change was still questionable. Yet, from other quarters, I'd heard that the scientific consensus was firmly established, and getting more and more so all the time. So, what was going on?

Since then, I've done a lot of reading on the web, and have found a few very good sites, and have come to realize how thick and deep is the bullshit that we've been served by George Will and his denier cronies. For a debunking of the particular myth mentioned above, i.e. that global warming stopped in 1998, I highly recommend this very watchable video, in the Climate Crock of the Week series.

The week before last, I noticed this NYT article by Andy Revkin, Momentum on Climate Pact Is Elusive, and found myself shaking my head at a number of the statements in it. Particulary, I was surprised to read him repeating the myth that global temperatures have not risen, or have even been cooling, ever since 1998. As I was reading it, I knew it would provide fodder for the deniers; and sure enough, George Will quoted heavily from it in his column.

Unfortunately, I don't have as much time as I'd like to write about this. But I want to encourage everybody to go watch this latest Crock-of-the-Week video, Birth of a Crock. This documents some of the timeline leading up to many of the misrepresentations in the NYT article, which then got repeated and amplified by Will's. It's mind boggling to see how what the scientist Mojib Latif actually said, was completely twisted and distorted by the denier media.

P.S. One thing I found entertaining was a recent letter to the Post that pointed out that Will's use of "Cassandra" in his column's title was deeply ironic, in that Cassandra was known for accurately predicting the future, but not being believed by those with the power to do anything.

Cell phone freedom

2009-09-25T17:49:00.000-07:00

I just got this email from Consumer Reports Advocacy. I couldn't find it on the web anywhere. I asked permission to reprint it here, but got no response -- well, silence gives consent, I think. Also, at the bottom of the email, the author encourages us to forward it along. So here it is:

If you own a cell phone, the giant telecom companies are likely holding you hostage right now.

They know they can charge you what they want, give you spotty service, and even prevent you from getting the latest technology, because almost all the most popular wireless handsets on the market today are shackled by "exclusivity deals" — meaning if you buy a particular phone, you can only get service from one company.

Want an iPhone? You're stuck with AT&T. Own a Blackberry Storm? You have to deal with Verizon. These exclusive contracts mean your pricey phone is virtually worthless if you try to change companies. And forget about shopping around for a better deal.

Throw off the chains of the telecom giants. Tell Congress to free your phone now!

A few years ago the telecom companies tried to keep you from taking your phone number with you when changing providers. They knew if you had that freedom, you'd walk away from bad or pricey service. But with your help we mounted a campaign to the Federal Communications Commission and Congress to let you keep your number, and the companies were forced to give in.

We want to give your cell phone that same freedom. The FCC just agreed to review these exclusivity deals, and the Department of Justice is reportedly looking into it as well. It's time Congress gets involved and makes sure that when we shop for wireless phones and service, it's in a truly competitive, free and open marketplace.

But the telecom giants are lobbying against this freedom, and we need consumers like you to put the pressure on once again.

E-mail Congress for the freedom to shop for the best deal on your phone AND your phone company.

In Asia, 80 percent of wireless phones are sold outside of a wireless carrier contract. But in the United States, you're either stuck with one company, or your phone is effectively worthless. That's not a free market, that's just un-American.

Sincerely,
Jim Guest

P.S. Know anyone else caught between the phone they want and the company they have? Forward this message so they can weigh in, too!

Having lived in China, I can attest that the last bit is true, and it's been one of the great frustrations of returning here to the U.S.

JFK 50 Update, and why MapMyRun.com sucks

2009-07-18T19:12:00.000-07:00

I'm in!! As of yesterday, my name showed up on the official list of entrants for the JFK 50 Mile run. The registration is already closed -- it filled up in just a few days. So, I guess I'll actually have to do it now. I think I'd feel pretty guilty backing out, since that would be denying the slot from somebody else. Anyway, I have no intention of backing out -- if my body holds up, I'll do it.

I Googled around looking for the actual route of the race, and found this route map on a website I hadn't seen before, MapMyRun.com. I was immediately drawn to it, since the concept seems to be exactly what I've been looking for lately. For the past six months or so I've been plotting my jogging routes on my Bethesda Jogging Routes Google map. I enjoy doing it, but it's tedious, and there are a lot of limitations that make it frustrating.

So I checked out MapMyRun with some hope that it would solve some of those frustrations -- no. The first roadblock was that the site doesn't work, at all, on Firefox. Try bringing up the home page, and all you get are some ads, with no meaningful content from the site itself. So apparently its designed for IE.

My next big complaint is that the site is just too noisy, and, especially, there are way too many ads. I don't mind free web service sites popping up a few ads here and there, but on this site, they practically make it unusable.

I can say one good thing about it, and it's that it does have a nice search feature where you can find runs posted by other people. You can search by location, route length, type of route (bike, run, etc) and keywords. So I used it to find a run that I'm going to try tomorrow - Rock Creek Park 21 Mile, which starts near my apartment, goes along Beach Drive and then Rock Creek Park trail up to Lake Needwood and back. I haven't done that stretch before, so it'll be new to me -- it's nice to be able to find a new route so easily.

So then I wanted to take that route and copy it, and modify it somewhat. I was pleased to find that it is easy to copy maps, so I copied it and renamed it Rock Creek Park to Lake Needwood. I wanted to edit it to accurately reflect what I'll be doing, and that's where I hit some real stumbling blocks.

First of all, this is an out-and-back route, but the starting point is on the wrong end. I want to start and end toward the southern end, but this map has the start/end points at Lake Needwood. There is an "out and back" button on the edit toolbar, so I thought maybe by pressing that, it would "undo" the out-and-back characteristic. No such luck -- I think what it started to do was to make it an out-and-back-and-out-and-back type of route, but I'll never know, because it took too long and I didn't let it finish.

What the "out-and-back" button does for any given route, is just to retrace the route from the end point back to the starting point, but without recording the metadata that this is an "out-and-back" type route now. So that means that you can't undo it. And if you try to adjust the route in the middle, you have to drag two sets of points -- one for each leg of the route. Not very usable, IMO.

The route editing capabilities of this app are still very rudimentary, comparable to what Google Maps gives you, with a few extras like notes, but not much. What is badly needed are more sophisticated ways to edit paths, like, for example, being able to define sub-paths, and then mix and match them. I often find that I want to make a new routes based on combinations of two or more previous routes, but I don't think that anything like that is possible yet.

Anyway, it might be a nominal improvement over just using Google Maps. I'll keep playing with it.

Guess I'll go with the wrench

2009-07-09T14:43:00.000-07:00

So I just signed up for the JFK 50 Mile race in November, and I've been trying to figure out why I felt compelled to do this. I anticipate a lot of pain.

Then, a moment ago, this dialog from "Good Will Hunting" came to mind:

Will: He used to just put a wrench, a stick and a belt on the table and say "Choose."
Sean: I've gotta go with the belt on that one.
Will: I used to go with the wrench.
Sean: Why the wrench?
Will: 'Cause fuck him, that's why.

That about sums it up, I think.

Chinese censors running amok

2009-06-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

In case you aren't up on what's going on over in China lately, you should read this excellent post by Rebecca MacKinnon.

Maybe-its-donuts.org

2009-06-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

I was riding the subway today, and there was an ad pasted up, "Longing for something? Maybe it's God." Below the slogan was the URL of the website of the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, http://www.maybe-its-god.org/.

I think, maybe it's donuts. I just checked, and maybe-its-donuts.org is not taken yet. Who wants to help me put together a website urging people to come back into the loving embrace of the donut-eating habits that they were raised with?

Fanatics and addicts

2009-05-30T19:38:00.000-07:00

Here's an article that's old, but that I just read for the first time, that I'd like to recommend. I came to it by way of FuturePundit (this post). It's about a topic that I think about all the time: how is it that, for instance, two intelligent people with different backgrounds, when presented with the same set of facts, can come to diametrically opposite conclusions? It's about the origins of bias and irrationality.

Birds do it, bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. We all have biases that affect our ability to think rationally. I often wish that some kind of movement would rise up that would teach adherents to think, and show to us where and how thinking goes wrong.

The article is about a study using functional MRI (fMRI) to learn what happens inside the brains of subjects when they are asked to perform certain tasks. During the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, when diehard partisans, both Democrats and Republicans, were asked to evaluate threatening information about their candidates, "none of the [brain] circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged."

Drew Westen, who led the study, summarized the results, "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

The subjects were given statements that revealed contradictions between words and actions for John Kerry, George Bush, and a politically neutral male control figure such as actor Tom Hanks. "Partisans denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate.... Republicans and Democrats did not differ in the way they responded to contradictions for the neutral control targets, such as Hanks, but Democrats responded to Kerry as Republicans responded to Bush."

The areas of the brain that were most active when the subjects were evaluating their own candidates were those associated with emotion, and not with reasoning and logical thinking.

"The investigators hypothesize that emotionally biased reasoning leads to the 'stamping in' or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associating the participant's 'revisionist' account of the data with positive emotion or relief and elimination of distress. 'The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,' Westen says."

The FuturePundit post has some nice money quotes:

"The feeling of partisan loyalty is an obstacle to rational thought. Abandon your partisan loyalties and the effect will be to boost your ability to understand political events."

"Also, distrust the most partisan commentators who defend the leaders of their factions. Their odds of making sense and being correct are lower than for less partisan commentators."

"I feel sorry for the partisans. They are basically drug addicts. But I have greater sympathy for the rest of us who suffer from their actions just as we suffer from the actions of drug addicts."

The gist of the FuturePundit post is that these results make sense from an evolutionary perspective -- that our brains are wired this way to enhance tribal solidarity, and thus the fitness of the tribe in which one belongs. Tribes that had too many independent, rational thinkers weren't cohesive enough, and succumbed to others when attacked, and thus didn't survive. In this regard, evolution works against moderates and rationality. This is still true today -- just look at how the U.S. Congress has gotten progressively more polarized.

What also comes to my mind are the many instances of independent-minded people being branded traitors just for standing up for simple principles. I wish the word "traitor" itself were banished from the world's languages, or at least that it morph into having a positive connotation. (It could happen! Look -- even "the shit" is a compliment now...)

Partisanship, nationalism, and religious extremism are all the same in this respect, I think. And the groups themselves -- the political parties, the governments, and the religions all do their best to manipulate members with emotional appeals to loyalty.

I'm a Democrat, and on-the-whole, pretty liberal, but I have no patience for political advocacy groups of any ideology, because they are always so strident and partisan. For example, I recently signed up to the We Campaign, Al Gore's initiative to fight climate change. I'm wholeheartedly in favor of this cause, but I just can't bear to read any of their propaganda emails. I just don't trust them, because it's obvious that they're so partisan, so I know their chance of being rational and balanced is pretty much nil.

GTD Update

2009-05-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I dug in and really started trying to implement the Getting Things Done system. I just checked the date, and I can't believe it's already been over a month since I last posted about it. The book recommends that you block off two full days to get the system kicked off -- and this past weekend was really the first opportunity I had. Well, the weekend is already over, and I've only just gotten the first step done, which is putting everything into my "in box". I think by now I was supposed to have had everything organized and dispatched. Yikes!

The GTD system is supposed to boost your productivity by reducing the stress of having to deal with so many things on your to-do lists, by setting up a really good and efficient organizing system. The idea is that if you can get the things out of your mind and into your system, then they won't act like little mental parasites and suck your life-spirit away. I don't know if it's ever been studied objectively, but it seems to make sense, and it appeals to me because I'm so anal retentive.

So, as I mentioned, the first step is to go through all of your collected stuff, and throw anything that needs attention into an "inbox". In the book, that sounds easy. But what makes my case a little bit special, I think, is that I'm a total data packrat, and most of my "stuff" is accumulated computer files from over twenty years of half-finished projects. I find it very hard to throw files away, and I've collected a lot of stuff that I just don't need, so my personal folders on my computer have well over 350,000 files (I wish I was kidding). I keep my notes in XML files, and they number just over 1700. Up till now, I've kept "to do" items in those XML files in custom "to do" sections. So part of what I did today was to write a program to extract all those, aggregate them, and print them out - I got about 50 pages.

In the GTD book, Allen recommends putting each to-do item on a separate sheet of paper, but that's out of the question here. These 50 pages probably average about ten things to do per page, so I have somewhere around 500 items total (just from my XML notes files).

The next step outlined in the book is to get "in" to empty. That means going through every item and dispatching it -- either doing it, deferring it, or delegating it. Crucial to success is to get this step done fast, and completely. I'd like to try to get it done within two weeks -- so, no movies for me for a while! (Fortunately, Sonja and I have already gone to see Star Trek and Terminator, and I understand Transformers won't be out till June 24th).

Cheers!

Snee is for Sneedle

2009-05-03T18:36:00.000-07:00

I was studying JavaScript, and wanted to try out doing an HTTP POST from some a snippet of code I was writing, and I so I searched the Internet for any random web page where I could perform a POST and get an echo back of the data that I posted. In one of those fortuitous twists of fate, I found one at http://www.snee.com/xml/crud/posttest.cgi. Curious, I looked at what sort of site this was ... and, oh, the places we'll go!

Their about page discusses the origin of the domain name, inspired by Dr. Seuss's On Beyond Zebra!, a book that I vaguely remember from my childhood. (Text is here).

And when I say vaguely, I mean not at all.

Now, lately I've been fascinated by weird and exotic characters, especially as they relate to Unicode. I don't understand it this fascination, but it seems that the more obscure and useless, the more I'm interested in it (I think that's why I like Chinese -- hah!). In OBZ, Seuss describes the twenty (not 26, as described in the Snee group page) little-known letters that come after zee: yuzz (, ), wum (, ), um (, ), humpf (, ), fuddle (, ), glikk (, ), nuh (, ), snee (, ), quan (, ), thnad (, ), spazz (, ), floob (, ), zatz (, ), jogg (, ), flunn (, ), itch (, ), yekk (, ), vroo (, ), hi! (, ), and a final letter that you can name yourself (, ).

I nearly fell off my chair when I read that these characters even have their own Unicode code points. Alas, it turns out that these assignments are not official, but are given by the ConScript Unicode Registry, a group working independently to assign codes for weird and bizarre scripts (including, for example, Klingon and elvish) to the private use area of Unicode. The codification of Klingon should be a big boon to Damian Conway and the whole Perl community.

Now, we just need to find (or devise) a font for these little bastards....

JSAN - The JavaScript Archive Network

2009-04-23T19:53:00.001-07:00

I've been checking JSAN out recently. It's supposed to be a repository of user-contributed JavaScript modules loosely patterned after CPAN, but it's in really bad shape -- the website has been badly neglected of late.

I just posted this comment to the user's group with comments and suggestions.

GTD - Some impressions

2009-04-19T21:13:00.000-07:00

I've been working steadily through GTD, as I said I would. It's going slowly, because I find this kind of book very hard to read, and also because I'd like to read it carefully rather than just skim it. Anyway, I'm up to page 70, and my impression so far is mixed.

In many ways it's the typical self-help book -- not very well written and full of some extravagant assurances and claims. The claims often seem great when you read them, especially if you really want to believe. There are inspirational quotes on every page, including the required pretentious eastern-mystical ones to give it that erudite flair; for example,

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. -- Shunryu Suzuki

O-kay, whatever. Some of it is the kind of sloppy writing that gets under my skin:

Now describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation.... It could be as simple as "Take the Hawaii vacation," "Handle situation with customer X," ...

I'm sorry, but those examples just aren't descriptions, IMO.

Here's an example of the kind of way-too-cute quote that makes me want to puke:

Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enought to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs. -- Vaclav Havel

Does anybody over 13 really like this kind of drivel?

Oh, and no self-help book would be complete without a healthy dollop of mixed metaphors, like this doozy when he was talking about people's short term memory as if it were computer RAM:

Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of things I like about it. It is very practical. He doesn't dwell too long on his pet theories of How Things Work, before he gets down to offering very concrete advice. From what I've read so far, it's just discussing how to organize your "to-do" lists and all the thousands of bits of information that we all have to juggle everyday. Most of the advice, so far, rings true for me.

I'm still on the introductory sections. The real how-to material starts in chapter four, on page 83. Then, I'll start trying to figure out MonkeyGTD.

Getting started with Getting Things Done

2009-04-12T20:48:00.000-07:00

I've started to read GTD, and since Bob posted this comment here a few days ago, I've thought that I should track my progress on this goal by writing regular blog posts, for the benefit of ~~all mankind~~ Bob.

First I'll write a couple of words about the problem I'm trying to solve.

I'm an ambitious (and vain) fellow, but my whole life, I've had the feeling that I lack focus in my goals. I've accomplished a few things that I've set out to do, but more often than not, I start a project, only to lose interest halfway through, and then drop it. Then I'm left with this hollow feeling of having let myself down, and in a few cases, other people who were looking to me for results and/or leadership.

The pattern is this:

I get an idea for a new project, and get very excited about it;
In a manic phase, I make great leaps of progress for about the first week or two;
Either I hit a snag, or else I get another idea for an even cooler project, or both;
Even though I'll keep it on my to-do list for a long while, my work on project #1 drops precipitously -- I basically never look at it again;
Rinse, repeat, ....

I love building things, and programming in particular, and I've always looked on with envy at the great figures at the tops of their games, like Steve Ciarcia (back in the days of Byte magazine) and nowadays all the great open-source contributors and book authors. I don't think for a minute that I'll ever be famous, but I do think that in my life I've had one or two really good ideas, and I've even made one interesting (I think) open-source contribution.

I know a little about my limitations, and some of the things working against me are: my memory is not very good, so if I'm away from a language or a piece of software for a bit, I get rusty quickly; I need a lot of sleep; I have other hobbies besides programming, like running and Chinese, that I'm not willing to compromise on. So that doesn't leave me with much time to devote to computer projects.

So that's the backdrop. Last week I was looking on the Internet (again) for "to-do list" software (I've tried lots of options, and in fact, one of my projects .... okay, let's not go there.) I hadn't heard of the "Getting Things Done" book, but I happened on MonkeyGTD, and liked it right away, because it's a Tiddlywiki, and it seems pretty slick, and it got good reviews. That's how I found the book, and most of the things I've read about it so far are positive. So, we'll give it a try.

I don't have high expectations -- I've seen and tried lots of self-help books in the past, and even the good ones never live up to the hype, in my experience. I don't expect my productivity to go through the roof, but if it can just help me to learn to stay focused on one project at a time, and see them through, it will have been worth it.

I'm going to go ahead and read it cover-to-cover and to assiduously apply his suggestions. I promise I'll report back here regularly.

Very disappointed by Google Maps

2009-04-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

I've been had a lot of problems with Google Maps, and I'm not trying to do anything sophisticated with it at all, just draw lines. I've come to the conclusion that this feature just doesn't work.

I just tried to add another line to the map that I linked to in my last post. Drawing it initially wasn't a problem, but then I tried to edit it a bit, and that's when things went haywire. I right clicked on a spot of the line, and selected "add point". I then moved the point, and the point seemed to move, but the line did not. Anyway, to make a long story short, it seems that the point got added not at the spot in the original line where I indicated, but at some other, completely random place in the line. Adding two points and moving them put this huge crink in my line from somewhere near the beginning to very near the end, and then back.

I also noticed last week when I tried to trace the bike ride that Sonja and I did to D.C., that when I tried to change the line style, the line disappeared completely. It came back after some time, but it was a random and vexing problem.

I just don't get how something so widely used and sophisticated and advanced can be so broken.

New Year's Resolutions

2009-04-07T21:52:00.000-07:00

New Year's Resolutions

The main purpose of this post is to explain my sorry lack of posting, and give a quick run-down of what's going on. I'm forcing myself to put this post up tonight, even though it's a mess.

At the beginning of this year, I actually made two resolutions and one plan. My resolutions were:

Do all my repetitions every day, and
Write one blog post per week

The plan was to get my shit together -- to try to organize all my computer data and my web activities. I had a nebulous timeline, planning to spend the first third of the year working on organizing my PC, then second third working on my web presence, and the third third -- I hadn't thought that far ahead.

I'm happy to say that I've stuck to the first resolution pretty well, and with a new job, getting married, and a lot of things going on in my life, it hasn't been easy. A couple of times I considered giving up on Supermemo -- it takes about an hour and half a day -- but that's tantamount to giving up all of the Chinese that I've learned over the last several years, so I won't do it.

The blog posting, though, obviously, has not happened. Yet, even though I've given up on posting, there isn't a weekend that goes by that I don't think about it. I had decided on a deadline every week of Sunday evening; and every Sunday, I think that it's time to get something out, but it just doesn't happen. What I need to do is to try to write smaller, more focused, and less polished posts. Not that my posts have ever been that shiny and new, but in the interest of getting them out, I've got to let go of them while they're still half-baked.

These are are of the post ideas that I've got in the oven:

My new dream job at NCBI
A typical week in my new life in America
My amazing running route around Bethesda
Sonja's Visa trials and tribulations
JSSG, a Javascript Study Group that I started at work, and some notes about learning Javascript (which is a little like learning to read, i'n't it?)
What I'd really like to be learning: Scala
Ideographic Description Characters (IDCs), the Grass Mud Horse, and a quasi-baked Javascript project I have in mind with IDCs and SVG
Progress on the plan I alluded to above, my new organization for my PC. Finally getting privacy, security, data integrity, and convenience in their proper places, using Password Safe, unison, Areca, and True Crypt
Cocoon and Forrest and my attempts at getting back into working with them
A constant stream of interesting topics about Chinese and China, suggested by Sonja. Most recently, Sun Dongdong's insensitive comments and the mother and daughter chased off the campus of Wuhan University for wearing kimono's while going to see the Cherry Blossoms.
Going with Sonja to see the Cherry Blossoms here in Washington, D.C. We rode our bikes down the Capital Crescent Trail on a near-perfect Spring day.

I've decided though, that my to-do list is completely out of control, and so I gave myself another thing to do, and that is to read Getting Things Done. When I've done that, I want to start using MonkeyGTD, which is a
Tiddlywiki, and therefore cool beans.

I am an atheist!

2009-04-02T22:21:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to add my voice to Ryan's, and declare myself proudly. I just spent the last hour and half writing this annoying comment.

Help the police!

2009-01-27T15:22:00.001-08:00

This video is pretty funny. I recommend watching it while reading along with these lyrics.

Data Security and Privacy, Happy New Year!

2009-01-25T21:52:00.000-08:00

First: Happy Chinese New Year!!!

I want to write a series of posts about data security and privacy. It's something I've been working on feverishly lately, trying to figure out what software to use, and how, to backup my data and to secure private data where appropriate.

I'm a data packrat, and over the years I've collected an enormous amount of crap, which defies all of my best efforts at cullage. Plus, I use my computer for a lot of daily things -- the same things most people do -- like storing pictures and music. Another thing I use my computer for every day, for studying, is Supermemo. If my Supermemo data were lost, even if only a few weeks of it, it would be pretty devastating.

So, I got another lesson in doing timely backups two weeks ago, when, the night before my wedding, my laptop's hard drive completely crashed. The to-do item "backup computer" had been on my list for about a month. I was panic-strickend, of course. The computer refused to boot. I won't go into too much detail, but I wrestled with Windows for a while, and at one point, it boot successfully for a little while, allowing me to copy off some of the stuff that I was most worried about. But, before long, the machine crashed again. From then on, Windows was dead.

What I'm talking about is a three-month old Dell Inspiron 1420, so the hard drive really had no business going bad. I fiddled around with the discs that came with the computer, but was vexed to find that none of them let me boot into Windows from the CD. There's a diagnostic disc, and a Windows Install disc, but the days when a boot disc was included with a new machine are long gone, I suppose. Later, I found out about a tool called Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE), which lets you create a boot disc from your Windows install disc, but that was later.

At the advice of friend named Eddie at my new job, I downloaded Knoppix and burned it onto CD, took it home, and tried it out. I was able to boot the machine into Knoppix, but for the first few times I tried, it refused to mount the C: drive. I have no idea why, but it succeeded on about the third try, and I was able to copy all of my stuff (I thought) onto a removable disc, through a USB port. I love Knoppix!

During this time I was in touch with Dell, and I have to say that I'm very satisfied with their service. I contacted them through online chat first, and then a technician called me, and was helpful and sharp. He had me run hardware diags, and when the hard disc failed, he didn't hesitate, and arranged to send me a replacement drive, which arrived the very next day.

The next step was wiping the old hard drive before sending it back. I hadn't talked about that with the guy at Dell, but it occurred to me that the old drive had all my passwords, and lots of other personal information. One doesn't have to be Edison Chen to feel that some stuff is worth safeguarding. But, how to wipe the disc?

Knoppix only boots NTFS partitions as read-only. I could have used the Windows installation disc to install Windows on it, and then try to wipe it, but I had no idea if that would work, since the drive was bad, after all. I finally found this Knoppix hack that allowed me to "shred" the disc at the hardware level - so the fact that it was NTFS was irrelevant. It's interesting to read that page, and other pages on shred, because the level of paranoia is so high. Of course, the writers of those kinds of tools are supposed to be paranoid, and one would expect them to be, but most of the things they write about are pretty far-fetched.

Or are they? The more you read, the more you believe. I especially find myself more and more worried about the capabilities and intentions of large, powerful, autocratic governments with little or no transparency, in countries with no independent court system and no long history of grass-roots government opposition. I have a lot of friends in China, and some of them are moderately anti-government, and I get very worried about them and their future. Here in the U.S., at least we have the expectation that the government will respect citizen's privacy, and we have a (more or less) independent media and court system that can sometimes act as a check on government misbehavior. But in China, there's none of that.

So, I shredded the drive and sent it back. As I mentioned, the new drive came right away, and I plugged it in, and moved my personal files back onto it, with no major problems, until about a week later.

At the wedding, I had promised to send our officiant a Chinese song that we had talked about, and I had described to her. But when I went to look for it where I thought it was on my hard drive, it was not there. Then I noticed that a lot of the directories under my "Chinese" folder looked pretty sparse. I eventually figured out that none of the files on my old system that had any Chinese characters (hanzi) in their names were copied over by Knoppix. Aiy? I not so love Knoppix now!

Very luckily, though, all of those files were still in my old backup from a month and half ago. The next challenge was finding just that special subset of files. They were scattered all over among my stuff. How to do and exhaustive search, among hundreds of thousand of files, for those with hanzi in their names? Here's the trick I hit upon. My version of Windows here is English, and the DOS window (just like Knoppix, I guess) doesn't recognize hanzi. When you do "dir" in the DOS window, it substitutes question marks wherever there would have been a character. So, from the root of my backup directory, I entered "dir /s/b >junk.txt", and then searched the junk.txt file for question marks. Worked great.

I'm going to write more on this general topic, and hopefully not all my posts will be this dry and boring. I'm finding a lot of interesting and cool tools, and I think some of them could be of use to other people.

All married up!

2009-01-14T14:20:00.001-08:00

Hey, I made a New Year's resolution to post more, but so far it seems to be going the way of most New Year's resolutions, only with more rapidity.

This latest event has been a long time coming. Sonja and I decided, at just about this time last year, to apply for a fiance visa, come to the U.S., and get married. And, well, that's just what we did!

My brother-in-law, Brad, put up pictures here on SmugMug.

I'm relieved, delighted and still a little bit light-headed. In the days leading up to the ceremony, everything got more and more stressful. Even now, I still have a to-do list that seems to keep growing, no matter how diligently I work at it. But in the end, everything went smoothly, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm fantastically lucky to have found such a cool chick to marry, and to be given a new lease on life.

In fact, not just lucky about her, but I think we were inordinately lucky about many of the arrangements. We were married at The Inn at Brookeville Farms, which was beautiful, and had a perfect room with a fireplace. They let us get there early and decorate the room with some Christmas lights, which raised a few eyebrows, but (I think) looked nice.

We got the wedding cake from Peace of Cake, on the Eastern Shore, at an amazing price. One thing I discovered (or, 说实话, was reminded of) was that when shopping, every time you mention the word "wedding", the price roughly triples. Peace of Cake was the only place we found that offered a cake at a price that was reasonable. (It also happened to be yummy.)

I really have to thank my parents and sister and brother-in-law for all the help they gave us. We wanted a small, simple wedding, and left the planning until the last minute, but I was in complete denial about how much work was involved. They did a lot to help. My parents are amazing, because this whole past month, they've also been driving back and forth taking care of my aunt (my father's sister) who got very ill about a month ago and has been in and out of the hospital.

The officiant was a lovely woman named Nancy Montagna who performed the ceremony as a volunteer for the Washington Ethical Society. Neither Sonja nor I is religious at all, and the ceremony Nancy gave was profound and moving in a very secular way. I noticed a few eyes welling up when I stole some glances about the room. Unfortunately, there aren't many pictures of the actual ceremony, because Brad was both the photographer and the best man, and during the ceremony, he was busy with other things.

The Inn provided some flowers for the table, but the bouquets and the flowers on the wedding cake were all from Safeway, purchased the day before! I know, I know, but they were nice! We really did try to scrimp and save for this wedding, and I'm actually a little bit proud of that. After living in China and coming back here, I'm still subject to getting sticker-shock at least three or four times a day. Sonja made the bouquets with my niece Patty.

The music for the ceremony and the most of the reception was played on an iPod with a Bose sound-dock (also borrowed from Brad). The sound was great, and it was pretty easy to use during the event, but this was one of the major sources of stress for me on the day before. I want to know -- why do people like iPods? I am decidedly unimpressed. It seems to me a simple MP3 player would have been much easier.

To get this thing to work, I had to first install iTunes, then import all my music into it, and then sync it up with the iPod. All that would have been fine, except that absolutely nothing worked as it was supposed to. First to go was my laptop. (I can't actually blame Apple for this, but) my hard drive completely crashed on Friday night, right after I installed iTunes. I've since verified what I thought at the time: that it was a hardware crash, and not the result of a virus.

But even after getting iTunes up and running on my parents' computer, it was a nightmare to use. I think I'm a little bit spoiled, because for a long time I've used MediaMonkey to manage my music, and nothing else comes close.

After the main event, Sonja and I took off and stayed Sunday night at the Blair Mountain Bed and Breakfast, which I can't rave about enough. Sonja took scads of pictures there, and I'll get them up on my SmugMug page, soon, I hope. We stayed in Laura's Dream Suite, and it was opulent, and affordable (only $129!).

It even had a bidet, which I'm embarrassed to admit, I'm still, even at this age, not sure how to use (or, wasn't, until I found this image:)

The next day we went skiing at Ski Roundtop, and I got to teach Sonja how to ski. I warned her ahead of time how difficult and grueling it can be to learn, and it was all that. She almost gave up too soon, but didn't, and finally started to learn how to make pretty S-turns. Every time we got to the bottom, I was ready to hear her say she wanted to quit, but instead, she'd say "Let's go again"! By mid-afternoon she was getting pretty good at it. Before we left, I went on a couple ♦ runs on my own, and it was sweet. There was nobody on the mountain! I was shocked, even though we went on a Monday, at how few people there were. I wonder if it's because of the economy.

So, that's the update. Now, we still have to frantically apply for her Adjustment Of Status (AOS) in pursuit of her green card.

The Crash

2008-12-30T21:13:00.000-08:00

Just want to point everybody to an excellent series in the Washington Post on the recent financial meltdown. I've been reading it and find it not only educational, but captivating.

Classroom material should get proper attributions

2008-10-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

I think I've mentioned here before that lately, since coming back to the U.S., I've been taking a class at the Confucius Institute at Maryland University. On the whole I think it's very good. The teacher is charming, friendly, and bright, the level is just about right, and the number of students is small.

We don't use a textbook. Instead, the teacher, 崔老师, pulls stuff off the Internet and sends it to us as emails. The last couple of times, it has struck me that he doesn't give the material any attribution. Before the last class, I struggled a little bit with whether I should confront him in class about it. I finally decided on a half-measure, and towards the end of class, suggested that it would be nice if, when he sends these out, he could tell us where he got them from, so that, in case we wanted to do more research, we could look them up easily. He seemed to agree. But then, just today, he did the exact same thing again: two essays, no attributions.

So I looked them up on my own. It was a bit of a struggle, since I'm really discovering that what I've read elsewhere is true: on the Chinese-language Internet, copying articles without attribution, or even outright plagiarism, is fairly rampant. Especially for the second of these two, I got lots of hits, and it was pretty hard to tell where it came from originally. I went with the page that I found that had the earliest date. Anyway, here's the results:

- The first article was titled "五件日常事，不问他不说——美国百万富翁的真实生活"
I believe this was originally from here, author: 黄明, website: 多维, original title: "百万富翁说不出口的 '秘密'". The original version lacks my teacher's version's first paragraph.

- The second article: "人生就是五张纸"
The earliest version I've seen of this one is here, author 尹娟, original title: "管好五张纸，幸福一辈子。保单、存折、房产证管好几张纸能养活一辈子？" The original version includes several paragraphs at the end that are not present in my teacher's version.

This time, I sent him an email response, asking directly if he could include attributions, and also giving him the above results. Let's see if that makes a difference. If not, I'm going to be forced to start encroaching on his precious face.

Obama for President

2008-10-23T22:38:00.000-07:00

Here are two good articles:

Why Barack Obama is Winning, and
Washington Post endorsement

5000 years.... right!

2008-10-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I found myself in the midst of another of a set of recurring arguments that I have, this one over whether or not China has "5000 years of history". I was at a book club meeting at the Confucius Institute of Maryland with a bunch of Chinese people (I was the only white guy). The topic was the Confucian Analects, and it was all in Mandarin. It was a bit over my head, to tell you the truth, and during the main discussion, I only understood about 50%.

In events like this, as the only white guy, I often attract attention that I don't particularly like. Any other westerner learning Chinese can attest to this -- not to put too fine a point on it, the Chinese often treat us like circus sideshow freaks, or like performing monkeys. So I resolved to sit in the back and try to keep my (often unruly) mouth shut.

That plan went out the window when I heard a guy from the other corner say that, look, China has 5000 years of history, and America has only 200 or 300 years of history, so how is it that America developed so fast? Now, I can't remember the larger point that he was trying to make. As soon as I heard that, though, I said, "Well, that's just not right." I thought I was saying it under my breath, but the room had gotten silent at exactly that moment, and everybody heard it, and they all turned to look at me.

I did a very poor job of defending myself. I did mention that I thought his number for China's history was too long, and that America's was too short. Also, I managed to say that America's cultural heritage is from Europe, and therefore much longer. It's still very hard for me to argue in Mandarin. The room had its fair share of big talkers, so the conversation quickly spun away from my grasp. Sigh.

Anyway, for those who are interested, here are a couple of links that do a better job of exploring this topic than I'm capable of:

5000 years - blog post on The Useless Tree. He gets a lot of his material from comments on the next linked-to post here from the Peking Duck (note that his link to this post is broken)

5,000 Years of Civilization - blog post from the Peking Duck. All the meat here is in the comments.

My opinion is that this claim is just another tiresome manifestation of rampant nationalism. Especially when they say that the U.S. has only a few hundred years history, it also displays a staggering ignorance of the richness of U.S. and Western history and culture, especially the deep philosophical underpinnings of our politics and government. Unlike Jeremiah in the comments on the Peking Duck post, I feel that it is worthwhile confronting people on this point, even at the risk of hurting their pride (rather, one might say because it has the potential of hurting their pride).

Random links

2008-10-22T20:03:00.000-07:00

Here's some stuff I've been reading lately, some of it may be interesting:

The Debt Trap - a powerful series of articles and miscellaneous multi-media gadgets about the huge and ever-increasing debt hole that Americans (and others) have dug themselves into.

Uyghurs, Chinese Muslims, etc. - on my favorite blog, Gene Expression - this is a nice succinct post answering the question "Just who are the Uighurs, anyway?"

方舟子的 blog - a blog by a science activist named Fang Zhou. I've just started trying to read some of his posts, and they look very interesting. Fang Zhou is very active in taking to task pseudo-scientists in China, of which there are hordes. As bad as America is with its religiosity infecting everything, China just might be worse. Helped along by the government and the current nationalistic fervor, there's a pervasive veneration for traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy that lacks any scientific basis. I tried to combat it sometimes in my English classes, but was usually overwhelmed. I'm trying to develop the Mandarin vocabulary so I can take the argument to their home turf. To get an idea of what this is about, read this post on Danwei (in English).

Baidu: be evil, be very evil ...

2008-10-11T21:47:00.000-07:00

Here's a polemical attack on Baidu, China's biggest search engine (by "maths"). While I was in China, I very rarely met any Chinese person who didn't use Baidu as their primary, or only, search engine. This article is mostly about their MP3 search feature, and how they continue to blatantly violate intellectual property laws. The author starts frothing at the mouth towards the end, but he lays out some pretty compelling evidence that Baidu is intentionally and systematically flouting the law (and all principles of business ethics, one might add).

One of the things people often say in defense of Baidu is that their search function just links to the music, and that they don't actually host it, and that they have no way of knowing if the files they link to are pirated or not. But The evidence indicates that they not only host the files, but that they are use devious techniques to try to cover their tracks. Also, for example, if a record company complains to them about a particular host address that is providing their songs (unbeknownst to the record company, the host is actually one of Baidu's own) then they just move the file onto another secret server somewhere and so the search results bring up a different URL, but the availability of the song was never interrupted.

For example, in the article above, he puts up this screen shot, which shows the result of an MP3 search. The host is given by IP address (218.6.9.76), which is very strange to begin with. I did a reverse lookup of that address, and the results indicate that this address is not mapped to any domain name: "This IP address range is not registered in the ARIN database .... APNIC is the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia Pacific region."

Quote maths: "This begets the question of why any third party site (mysterious or otherwise) would risk prosecution for hosting illegal music files with no recourse to any revenues from advertising or other means when it can only be accessed via the Baidu mp3 search engine where the only beneficiary of this process seems to be Baidu. That the mysterious sites are actually closely related domains following a pattern and the illegal music files are moved around in an organized manner ...." He goes on, but his point is clear, and I'm convinced.

He talks a lot about some other thuggish practices, such as removing companies sites from search results if those companies don't accede to Baidu's whims, for example taking down negative stories about Baidu.

For fun, I just decided to compare the results of a couple of searches on Baidu and Google. I did one Chinese search and one English. The results where interesting, interpret them however you want:

"洛杉矶", Los Angeles, in Chinese:
Baidu:
1. A Dangdang page selling a book by that title (probably pirated, haha). Note that the link goes through a Baidu PHP script which redirects to the Dangdang site, so Baidu can keep track of how many hits that site gets (so they know how much to charge, presumably).
2. The Baike article on the city. Baike is Baidu's answer to Wikipedia, and it is flourishing largely because access to the Chinese wikipedia in China has been very sporadic. It has only recently become re-accessible, because of pressure from international journalists during the olympics.
3. The Chinese consulate in Los Angeles
4. The Chinese wikipedia article

Google:
1. Google maps for Los Angeles
2. A site chineseinla.com
3. The Chinese wikipedia article
4. News results from news.google.com

"Cleveland, Ohio"
Baidu:
1. An escort service! This is wacky, because the link is to a Google notebooks page. Why this site gets to the top of the list is hard to understand -- great SEO design, I guess!
2. A random guy's batch of pictures on fotki.com. This photo album has the title "Cleveland, Ohio", so there you go.
3. A page with the lyrics of a song titled "Cleveland, Ohio".
4. Another random uninteresting site

Google:
1. Google maps
2. A news site http://www.cleveland.com/
3. The wikipedia article
4. The city government site.

Lessons (granted this is a small sample size, but anyway):
- Searches in English on Baidu are completely useless.
- Both Baidu and Google are tending towards putting more of their own sites towards the top (Baike, Google maps, Google news)
- Yet Baidu's results are not as useful as Google's, even when the searches are in Chinese. For one thing, the Baike articles are always crap (unless they're copied verbatim from the Chinese wikipedia, which they often are).

Oh! Here's an interesting twist -- it just occured to me to try Google.com.cn, for 洛杉矶:
1. The Baike article on the city (!)
2. A Xinhua story
3. chineseinla.com
4. news.google.com
So, no link to the Chinese wikipedia, even though as of the time I write this, it's still accessible. Instead, they put the Baike article right at the top. Well, there goes some of the support for a grand Baidu conspiracy, right out the window.

Anyway, it is very worrisome, to me, that both these companies are relied upon so heavily for what should be unbiased search results, yet they're getting their fingers into everything. I'm sure that so far, Google is less evil than Baidu, but how will we ever know if they continue to be?

Community translation site

2008-10-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

I just discovered a website called Yeeyan 译言 (also in English), which looks good. It's a community that translates news stories originally in English into Mandarin. If been on the lookout for sources of material for the new Mandarin Corner group. One story I found already that I'd like to do a discussion plan on is about vegetarianism. There's a lot of other great content. Plus I like the site design: for any article, there are multiple "views" -- just Chinese, just English, or both languages side-by-side.

2008-10-05T17:39:00.001-07:00

For those of you studying Mandarin (or perhaps you're just curious how to say "melanine" in Chinese), I wrote up a "lesson plan" on the recent tainted milk-powder scandal.

It's based on an interesting blog post, the title of which might be translated "How many more food scandals (will there be)?". At the end, she makes mention of a few famous scandals from the past, including one of my favorites, the cardboard baozi.

Enjoy!

Mandarin Corner

2008-10-02T10:28:00.001-07:00

I and a Chinese friend of mine are trying to get a new group started, called Mandarin Corner (中文论坛). In pursuit of that, I've been trying to put together a website here. It's still fairly embryonic, but it's starting to get just a little bit of traffic.

The motivation for this came partly from my experience as a freelance English teacher over there and partly from discussions with my friend Halson.

When I decided to set up my own English classes, I chose to make it exclusively for upper-intermediate to advanced level speakers, and set it up as a speaking (口语) class. Before that, I had been teaching for the various private English schools, that was the kind of class that I enjoyed teaching most. It's not so much teaching as it is getting together with friends and chatting for a couple of hours. Plus, I think I was giving them really valuable speaking practice, and teaching them a lot of useful vocabulary. I'm convinced that the best way to learn a new language is to be forced to use the words in converstation.

That contrasted sharply with the classes I attended as a student at Xiamen University (Xia Da). Those were the traditional lecture-style -- one teacher standing in the front and twenty or thirty bored students listening. I often complained, to whomever would listen, about the lack of speaking practice. Even our 口语 classes were crap -- they were almost always dominated by reading and learning the lesson in the book, with maybe a little bit of conversation at the end of class, if there was time.

I think the reason that my vocabulary has gotten fairly decent is only 30% because of Xia Da, but 70% because I religiously use Supermemo. Another thing about the classes that I taught, I tried to make the topics interesting (you be the judge, you can see most of them here and here). That also contrasted sharply (very) with the lessons I got at Xia Da. And so, I've yearned for this kind of discussion group for myself, to practice Mandarin.

My friend Halson is a third-year student at Xiada. He's one of the most open-minded Chinese guys I've ever come across (which makes me worried for his future). Before I left China, I encouraged him to think about setting up this kind of discussion group among the foreign students of the Overseas Education College at Xia Da, and he was excited about the idea. So over the last month and a half, since I've been back in the States, we decided to cooperate.

A final motivation is that I'm keen to learn more about setting up and running a website. Every attempt I've made so far has been pretty sad. I'd like to get a job in this field, and so I'm looking to start building a little portfolio.

I hope the website can become a useful tool for people wanting to learn and practice Mandarin. I'd really like to build up a library of "lesson plans", sort of like the ones I have on my old classes Google Group, but better. I definitely want to encourage collaboration and sharing of the plans. And maybe, down the road, we can incorporate some automated learning tools like those in ChinesePod.

Speaking of ChinesePod -- that site is great! But, when I was in China, I never used it, because I was always up to my neck in homework from school. Since coming home, though, I've been listening daily. They're not only great lessons in themselves, but they also usually have cool topics that are both interesting and useful in everyday life. Poking around on their site, I discovered that up until very recently, they released all their lessons under the Creative Commons license. A lot of them would make good starting points for developing lesson plans for MandarinCorner. So, I grabbed a sampling of them, which includes all their old Upper Intermediate and Advanced ones, and threw them up on our site. I hope this also helps attract a few people. I also hope it doesn't piss off the great guys at Praxis. Another thing, the list page I have right now is just sticking out by itself, I need to integrate it into the forum. So don't tell anybody about it yet.

I wrote some more about the site in the welcome message and also here and here.

Big Dog

2008-09-22T20:44:00.000-07:00

This Big Dog video is just about the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

Big Dog is a four-legged robot, that walks up hills with hundreds of pounds on its back, walks over rubble, over ice and snow, and keeps its balance.

What I found most interesting was that, while watching, I couldn't help but think of it as alive. The way that it moves seems very much like an animal. There's a point in the video where a guy walks up and gives it a hard shove with his foot, trying to knock it over, and when I watched that, I really felt sorry for the little feller!

New group: Mandarin corner 中文论坛

2008-09-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

Here I'll copy a little announcement that I sent out to a bunch of friends and organizations that I know, about a new group that I and a friend of mine are trying to start. With the kind of blog traffic I get, I'm sure this will be an effective medium of promotion. So, here it is:

Hello everybody! 大家好! I and a Chinese friend of mine have started a new group called 中文论坛 Mandarin Corner, and a website to go along with it. Their are two main goals of this group: to give people learning Mandarin Chinese a chance to practice talking about topics and to build their vocabularies; and to promote cross-cultural dialog and understanding. If you are a student of Mandarin, or if you're a Chinese person who is interested in participating, please read on!

There are two chapters of our little organization: one in Xiamen, China, and one in Maryland, U.S.A. If both of these locations is inconvenient to you, you could consider starting your own "chapter" -- we're hopeful that our group will grow over time. Just let me know if you're interested in this.

In Xiamen, they have already had their first discussion group, and the topic was travelling. You can read their "lesson plan" for that discussion here. This was written by my (aforementioned) friend Halson (张海淼), who's a student at Xiamen University. He's leading the group at the Overseas Education College there, and encouraging foreign students from many different countries to participate.

Here in Maryland, we'll have our first meeting this coming Saturday morning, September 27th, from 10 AM - 12 noon, at the Stamp Student Union in the cafeteria area. We will either talk about travelling (using the same lesson plan), or the famous novel "Journey to the West" 《西游记》 (lesson plan coming soon). The location might change in the future, so stay tuned.

These discussions are aimed at intermediate or above level speakers. We hope the discussions will be at least 95% in Mandarin. Students at this level should find the Intermediate level Chinesepod lessons a little bit too easy, and the Upper-Intermediate level lessons should be just about right. If you're not familiar with Chinesepod, give these a try. Here are two Intermediate lesson podcasts (they should be a little bit too easy):
- Sneezing
- Fat Camp

And here are two Upper-Intermediate lessons (should be just about right):
- World Cup Football
- Bargaining

Topics won't be limited, i.e. they can include controversial and political things, so we would ask that everyone come with a very tolerant attitude.

Chinese people are more than welcome to participate! We hope that in this group we'll discuss a lot of very interesting topics; so more than just practicing Mandarin, it will be a good way to learn new things and make new friends.

If you want to know more, visit our Welcome post on our website, or send me an email.

Best wishes to all! 加油！
Chris 马凯瑞 ("Klortho" on the website forum)
voldrani(at)gmail.com (replace the "(at)" with "@")

Don't be so pusillanimous!

2008-09-07T08:39:00.000-07:00

This video is a treat:

SmugMug

2008-09-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered a new photo-sharing service that I think is awesome, called SmugMug. It's a little bit expensive, but it's interface and features are so slick and elegant that I've gone ahead and signed up. You can try it free for 14 days.

They have a referal program, which is a little like a pyramid scheme, so if you do decide to sign up, please use my referrer number dj94OZg4yMqDg, which will save you $5, and also save me some money on future renewals.

I'm working on putting together a Xiamen picture gallery from pictures that I took there on my last couple of weeks. I haven't yet finished all the captions. I took a lot of pictures of signs and propaganda posters, because I find them interesting. I also took pictures of the 老百姓 ("old 100 surnames" i.e. common people) when doing so wasn't too obtrusive.

I also have a gallery of pictures from this past Labor Day weekend, which I spent in Maryland at my parents' house, with the fam.

Some of the things I like about the service:
- I get my own URL: klortho.smugmug.com
- It's really easy to upload pictures from Picasa, and captions are transfered with the pictures
- The original size photos are always available, as well as different-size versions of the same photo, from easily constructed URLs.
- The tools for organizing galleries and photos, that I've played with so far, are all very intuitive and easy to access, and finally
- The online help is actually useful!

Coming home

2008-09-02T18:03:00.000-07:00

I've been back in the U.S. for almost two weeks now, taking faltering steps into the next yawning cavern of my life. I got brutally sick, starting on the plane from Beijing to New York, making that by far the worst single traveling experience I've ever had. The consensus is that I got Salmonella poisoning, probably from eating a raw egg a few days before I left China (I would often AGA (against my girlfriend's advice) put one into banana milkshakes that I made, and that she wisely refused to drink. Hey, Rocky drank raw eggs, didn't he?) So on the plane I started to get chills. I had a window seat, so I couldn't get out very often, but I also couldn't sleep and I felt more and more cold, until I was curled up in a fetal position on my seat, completely covered (including my head) with two airplane blankets, and shivering uncontrollably. After arriving home, I spent two days in bed, alternating between periods of fever and chills, and periods of sweating profusely. Then it took another three or four days before I felt halfway normal, trying to recover simultaneously from Salmonella and jetlag. So, note to self: next time flying halfway around the world, do not eat raw eggs for at least one week prior to travel.

Now, I'm still having a massive dose of reverse culture shock (even though this is the third time I've come back to the U.S. from China). I can't help but notice, and comment on, a few of the most obvious differences.

- The Internet here is fast. I think this might be because the websites I frequent are in the U.S., and that a Chinese person would have the opposite impression, but I'm not sure -- even when I try to access Chinese websites, it's faster than I remember. Maybe the reason is something as banal as the service provider we had at our apartment over there.

- I thought that when I got back to a country where everyone speaks English, my communication problems would cease. That has not been the case. I'm thinking of a trip I took to the bank a couple of days ago. I was trying to complain to the nice lady about a glitch in their online banking service, that ended up costing me a late fee of about $25. I paid off my credit card's balance by transferring funds from my checking account, in the exact amount that the screen said was due. But, because interest was accrued daily, the next day, my credit card still had a balance of a little over a dollar, which I didn't notice. After I told her this, she patiently explained to me that if I had paid off the amount due, there would have been no late fee. I said, yes, but I had paid off the amount that my web browser told me I owed, so I had assumed that was the amount due. She patiently explained to me again that if I'd paid off the amount due, .... We went 'round and 'round like this a few times before I gave up.

- Oh, yeah -- the health care system in the U.S. sucks. If I had been sick in China, I could have gone to the hospital, seen a doctor, gotten the appropriate medicine, probably within two hours, and all for about $10. But, god forbid I should have tried to go to the emergency room here. I'm sure I would have waited at least half a day, and come away with a bill for a few hundred dollars. I've had this experience before, so this time, I was disinclined to try it. I would have had to have gotten much sicker before going to the doctor. And another thing, I use a Ventolin inhaler for asthma, which is over-the-counter in China, but prescription here. That means having to pay about $100 for an office call to see a doctor, just so she can write me a prescription for this medicine.

- The air here in the U.S. is pristine compared to what I'd gotten used to in China. I lived in Xiamen, which I think is a relatively clean-air city, and yet, every breath here in Maryland is worth two over there.

- An ironic thing happened to me when I went to the grocery store. I had brought my two lovely dogs with me to run a few errands, which involved a lot of short stops at different stores, and also involved a trip to the newly built (and empty) dog park. Right after that, I parked the car outside the Safeway and went in to buy a few things. It was about an 80 degree day (thank goodness for we're back to using Fahrenheit, haha!) -- not especially hot, and I had rolled down all four windows about four inches (inches!) so I wasn't worried about the girls at all. So, then I was in the checkout line, and an announcement came over the loudspeaker, "Will the owner of a tan Toyota go check on your dogs ... one of them seems to be in distress." From where I was in the checkout line, I could see a small gaggle of busybodies hovering around the woman on the loudspeaker. I heard one of them say "I can't believe someone would do something like that." I ignored them, and went out to my car, and rather than being in distress, they were resting very comfortably in the back seat, just where I left them, as happy as could be. Steve (the one with only three legs) was a little hot and was panting a bit, but fine. Jade's (four legs) brain may have gotten fried a bit, but with her, it's always impossible to tell.

This was ironic for three reasons: 1, in China, I always felt like I was too much of a busybody; 2, nobody loves their dogs more than I love mine (no, no, nobody); and 3, just the day before, I and some of my family saw a guy riding down the highway with a dog in the back of his pickup truck, and I was just itching to say something to him. Anyway, I think this is a huge culture difference between China and the U.S. -- people here really are more likely to butt their nose into other people's business. In general, I'd still say that's a good thing.

- More than any of these, though, one massive symbol of American excess barges through, and makes me happy to be back. I speak, of course, of the Double Gulp:

Free Tibet protesters -- 加油 (add gas) !

2008-08-26T02:14:00.000-07:00

I'm cross-posting a comment I made to a post on Lost Laowai. Let me summarize, and try to get these hyperlinks in the right order: The post was in response to an article in the Washington Post about some protesters from Students for a Free Tibet, who went to Beijing and hung a "Free Tibet" banner near the CCTV building -- you can see pictures of the banner here. My reaction, when I read the article in the Post, was that these guys were incredibly brave, but that the action was doomed to be ineffective. I thought to myself, wouldn't it be nice if they spent one tenth of their time and resources on devising a better slogan than "Free Tibet", or on doing a little bit of PR research to figure out how best to get their message into the minds of Chinese people?

My friend Ryan wrote this post about the article, and he had a very different reaction, which really surprised and saddened me. I expect the average Chinese person to dismiss and ridicule foreign protesters who go to China, but not the expats. I grew up in the sixties, so maybe that has something to do with it -- I naturally have a lot of respect for protesters. But it seems many, if not most, other people see them as "dumbnuts".

Here's what I wrote:

Ryan, I’m really disappointed. This post reminds me a lot of the kinds of things you read by the 50-cent party members on Chinese forums. These protesters should be given kudos; they deserve our support, not our derision.

First of all, you make fun of the precautions that they took not to get caught. But, they were all reasonable, in my opinion. The Chinese security apparatus is frighteningly efficient, and getting better all the time. And the bottom line is, nobody knows just how good they are, so it's better to err on the side of paranoia. Especially when it comes to electronic communication, I think they were right to be very cautious.

I don't know why you quoted this: “Had Chinese authorities bothered to check his luggage and that of his companions, they might have gotten a hint of what was to come: a 25-by-15-foot white nylon sheet, a handful of black Sharpie markers, climbing ropes, harnesses and walkie-talkies.” Here's their press release of this event, and you can see the banner they hung required all those tools. It's pretty impressive.

One criticism I would agree with is that they're not very effective at getting across their message here. I've thought for a long time that the slogan “Free Tibet 西藏自由” doesn't work — has no chance of winning over any support from Chinese people. In this post on my blog I talked about my idea to hang a banner that said something different, that I thought might actually make people think for a second.

So, who knows if this kind of peaceful protest has any effect, or ever will? Maybe nobody, but the West has a long tradition of it, and often in the past, it has had an effect. I think that's why the Chinese government is so scared of it. Also, the fact that they are foreigners protesting in China makes it less likely that Chinese people will listen, but there again, that's mostly because the Chinese government has been so effective at planting the “foreigners are all out to split China apart” meme.

So I can understand criticizing their methods as not very effective, but in this post you're just ridiculing them, which is wrong. They are incredibly brave.

You said you get disinterested in their cause because they “come off as closed-minded fanatics that only have an interest in pushing their view - not in seeking any form of ‘truth'”. But are they? How do you know? In a protest action like this, of course the slogan has to be short and one-sided (you only have so much banner real-estate). But you don't know anything about them, really. Why do you assume that their closed-minded fanatics? Have you read their website? (I admit I haven't, but my point is that you shouldn't just assume).

You also say a couple of times that the only experience that they could have had that would make their voices worth being heard would be for them to have traveled to Tibet and seen the conditions with their own eyes. This is right out of the 50-cent party handbook! That doesn't make any sense … maybe that's a valuable bit of experience, but when I'm talking to somebody about this issue, I rank it about ninth, I guess.

The Chinese people love to dismiss protesters as no-nothing fanatics, but you know as well as I do that they often know much, much less (or what they know is just plain wrong). I think it comes from arrogance that they live there, that it's their country. Is it possible that you're guilty of a little expat-arrogance, since you've been there for so long?

Book: Out of Mao's Shadow

2008-08-23T01:20:00.000-07:00

I just watched this episode of The Daily Show, and the guest was Philip P. Pan, who wrote the book "Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China". Then I spent a little while reading about the book on the Internet, and ordered it for myself, and so I just want to write a quick post about it.

The Amazon page, as usual, has a good editorial review and some good reader comments. You can read an excerpt from it on the book's main website. Also, the author has a blog on Amazon where he gives many more links to interesting interviews.

Everything I've heard him say so far resonates with me. The theme of the book seems to be how the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has managed to stay in power throughout the massive changes since Mao's death. This has been no small feat, and they seem to be very adept at it.

New / old website

2008-08-16T08:59:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been getting an old/new website going (old domain name, chrismaloney.com, new server). I'm in the middle of migrating all my old posts over to a Wordpress blog, including my posts here on Blogger, and also the older ones from Livejournal.

Importing the Livejournal ones has been very painful. You have to first export everything one month at a time to XML files, and then import into Wordpress; plus, the exported files don't include comments. There have also been the typical problems with characters not showing up, etc. My old Livejournal entries are out-of-date in another respect. I used to link to lots of stuff, mainly pictures, which I uploaded to my old website, which is now gone. So, I've set upon the course of restoring as much as possible of that old stuff, and have found that, so far, it's a nice nostalgic trip.

The first thing I've restored is an old set of pages that I concocted to display pictures from my first trip to China, which was back in 2004. The pages look very amateurish, I know, but what the hell. Please excuse the garish red background -- I was going for a China theme. When I set this up, it was just an exercise to help me learn XSLT. In going over it today, and getting it to work again, I also wrote this How It Works page and a To Do List.

The crackdown continues

2008-08-13T05:36:00.000-07:00

The was an article in the Guardian yesterday about the little girl who, during the olympic opening ceremony, sang the song "Ode to the Motherland". In fact, she lip-synced it. The little girl that you saw was Lin Miaoke (林妙可), but the voice you heard was that of Yang Peiyi (杨沛宜). I don't have a big problem with the idea that it was lip-synced -- I think that's understandable -- other than to feel a little bit sad for Yang Peiyi, who has to grow up with the memory of having not been cute enough to show on television. (There's another set of pictures of them here.) But what's really been disturbing is the reaction of the Chinese government online censors to this and to a host of other issues.

My girlfriend is the source of most of my information on this topic, as my Mandarin still isn't really good enough for me to surf at ease on the Chinese blogs and forums. She tells me that in general, saying anything negative about the olympics is forbidden. If you write a post, or even a comment to a post, that's overly critical of any aspect of the olympics, it will very quickly be removed (or, as the Chinese say "harmonized"). This policy of harmonizing online criticism has always been in place, but has gotten much more strict in recent weeks, because of the olympics. This is despite promises from the Chinese government for the last eight years that the olympics would help to bring about more freedom of expression in this country.

These days, the censors are out of control. For example, in the Baidu Tieba (the Chinese equivalent of Google Groups) you're not allowed to talk about the lip-syncing issue. The only posts about that part of the show that survive in this harmonious society are the ones that praise Lin Miaoke. Any posts critical of the lip-syncing, or even any posts praising Yang Peiyi, are quickly brought down. I just checked myself, and invite you to also: go to Baidu Tieba, and first search for 林妙可 (the cute one) and you'll get hundreds of results. Then search for 杨沛宜 (the not-so-cute one) and you get zero, none, nada. It's creepy and Stalinesque -- she's undesirable and embarrassing, so she's being erased from existence. What a terrible insult that is to an innocent little girl, who was used to promote China's image, and then discarded like a piece of garbage.

Moreover, the blatant violation of freedom of speech is infuriating, and I'd like to ask again (rhetorically, I suppose), where's the outrage?

Great Firewall knol

2008-08-10T09:36:00.001-07:00

I've started a knol on Circumventing the Great Firewall of China, based on my last blog post. This is a topic that I'm very interested in, even though I'll be going back to the U.S. soon. Google just came out with the Knol concept, and it seems pretty good to me. Some see it as an attempt to compete with Wikipedia, but I think it will complement it, more than compete with it.

For example, the focus (at least, one of the foci) of this new knol will be how to get around the damned GFW, not just about what the thing is. I want to include a list of techniques, with the most useful at the top, and give some in-depth information about why these techniques are recommended over others. By contrast, the Wikipedia article on the Golden Shield Project has a section titled "Bypassing" which just has a perfunctory list of techniques. I think that's as it should be -- after all, it's an encyclopedia article, not a "how to".

Knol offers "moderated collaboration", which means that like a wiki, but unlike a blog entry, others can edit the content. But the edits are moderated so that unlike a wiki, the changes don't take effect until the author approves them, which is nice, because I am a control-freak. Anyway, I know there are a lot of people more knowledgeable about me on this topic, and I hope that people are interested in collaborating on this effort.

The Great Firewall - where's the outrage?

2008-08-08T03:57:00.000-07:00

As usual, this post is a little bit late. I got started writing it a few days ago, and wanted to get it up right away, but, well....

I made mention of the Great Firewall (GFW) in my recent rant about the pre-olympic crackdown. There have been several recent developments.

For anyone new to this topic, despite its being a little bit old, I still recommend this article by James Fallows, on The Atlantic.com. The article describes why the GFW is so effective, despite the fact that it's relatively easy to circumvent. This other article, from Wired magazine, has a different take, one that I don't agree with: that the GFW is ineffective, getting less effective, and is doomed to fail. (In fact, there are a lot of problems with this second article, but that's another post.)

A few days ago there was a spate of news about the IOC's complicity in Beijing's reneging on its promise for unfettered access to the Internet during the games.

Then, within the last one or two days, several websites that were previously blocked are now unblocked, as described in this story on the Times Online. The article is sloppy. For example, the author talks about her computer "crashing ... after coming into contact with a site blocked by the censors," which is ridiculous. The GFW doesn't cause computers to crash. Also, I take issue with the main theme, which is that, in this battle, the people for freedom of access have won, and the censors have lost, because of pressure from the IOC. All that the government has done is allowed access, probably temporarily, to a few (mostly English-language, but with one surprising exception) websites. It's too little and too late.

For the record, I've personally verified that newly unblocked sites include (in no particular order):

The Chinese Wikipedia - this is actually a jaw-dropping development! This website wasn't mentioned in the article above, but was something I just discovered. The link above is to Wikipedia's secure server, instead their normal server. You should always use the secure server (if it's not blocked) for two reasons. The first is, when you're browsing around on Wikipedia, why would you want to allow anyone else (i.e., the government) to be able to see which articles you're reading? The second, keyword-blocks are still in place (see below) but if you're using the secure server, there's no way for the authorities to see what you type into the search forms, so the keyword blocks don't work. So, for example, using the secure server you can type in, and go to the page for "六四事件" (6/4 Incident, or the Tiananmen Square Massacre), no problem. But using the normal server, you immediately get "The connection was reset".

Amnesty International - but not, for example, it's page on The China Debate.

Reporters Without Borders - but not its Mandarin-language version

The Voice of America (VOA), and even their Mandarin language site.

BBC in Chinese

Human Rights Watch

Liberty Times - a Mandarin-language newspaper published in Taiwan

Apple Daily - another Taiwanese site

Radio Free Asia

But there are still a plethora of sites that are blocked, including:

Google Groups - I mentioned before that access to this was spotty. Since then I've figured out what they are doing, and this block is still in place:
- Access to the main pages of a group is allowed (for example, this one). These are served through URLs like http://groups.google.com/group/group-name/web/file-name.
- Access to the group's files, though, is blocked (for example, this one). These are served through similar, but different, URLs like http://group-name.googlegroups.com/web/file-name
This very effectively makes Google Groups completely unusable. But note that it's subtle, and the subtlety is, maybe, part of the reason there hasn't been more of an outcry.

The Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER, gotta love that acronym) - I just read a good article there on China's 50-Cent Party (五毛党)

China Digital Times

The Epoch Times, and its English version - a newspaper started by practitioners of Falun Gong

Boxun - "Unbiased information resources about China and the World"

torproject.org - TOR's home page (see below)

Independent Chinese Pen Center (ICPC)

LiveJournal, including my old blog.

Barking at the Sun - this is not a particularly special website, as far as I know, but is here as a place-holder for the myriad random blogs and websites that are still blocked. I was just surfing around a little today, as I'm wont to do, and was trying to get some information on the Sichuan dialect, and tried to follow a link to an entry on this blog, but it was blocked. It seems that the rate at which I run into random nonsensically blocked sites has not changed. Why?? It doesn't have to be this way.

Also, keyword blocks are still in place. For example, if you enter certain senstive terms into online forms, including search-engine forms, your connection to that website immediately gets reset.

The point I want to stress in this post is that we should still be outraged at this blatant violation of human rights. Yes, you heard me right -- I consider blocking access to information a violation of human rights. What good is freedom to speak, if other people don't have the freedom to listen? Some of the news stories about this have focused on the progress and suggest that we should be happy that the government is allowing access to some sites that were blocked before. But I hope I've shown, by compiling the list above, that it's not good enough! The point is that there are still sites that are blocked for no good reason other than that the government doesn't want you to read them. It's paternalistic, degrading, and unacceptable.

Yet, there doesn't seem to be much outrage among most of the Chinese people that I've talked to. I think there are a few reasons for this:

Most of the blocked websites are in English. But note that doesn't mean that there's more freedom within the Mandarin-language Internet -- exactly the opposite. The vast majority of Mandarin language sites are within China, so the government has more control over their content. It's server-side, rather than client-side, censorship.

They are more comfortable adopting a "没办法" (there's nothing to be done) attitude. As far as most of the Chinese people I've talked to are concerned, this situation cannot change, and so why bother?

Another aspect of the GFW that isn't talked about much is the business/trade aspect. The blockage of websites constitutes unfair trade practices and protectionism. Just taking Google Groups as one example, the current policy makes this service unusable, so people in China (including expats) will be drawn to other services (usually Chinese services).

Well, since you've persevered through all my ranting and raving for this long, I now grant you a reward. Below is a list of tools that you can use to get around the GFW. This list is in a constant state of flux -- there's an evolutionary arms race between the GFW implementers and the circumventors. The one's I know about and use are:

VPNs: Using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) is the best option, hands down, because:
- it makes everything you do online completely (more-or-less) secure from prying eyes. It doesn't just let you go to the websites, it also prevents anybody else, including your ISP, the government, or hackers, from seeing what you're doing. It's more true now than ever: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you!
- it lets you go to sites and register for services where you need a U.S. IP address, for example, (Hulu (NBC), Pandora Radio) (Note, of course, though, that if the VPN server is in a country other than the U.S., this doesn't apply)
There are two recommended options for VPN: WiTopia and Hotspot Shield:
- WiTopia - very cheap VPN - about $40 / year. A lot of expats in China use this.
- Hotspot Shield - there's a very good video introduction to this here. I've just started using this, and it's working well.

Freegate 6.72, which you can download from here. Freegate is very cool because it connects to a server, and then runs a local proxy, so you can set your browsers to connect to the Internet through the proxy. Why is this cool? Because you can set one browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) up to access the web through Freegate, and another (e.g. Firefox) to access directly. I haven't really researched how this works, but it seems to work well.

Gladder - this is a tool that I was sweet on at first, but have since grown sour (on). It is a Firefox add-on, and is a tool for climbing the Great Firewall (it's a Great Ladder -- get it?). It works by redirecting URLs that you type in or that you click on through anonymous proxies. It maintains a list of anonymous proxies to use, and a list of blocked websites. So, for example, if you type in the URL of a blocked site, it will automatically transform it to route it through a proxy. The biggest problem is that most anonymous proxies are total crap. Since they are free, and often fly-by-night, you never know what you're going to get. Often, the proxy doesn't deliver the page you want at all, but instead puts up some advertisments of its own.

Vidalia, TOR, Privoxy, and Torbutton. This combination of tools is pretty good, but it's slow. Also, recent updates to torbutton have broken it very badly. The core of this is a tool called TOR (The Onion Router). It works by encrypting all of your Internet traffic and routing it through an ever-changing network of proxy servers. To get started, just download one of the Vidalia "bundles", which includes TOR and Privoxy. Then, if you want, install Torbutton, which is a Firefox plugin to allow you to easily turn TOR on and off. But, as I mentioned, as far as I know, Torbutton is still broken.

That's it for now. I'm sure others can add to this list of tools, or talk about your experience with some of them. I'd love to get comments!

Meanwhile, here are two more articles about the worsening situation:

The Security Olympics - A Washington Post editorial

Journalists Say China Is Not Living Up To Openness Pledge - a Washington Post article

Update:
I just found another good article on the Washington Post, Blinded by the Firewall, which demonstrates through lots of survey results just how effective the information control system here is.

Password Safe

2008-07-28T03:46:00.000-07:00

This is just a very short post to recommend a sweet little tool that I just stumbled across, called Password Safe. I, up until now, have managed all the passwords I have for web sites and services in a text file on my PC. I just counted them, and I have a staggering 163, and I'm by no means a power web-user. I don't know how other people manage their passwords, but this is ridiculously insecure, obviously.
Since school has ended, I'm trying to catch up on a lot of things on my to-do list, and beefing up my computer security practices has been on that list for about as long as I've been using computers.
Password Safe is nice because it's small and unobtrusive, has just the features I want without a lot of extra crap, and it's free. It has an auto-password generation feature, so I can start using different passwords for different sites. What's really nice is an "auto-type" feature: it can fill in the username and password fields of an online form automagically.
While I'm at it, for anyone behind the great firewall, here's a site that provides VPNs for about $40 / year: Witopia, and here's an online book that I haven't read, but skimmed a little, and it looks good: Digital Security and Privacy for Human Rights Defenders (this book is where I found out about Password Safe).
Enjoy!

Differences between men and women

2008-07-27T11:39:00.000-07:00

This is a review / summary of an article that I read quite a while ago, called "Is There Anything Good About Men?", by Roy F. Baumeister. The title is misleading; it's not about men's good points and bad points, but rather about the differences between men and women. In particular, a major theme of the paper is that a lot can be explained by considering genetic differences between the sexes that arose as the result of evolution. It's a provocative topic, and one that I've always been fascinated by, and this paper reinforced a number of things that I'd heard before, and also taught me a lot of new things.

This review is being written in a bit of a hurry, so won't be very polished. I'm actually writing it for my English class, to serve as the basis of a discussion. The paper itself is way too long, and a little too technical, for them to read. So I'll just go through the paper and pull out quotes that I like, and summarize things that I think are important. I'm hoping that this summary will be shorter than the original paper!

The author starts by talking a little about the political climate, and the "battle of the sexes", and claiming that he's not taking either side. This is, of course, rubbish. Merely by stating what he believes in this paper, he's staking out a political position, which others will attack as biased. That's just the nature of these kinds of debates. There's never any point in arguing that you are apolitical and objective -- others will not see it that way. That is, except for this paper of course -- it will be apolitical and objective, I promise!

Anyway, his first point is that it's not helpful to view culture as a patriarchy, that is, as men exploiting women, but rather to "understand culture (e.g. a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems -- and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause." So, cultures compete and evolve, and use people as tools for survival. Men and women are different kinds of tools. It's a novel way of looking at things.

Men On Top

The first concrete manifestation of gender differences in society that he takes on is the obvious disparity between men and women in positions of power: "This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, most presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth -- these are mostly men."

But note that "if one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too." Among criminals, political prisoners, and the homeless, there are mostly men. "Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? [Of the first] 3,000 deaths in Iraq, ... 2,938 were men, 62 were women."

In line with the concept of culture using people, he states that culture uses men for high-risk, high-payoff slots, more so than it uses women. "Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don't give them the big rewards."

He says, "I'm not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren't moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups." He seems to have missed the fact that the same could be said of people, so according to this line of reasoning, one could conclude that "people aren't moral beings" (which may or may not be true).

Larry Summers and Differences in Variance

Next he brought up Larry Summers, the economist and former president of Harvard University. "As summarized in The Economist, 'Mr. Summers infuriated the feminist establishment by wondering out loud whether the prejudice alone could explain the shortage of women at the top of science.'" In January, 2005, at a technical conference, he suggested the possibility that there might be some factors other than the environment that could explain why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering positions. Because of these remarks, he was subjected to intense criticism, and eventually resigned as president of Harvard. Steve Pinker, in a short interview, defended his comments as completely within the bounds of legitimate academic discourse.

It seems that almost everybody who criticized him didn't really understand what he was saying. Yes, he was saying that perhaps there are more men than women with high ability, but that's not the same as saying that men are, on average, smarter than women. If the averages are the same, but the variance of men's intelligence is greater, than there will be more men at both the top and the bottom of the intelligence scale. That is, there are also more really stupid men than there are stupid women. "There are more males than females with really low IQs. Indeed, the pattern with mental retardation is the same as with genius, namely that as you go from mild to medium to extreme, the preponderance of males gets bigger."

Those who say that the cause of the male-female gap in high-end positions is patriarchy might have a hard time explaining this phenomenon. "All those retarded boys are not the handiwork of patriarchy. Men are not conspiring together to make each other's sons mentally retarded."

Because the distribution of men is "flatter" than women, not just in intelligence, but in lots of other measures, there are more men than women at the extremes.

As an example, Baumeister then shows how this phenomenon can lead to (or at least contribute to) a remarkable effect: that "women get higher college grades but lower salaries than men." "Consider grade point average in college. Thanks to grade inflation, most students now get A's and B's, but a few range all the way down to F. With that kind of low ceiling, the high-achieving males cannot pull up the male average, but the loser males will pull it down. The result will be that women will get higher average grades than men -- again despite no difference in average quality of work."

"The opposite result comes with salaries. There is a minimum wage but no maximum. Hence the high-achieving men can pull the male average up while the low-achieving ones can't pull it down. The result? Men will get higher average salaries than women, even if there is no average difference on any relevant input." [Emphasis added.]

This paper is full of intriguing arguments like this. Personally, I don't believe it's likely that the wage gap is entirely the result of the differences in variance between men and women, but it's also likely that it's at least partly the result of it. So it would seem to me that it would be important to study and to quantify the extent to which it is (what percentage nature vs. what percentage nurture), but that's impossible as long as liberal demagogues scream "sexism" whenever they hear any suggestion that there might be innate differences.

In the remainder of the paper, the author lays out a thesis which I will explain in a few sentences, and then go back over and, following the outline of the paper, describe in more detail. He suggests that "the important differences between men and women are to be found in motivation rather than ability", and that the differences in motivation are the result of evolution -- that evolutionary pressures were different for men and women, and produced different preferences. Finally, that these differences in motivation are the cause of most (if not all) of the gender inequality in society today.

Evolutionary Trade-offs

The author then starts to talk about evolution, and how that might help to explain some of these observed differences. Crucial to his argument is the idea of a trade-off. "Evolution selects for good, favorable traits, and if there's one good way to be, after a few generations everyone will be that way. But evolution will preserve differences when there is a tradeoff".

For example, "African-Americans suffer from sickle cell anemia more than white people. This appears to be due to a genetic vulnerability. That gene, however, promotes resistance to malaria." Because white people lived for a long time in colder regions where malaria was not prevalent, this resistance to malaria wasn't as valuable, and this gene decreased in prominence. So what, in one environment, is a genetic vulnerability is, in another, a genetic advantage.

Differences in Motivation

With regards to differences in motivation, he starts by describing a few examples. He mentions that research has shown the more men than women like science and math. Also, another obvious example is in sex drive: "Our survey of published research found that pretty much every measure and every study showed higher sex drive in men. It's official: men are hornier than women. This is a difference in motivation."

Also, "workaholics are mostly men ... One study counted that over 80% of the people who work 50-hour weeks are men." This, again, is a difference in motivation, not ability. He then talks about differences in creativity, in particular musical creativity, and argues (unconvincingly, in my opinion) that these are the result of differences in motivation.

The Most Underappreciated Fact

The next section of the paper is the most interesting. It starts with the question: "What percent of our ancestors were women?" He says, "It's not a trick question, and it's not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that's not the question. We're asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today."

The answer: "Today's human population is descended from twice as many women as men." This conclusion was the result of research into human DNA. So, "throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced."

The most profound ramifications of this are related to evolution and the different pressures experienced by men and women: competition among men for a mate was much more fierce than among women. For a woman to be successful at reproducing, "the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe." We are, by and large, descended from women who played it safe.

But for men, "the outlook was radically different .... Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today .... We're descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)." In summary, "Women did best by minimizing risks, whereas the successful men were the ones who took chances."

As for how much these different evolutionary pressures affected innate differences in behavior or preferences among today's humans, that's still an open question, but it seems reasonable to assume that it had some effect. For example, differences in sex drive can be easily understood from this perspective. "For many men, there would be few chances to reproduce and so they had to be ready for every sexual opportunity."

Are Women More Social?

Common wisdom holds that women are more social than men. But there are two ways of being social: having a few close intimate relationships, or having very many shallow acquaintances. "It's like the common question, what's more important to you, having a few close friendships or having lots of people who know you?" Baumeister's theory is that men and women are equally social, just in different ways.

Consider aggression. In general, men are more aggressive than women, but "women are if anything more likely than men to perpetrate domestic violence against romantic partners, everything from a slap in the face to assault with a deadly weapon." Baumeister says the difference in aggression is found not in the home but in society at large: "Women don't hit strangers."

Now consider helping behavior: "most research finds that men help more than women." But this research usually looks at helping behavior out in society, rather than among family and close friends. So in these two opposite aspects of social behavior, aggression and helping, there is a clear pattern: women focus more on family and a few close, intimate friends, whereas men focus more on a broader network of shallower relationships.

He then gives a list of other behaviors where studies have shown differences between men and women, and describes how these all fit the same pattern. For example, he describes an experiment in which a group of people was given a task. After it was done, the experimenter would give one member some money and tell that person to divide it among the group, in any way he or she wanted. Women tended to divide the money equally, but men tended to give more money to the ones who had done the most work. Which way is better? The answer is that it depends. Equality is better for close relationships, but equity (more reward for more work) is better for big groups.

Likewise, women tend to be more communal, but men tend to favor exchange-based agreements (think of communism vs. capitalism). Men tend to describe themselves by describing things that set them apart from others, whereas women describe things that connect them to others. Men are more competitive, women are more cooperative.

Men and Culture

Next he uses these results to try to explain why men have some advantages in modern society. The answer is simple: society is a very large network of people, and success in society is more likely if you can (or if you are motivated to) maintain a large network of friends and acquaintances, rather than a small number of intimate ones. Simply put, the more guanxi you have, the better -- and men are better suited to getting guanxi.

"This provides a new basis for understanding gender politics and inequality." In primitive society, when groups were small, both men and women presumably had about the same amount of influence. But as societies got larger and larger, men were favored more, and gender inequality increased.

Unfortunately, Baumeister dismisses the feminist's view a little too cavalierly: "The feminist explanation has been that the men banded together to create patriarchy. This is essentially a conspiracy theory, and there is little or no evidence that it is true." Well, it doesn't have to be an overt conspiracy to be true. How could anyone deny that sexism plays some role? Leaving aside the question of how men got on top in the first place, once they did dominate positions of power, those societies did foster and perpetuate prejudices that reinforced the status quo. The question is, to what extent?

He boldly states that all of the main aspects of culture, "religion, literature, art science, technology, military action, trade and economic marketplaces, political organization, medicine -- these all mainly emerged from the men's sphere", meaning large social networks. This is a bit of a stretch, and guaranteed to offend. Yet, on the whole, it's plausible speculation.

In the next few paragraphs, however, he makes an argument that falls completely flat. He is trying to argue that gender inequality has little to do with "some dubious patriarchal conspiracy", but then goes on to talk about childbirth in a condescending and patriarchal way. He says that "women had after all managed childbirth pretty well for all those centuries," but that men came along and "were able to figure out ways to make childbirth safer for both mother and baby." Even if true, this would only have a remote connection with the issue at hand. But the way it's written, this statement is just too vague and general to be of any use whatsoever.

The Disposable Male

The final part that I'll talk about is his discussion of "male expendability", the idea that men are not as valuable as women. He says, "Cultures tend to use men for the high-risk, high-payoff undertakings, where a significant portion of those will suffer bad outcomes".

As I read this section, I found myself nodding in agreement. When talking about disasters or war, we commonly believe that "women and children" must be protected, at the expense of men. On the Titanic, "the richest men had a lower survival rate (34%) than the poorest women (46%)."

The reason has to do with survival of the group: "If a group loses half its men, the next generation can still be full-sized. But if it loses half its women, the size of the next generation will be severely curtailed." So men are used by cultures and societies for the most risky ventures, including war, exploration, mining, etc.

To sum up, "men create the kind of social networks where individuals are replaceable and expendable. Women favor the kind of relationships in which each person is precious and cannot truly be replaced."

The Graduate

2008-07-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

I finished school (again)! My time going back to university, and my time in China, are coming to an end. As a recap: I've been in China for a little over three years now, and it has been a gas. For two and half of those years, five semesters, I've been studying Mandarin full-time. The first semester (which doesn't really count!) I was in Shanghai Jiaotong University. After that, I moved to Xiamen, and just finished two full years of school at Xiamen University.

In return for studying my ass off and spending boatloads of money, I got myself two very handsome certificates (one in English and one in Mandarin), suitable for framing:

Notice how much happier I am in the Mandarin version! Despite all that study, I'm still not satisfied with my Mandarin level. I'm beginning to doubt that I ever will be. Mandarin is hard! If you are thinking of trying to learn it, don't! Turn back!! Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate!!

Anyway, it's been a fun few years in hell, as these pictures will attest. I will miss this place, and all these wonderful classmates and teachers, badly.

Olympic crackdown

2008-07-18T07:50:00.000-07:00

There's a great editorial in the Washington Post today which succinctly summarizes my feelings about the looming olympics. China has been making monumental efforts to get ready for the olympics, and all of these efforts fall under the heading "tightening control". I, like a lot of other people I suppose, had hopes that China would live up to some of its promises of improving the human rights situation here, but it's time to admit that those hopes are vain. In no particular order, here are the things that I've read about, or experienced personally:

Tightening up the visa policy. Starting about the beginning of this year, we foreigners started hearing rumors that visas would be much harder to get after this semester. It turned out to be true. I've given up my original idea of trying to extend my visa, and will be heading back to the States in August (more about that in another post). There's lots of speculation about the reasons for this policy, and it seems reasonable to assume that the government is trying to kick out, or keep out, foreigners who are most likely to participate in protests.

The crackdown on news coming out of Tibet. This was a big one, of course, that I'm sure everybody's aware of. It's faded from the news now, but this government action did, and still does, constitute a huge human-rights violation.

The crackdown on illegal street vendors. Until recently, street vendors abounded in every part of Xiamen, and provided a valuable service - a great alternative to buying things in the supermarket. Also, most of these people are poor and have no other means of supporting themselves. Almost overnight, they disappeared. Now, two or three times a day, I run across the "城管 chéngguǎn" - thuggish, corrupt city officials who keep the riffraff at bay. These guys are all completely interchangeable -- middle-aged, with bad skin and bad teeth, heavy smokers, and basically no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Everybody hates them, because their way of enforcing the law is to confiscate all the goods of the vendors that they can catch, no matter how poor and destitute the seller is.

Along the same lines, in order to create a "civilized city" ("文明 wénmíng civilized" is the second most common word on the propaganda posters) the 城管 prevent any restaurants from having outdoor tables. I guess this is supposed to promote hygiene, but it doesn't make any sense to me. Unfortunately, and contrary to earlier promises that were made, they still consider smoking a civilized activity, and allow it in all the restaurants. As a result, I have to sit inside, often in very cramped, ill-ventilated rooms, and eat my food under clouds of cigarette smoke.

Internet access remains as spotty as ever. It's true that I can now access the English-language Wikipedia (note that the Chinese version is still blocked) and a few other sites. But the thing that drives me batty is how intermittent access to foreign sites in general has become. For example, I use Google Groups to share information with my English students, and it would work great, except that more than half the time they try, they can't access the pages that I put up. I'm convinced that this is a deliberate, integral part of the Great Firewall. If access to foreign websites is less convenient and less reliable, especially for services like Google Groups, most people will just give up and switch to a domestic alternative. And the government has much more control over the content that gets placed on domestic websites. But, by not blocking the sites outright, they get the best of both worlds: they can say that access is not blocked, but in fact it might as well be.

There are lots of other examples that I hear about but don't affect me personally. For example, my girlfriend was just telling me today about an author who has complained to the government that IP protection is woefully inadequate. He can find pirated copies of his books everywhere, even books that he's never written, with his name slapped on the cover as author. The irony is that the government is doing a great job of protecting the IP rights of anything to do with the olympics. This author joked that he should pay the money to become an official olympic sponsor, and then maybe his works would be protected.

Not least, of course, is that many dissidents have been put in jail recently, many for doing nothing more than writing bad things about the government on their blogs (yikes!). There's this very disturbing article about a guy named Huang Qi who was dragged off more than a month ago and hasn't been heard from since. There are dozens more like him.

There's also the stifling of news about the earthquake, in particular, the story about the "tofu dregs" school buildings that were the cause of as many as 10,000 schoolchildren to be killed. This, to me, seems one of the unkindest cuts of all, that they are refusing to allow the grieving parents of dead children to tell their stories and to openly seek justice. Many Chinese commentators actually come down strongly against the parents, because they are saying bad things about China, and giving foreigners fodder for China-bashing. I, for one, find this repression by the government to be much more fertile fodder (say that three times fast!)

Hu Jintao's regime is promoting a "harmonious society". Wherever you go in the country, you can see the word "和谐 harmony" plastered everywhere. It seems that they are determined to have harmony, no matter how many heads they have to bust. In contrast to earlier hopes that the government might actually loosen it's controls and allow more freedom, they are actually using the the olympics to promote ever-more fervent nationalism, and to tighten controls.

And please don't tell me that the olympics should not be politicized! That's among the most banal comments I've ever heard. Everything the Chinese government does with this occasion is political. In fact, let's face it: everything is political. I was reminded of this when I went to see the torch relay here in Xiamen, and was surrounded by red banners saying "I love China", and the red Chinese national flag, and even lots of T-shirts saying things like "Tibet is, always was, and always will be part of China". If they can give out those kinds of messages, why can't I give out mine?

So, that's why I officially declare myself to be anti-olympics, and I say yes to any olympic boycott. Of course, I'm not keen to tell anybody this. The fact is that as a foreigner, if I openly come out anti-olympics, that will just make the Chinese people more convinced of the great Western conspiracy against their country.

Citizen apathy

2008-06-21T09:25:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure if I should write this post or not. In fact, I had trouble coming up with a coherent theme, so I just decided to write it without one. It was prompted by my last English class, when a few of my students brought up a video that they had heard about, of a man in America getting hit by a car, and onlookers doing nothing.

In line with my last post, I'll admit that I recognize in myself a deep bias, in that when I hear stories like this, my first reaction is to defend my country. At least part of this bias, I think, is a counter-reaction to the outrageous nationalism that most of my Chinese friends exhibit. A case in point is that my students seemed to relish the idea that this kind of thing happened in America. One said that a Chinese newspaper gloated over American's hypocrisy -- we are so holier-than-thou, it said, and yet people are unwilling to lift a finger to help their neighbors.

During the class, I responded by saying that these kinds of incidents are inevitable, when you take large numbers and probabilities into account. America is a big country, and has a huge population, and hundreds of thousands of video cameras constantly recording our everyday lives. Of course videos like this will be taken, and when they are, some will make their way to Youtube. But what you don't see on Youtube are the thousands of incidents where people do stop to help victims, often at great personal risk. These videos just aren't as attention-grabbing, and, even if they do get to Youtube, they don't end up being talked about in Chinese newspapers.

I later found the video and watched it for myself. It's of Angel Arce Torres, smacked down by a hit-and-run driver in Hartford Connecticut. It is disturbing, no doubt, but after watching it a few times, this article sums up my appraisal of it. There are certainly things that transpire that are appalling. First and foremost, of course, is that both cars (the one in front and the one that actually hit the man) sped off without stopping. The car immediately behind them does stop though, and pulls over. Then, amazingly, after 20 seconds, it pulls away. Several other cars do drive by without stopping. Many pedestrians also just walk right by. A motorcycle does drive around the prone body, but, unlike my students said, the driver didn't take a picture with his cell phone.

So, my opinion after seeing the video is that it was bad, but not nearly as bad as I was led to believe. As the article above points out, four people called 911 within the first minute, and a police car arrived on the scene, also within about a minute.

Over the last year or so, I can remember being shown at least two videos of disturbing incidents like this that occurred in China. I wish I could link to them, but after an exhaustive search for five minutes or so, I can't find them.

One was a video of a bus driver getting beaten badly by two thugs. After the thugs exited the bus, the video camera kept recording, and showed something like 20 - 25 people file off the bus. The tagline of this incident was that no one tried to help the driver, and no one even called the police.

Another video was from a surveillance camera in a crowded bank. There were lots of people around a teller window when a young kid came in, stabbed a woman, stole her bag, and then ran out. Everyone else in the crowd fled instantly, and, again, no one tried to help the woman. She died.

So what's the point? I think we should all keep in mind that all of these are mere anecdotes, and one shouldn't try to draw deep generalizations from anecdotes. From these few stories alone, it's impossible to conclude that Americans are more callous and insensitive than Chinese, or the reverse. But that, I'm afraid, is what a lot of people do. There's a PR war going on, and some of the ammunition being used are these kinds of videos.

If anything, I think that when we see these kinds of things, we should just reflect on ourselves and our humanity. What would we, personally, do in these kinds of situations? I tried to talk about that a little in the class, and brought up some examples. For instance, I once saw a couple in Dalian arguing on the sidewalk, and the guy smacked his girlfriend. I stopped and watched them for a while, and wanted to intervene, but I didn't. He didn't hit her again, and the situation didn't escalate, and I was afraid for many reasons -- so after a while, I walked on.

In other instances, I have intervened, and sometimes felt good about it, and sometimes felt that it was a mistake. Just a few days ago, in fact, I was at the corner store buying some ice-cream. The guy who owns the next shop, a guy whose look and demeanor I've always found nasty, was tormenting this store owner's small four-year-old daughter. First he was flicking her hand and calling her name over and over, for no reason other than just to tease her. Then, he started flicking her ear. As expected, she burst into tears. I paid, and then stepped over and smacked him in the back of the head, and asked him what he was doing. It was a tense moment, and I wasn't sure what he'd do. He made as if it were a game, and, acting for her, mock-hit me in the arm. At this point this shop's owner, the father, came down and said to her "嘿，叔叔在帮助你 (Look, uncle's here to help you)" and then told her not to cry. I noted that he didn't have any harsh words for the asshole, but instead told his daughter, a bit forcefully, to stop crying. So did I do the right thing? Who knows?

In the bigger picture, one could relate this to foreign policy ... when is it okay for one country to intervene in the internal affairs of another? Often it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Well, that's enough blather -- as I said, no real coherent theme here.

Moon landing hoax conspiracy theory rears its ugly head

2008-06-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

I was teaching a class last week -- the topic was the sixties in America. We were talking about the space race, and I mentioned America's achievement of putting men on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth, when I was told that that, of course, was just a big fat lie.

I guess everybody has at least heard of the Moon-landing hoax conspiracy theory, but I've never been sure of how widespread it is, or how many people actually believe in it. Anyway, last week, I was shocked that about half of the students believed it, or were at least sympathetic to the arguments.

I started sputtering and stammering that the conspiracy theories were absurd, and how it was much less credible that the government could perpetrate the hoax than that they could have actually landed on the Moon, etc., but they were buying none of it.

We didn't finish that discussion then, and I asked them to send me links. So, after a few days, the main antagonist, Lance, sent me an email with two links to support this theory:

(Mandarin) Was the American Moon landing a hoax? Europe will check out the true situation.

Did We Land on the Moon? A Debunking of the Moon Hoax Theory

The second page is actually a great resource for, as it says, debunking the conspiracy theory. Most, if not all, of the arguments presented in the first page are dealt with by the second. I suspect that Lance didn't actually read it. I'll refer to this as the "debunk page".

One of the general reasons my students gave for the U.S. government perpetrating the hoax was that the U.S. wanted to damage the Soviet Union's economy by winning the space race. According to this argument, if we showed the world we landed on the Moon, the USSR would spend more money on aerospace, and thus ruin their economy.

A part of this argument is dealt with in the debunk page, under the heading "NASA faked the moon landings in order to beat the Soviets ...". This section talks mainly about the risk of a hoax being discovered. Also, why fake six landings? Why not fake just one? More than that, though, the idea that the U.S. winning the space race could adversely affect the Soviet Union's economy, or technology sector, is just absurd. The competition during the Cold War spurred both countries on to achieve more than they would have otherwise. A big reason for the U.S.'s rapid development of science and technology during this time was that it was a reaction to Sputnik. Also, if spending too much money on the space race was detrimental, then the U.S. really just hurt itself, damaged its own economy. Why wouldn't we have just given up sooner, and thrown that money into more productive uses?

Next I want to talk about the first page that Lance sent me, which is in Mandarin Chinese. As a public service, if anyone else is learning Mandarin, here's a vocabulary list:

航天员 - astronaut
骗局 - fraud, hoax
美国航空航天局 - NASA
内华达州 - Nevada
《今日美国报》 - U.S.A. Today
太空船 - spaceship
阿波罗 - Apollo
轨迹 - orbit
痕迹 - mark, trace, vestige
飘扬 - wave, flutter
这是让人难以置信的一幕。 - This scene is really hard to believe.
大气 - atmosphere
合影 - group photo
登月舱 - lunar module
制造商 - manufacturer
可信性 - credibility
迄今为止 - up til now
尼尔·阿姆斯特朗 - Neil Armstrong
不屑一顾 - disdain to consider
论据 - argument, grounds for an argument; as in:
“登月骗局”四大论据 - four main arguments in favor of the Moon landing hoax
敬礼 - salute
传送 - transmited, as in
阿波罗 14 号和 17 号的传送画面中 - The T.V. pictures transmitted by Apollo 14 and 17
俄亥俄 Ohio
先锋 1 号 - Pioneer 1
醉翁之意不在酒 - describes sb who has an ulterior motive

The main arguments put forth by this article are listed below, and, when possible, cross-referenced to sections in the debunk page.

· In some pictures, the shadows are not of the same lengths, indicating there is more than one light source.
-- See, in the debunk page, "Shadows cast on the lunar surface should be parallel. Some shadows in the Apollo photos are not parallel indicating more than one light source, thus the photos are fakes."

· In others, there are both astronauts visible, but the camera is in such a position that it's unlikely it could have been an automatic picture. They didn't even bring an automatic camera with them.
-- I couldn't find any reference to this specific argument in the "debunk page". On the other hand, there is a reference made to a camera that's not just automatic, but is a remote-programmable video camera, that took this video and transmitted it back to Earth. If they could do that, I think a simple remote-controlled, or timed, still camera would be no problem whatsoever.

· The article gives Bill Kaysing as a reference, and says that he was one of Rocketdyne's "designer engineers".
-- According to the Wikipedia article, he "is regarded as the instigator of the moon hoax movement. He worked for Rocketdyne, where Saturn V rocket engines were built. Kaysing was the company's head of technical publications but was not trained as an engineer or scientist. Kaysing's critics believe that Kaysing lacked the technical knowledge to make an informed opinion, and have denounced his conclusions."

· The flag continues to flutter even after the astronaut lets go of it.
-- This argument is addressed by "Some of the Apollo video shows the American flag fluttering. How can the flag flutter when there is no wind on the airless Moon?"

· When John Young was seen saluting the flag, he had no shadow.
-- See "There is one photograph of an astronaut standing on the surface of the Moon in direct sunlight, yet he casts no shadow, which is impossible."

· In some pictures there's a rock that seems to have a "C" written on it.
-- See "Apollo 16 photographs show a rock with a clearly defined 'C' marking on it. This 'C' is probably a studio prop identification marking."

· In some of the transmitted TV pictures, an astronaut's faceplate reflected way too strong a light, which couldn't have been from the sun.
-- I couldn't find any reference to this argument in the "debunk page". Actually, though, it doesn't make any sense to me, but perhaps I am not understanding it correctly. The sun is an extremely bright light, especially on the Moon where there is no atmosphere. I don't know how anyone could argue that the light in the photographs was too bright to have been the sun.

· The article asks why Neil Armstrong refuses to give interviews. Why should he refuse, unless he has something to hide?
-- See "Neil Armstrong refuses to give interviews, thus indicating he has something to hide."

Something that's not mentioned in Lance's article is that, in fact, there is hardware on the Moon that was left by the missions. From the debunk page: "Apollos 11, 14 and 15 erected laser reflectors on the lunar surface. Laser beams are routinely fired at these reflectors through telescopes at McDonald Observatory in Texas and near Grasse in southern France. They are used to measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon to an accuracy of one inch." There is no other reasonable explanation for how these reflectors got on the Moon.

During the class, when I began my ineffectual protestations, another student, Minda, asked me why it is that I always tell them they have bad information, and should look at different web sites, instead of assuming that I'm the one who has been misled. It's a fair question, especially since I often find myself arguing that they should be more skeptical.

Considering the question in general, it's related to cognitive biases, isn't it? It's a fascinating topic, and one that I hope to delve into more deeply in other classes / blog posts. But considering this Moon landing hoax theory, specifically, I can give a couple of reference why I think I'm not biased, and am, in fact, right.

At the end of the debunk page, there's a section "Who should you trust?" which is pretty well written.

Also, related to this and to lots of other conspiracy theories, one should ruthlessly apply Occam's Razor. As I tried to point out in the class, it's pretty inconceivable that this particular hoax could be perpetrated, when one considers how many people would have to be in on it. And not just ordinary people, or government goons, but we're talking about scientists and engineers -- a group of people who, I would suggest, are driven by an dedication to truth and objectivity, more than the average guy is.

I'll wrap this up by mentioning another argument that my one of the students gave. He said that the technology simply did not exist in the 1960s to land a man on the Moon. This one is hard to argue with -- it's almost true! That's what makes the fact of the Moon landing all the more incredible. But, of course, the technology was developed, and the Apollo program is still, in my opinion, the greatest engineering acheivement of mankind to date. And, you know what -- it's just not celebrated enough. The Moon landing is something that every human being should be proud of, regardless of what country he or she is from. Neil Armstrong said "One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." He didn't say "one giant leap for the United States." We (human beings) landed on the Moon, goddammit!

----------------------------------
Other refs:
Apollo 11 page on the Chinese Wikipedia
For those still not convinced, see Clavius.org

English class topic - sexual harassment

2008-06-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of months I've been freelancing as an English teacher, instead of working for one of the McEnglish schools in town. It's been more fun, but also a lot more work -- more work than before, and more work than I expected. I've discovered, though, that I don't mind the extra work so much, because I really enjoy it when the class goes well.

I only teach conversation classes, and only to adults whose English level is at least intermediate. We usually just pick a topic and discuss it very informally for two hours. It's very relaxed and easy, and not so much like teaching as it is like chit-chatting with friends. On the other hand, since I am the "teacher", I do get to be the center of attention, which suits me fine!

I've created a Google Group for each class. Currently I have two active ones, a private class I teach at my home, and another one at a friend's company. For each class I maintain a "Class Outline" page, which has links to all the lesson plans, notes pages, and any supplemental material. There's also a "Topic Board" page where I throw up ideas for things we could talk about.

I enjoy making lesson plans, and have thought many times that I could blog these as I come up with them, but haven't ever found the time. So this blog post is the first one (and maybe the last, who knows).

This post is about one topic for discussion, sexual harassment. It's actually a topic that I planned to do a while ago, but it got bumped, and we've never gotten back around to it. The link above is to an article that I lifted from an obscure American English textbook called "Americans' Courtesies". There's nothing particularly exciting about the article, but it's a good lead-in to the topic, contains a nice vocabulary list, and also a Chinese translation.

One thing I try to work into my classes is a bit of debate -- I'm always happy when there's some controversy. I think controversy helps people try harder to express themselves. So, I was just surfing today and came across this article, Naked Justice, by Dave Kopel, which describes one nasty side-effect of well-intentioned sexual harassment legislation -- the purging of any works of art that show the naked human form from any public buildings or places of employment. Unfortunately this article itself is too long to assign to my students to read, but it does contain some examples that demonstrate that (good) solutions to these kinds of problems are often elusive.

The disaster

2008-05-26T09:37:00.000-07:00

The death toll has risen above 60,000, and is still climbing. The T.V. and the Internet are still saturated with the news and images. Thousands of parents have lost their children, and thousands of children have lost their parents. Seeing the pictures of people screaming at the heavens, because their loved ones have been ripped from them; these stories and images just tear me up.

Yet, I'm often a bit cynical and jaded when people talk about it. For example, the other huge recent natural disaster, tropical cyclone Nargis, which hit Burma ten days earlier, has all but completely faded from the news, and yet, the death toll there is estimated at around 100,000 (and may climb as high as 250,000). Just about every web site I visit has a link for contributing money to the Wenchuan earthquake disaster relief, but I have yet to come across one for the Burma disaster. But they need our help more, just because they are forgotten, and because they're so brutally oppressed by their own government.

Another thing I'm cynical about is the way the government and the media here is exploiting the disaster to continue to promote nationalism. Before this, I'd had a post on the rise of Chinese nationalism in my workbook for a long time. With the olympic (no, I will not capitalize that word!) torch relay (the "sacred flame") debacle, it really started to turn ugly. Now, at least, it's easier to look upon, being as it is a driving force for altruistic volunteer efforts. Nonetheless, it's nationalism, and, perhaps partly because I'm a foreigner here, it makes me uncomfortable. I can't help but draw comparisons with the mood in the U.S. after 9/11 (which sucked me right in, by the way) when everyone was slapping the American flag on their cars: it is very similar. Much more than I did then (and I guess I should thank Bush for this) I detest American nationalism now as much as I do the Chinese kind.

Part of the way their exploiting it is with slogans like "团结 tuánjié unite, rally" and this next one, the meaning of which I'm not 100% sure: "众志城成抗震救灾 Zhòng zhì chéng chéng kàngzhèn jiùzāi", maybe something like "Collective will to build and succeed, fight the earthquake, disaster relief". Many (not all) of the news reports are relentlessly positive -- that is, they don't focus on the tragic stories. Instead, they tell moving stories about successful rescue efforts, and how many volunteers there are, and all the money that's been donated. A few of the TV programs really turn me off, such as one I saw a few days ago with some celebrities up on a stage taking turns reading poetic, uplifting, encouraging words. "We will fight, we will overcome, we will succeed, ..." Tell that to the people who've already lost everything, to the families who have lost all of their children. Of course it's good to be resolute and determined in the face of this tragedy, but it the tone of this message seems a little off.

That's the mainstream Chinese media. Meanwhile, there's more and more dissent and unpleasant news being kicked around on less official channels, like Internet forums. The most important right now is that a lot of people are questioning why so many school buildings collapsed, while government and other buildings didn't. EastSouthWestNorth has a translation of a post about that: Natural Disaster, Human Faults, and the New York Times has a well-written story as well. I predict that these kinds of stories, critical of the government, will continue to rise in pitch over the next week or so. Then there will be some kind of clash between these voices and the nationalistic ones. The blind nationalism before the earthquake didn't brook much criticism of the government. I have a feeling that things could get ugly. Let's watch and see what steps the government takes to squelch these stories -- subtlety (not their strong point) is called for.

Another prediction I have is that stories of corruption among the relief agencies will increase as well (but that's a no-brainer, really). Some of the people I've talked to here are amazingly naive about this. When I suggested they try to make sure that the group they donate to is reputable, they look at me in disbelief. We're seeing some of this already - disaster relief tents showing up where they don't belong, people stealing food and selling at their sister's corner store, etc. It will be interesting to see if stories of real large-scale graft and corruption come out. Cynical me thinks, it's not a question of whether large-scale graft occurs, but of whether this country's investigative reporters are worth their salt.

I am not god!

2008-05-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

Today, I got yet another "Hi, Christ!" email. I have never, to the best of my knowledge, given my name out that way. Yet, it seems, that more often than not, my Chinese friends and acquaintances address their emails thus. Maybe it's the aura that I give off ...

Online Texts in Hanyu Pinyin

2008-05-15T08:31:00.000-07:00

See this blog post on Pinyin.info. The webmaster there wrote that post in response to an inquiry from me asking if he had a list of texts that were written solely in Pinyin, not in Chinese characters. That, in turn, was prompted by an argument that I had with one of my teachers and some of my classmates about the necessity of Chinese characters.

It's an argument I've had before. As much as I'm fascinated by them, and as much as I'm proud of how many I've learned and know how to write (last count: just over 2800), I hate them. I think it's a ridiculous, inefficient, and burdensome writing system. So, occasionally I'll get into a discussion where I'll suggest that they should be completely scrapped in favor of Pinyin, which is the phonetic writing system based on the Roman alphabet. Whenever I suggest this to a Chinese person, or even a foreigner whose studied Chinese for any amount of time, the response is amused skepticism, to put it mildly. 不可能! (Bù kěnéng! No way!)

No one here has even considered the possibility, and when they first consider it, it seems patently absurd. The problem as they see it is that the written characters contain much more information than just the pronunciation. In a nutshell, for every syllable in Mandarin Chinese, there are many possible characters. What they fail to take into account though, is that in standardized Pinyin, capitalization and word breaks are also brought into play, and have a powerful affect on reducing ambiguity.

What it boils down to is this: if a listener could understand something read in Mandarin (without seeing it written) then he or she would be able to understand the same thing written in the phonetic alphabet of Hanyu Pinyin. Note that this doesn't apply to obscure texts deliberately obfuscated, or to ancient Chinese, but it does apply to modern-day texts written in the vernacular.

I wish I had time to titivate (Merriam-Webster's word of the day today!) this post with lots of links to bolster some of my claims above, but I don't.

Update: I added a del.icio.us tag in-pinyin to track these babies.

Olympic torch comes to Xiamen

2008-05-13T05:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the torch arrived here. Chinese people have started calling it the "Sacred Flame" (圣火 Shèng Huǒ), which is a hoot. For me, one of the most notable things about it was that it went right along the route that I usually take to go to school, making getting to school on that day pretty tricky (I know, I'm a cynical bastard). I uploaded some pictures of my trek here. After negotiating all of those obstacles, when I got to school, I found out that my class had been canceled.

Originally, I had planned on teaming up with a group of other students and going to see it with them. A couple of days ago, one of the teachers here at the OEC (Overseas Education College, 海外教育学院 [notice the glittering buildings!]) called me up and asked me to help her get a team together. I don't know why, but she wanted everyone's name and phone number, and she told me that they all had to be foreign students (no friends or family). I agreed to help her, but it turned into a nightmare of back-and-forth SMSs with lots of my friends, and with the teacher -- each of them having Special Needs.

As I said, I originally agreed to go with them. But as the time approached (we were to meet at two in the afternoon), the density of Chinese flags and other nationalistic bric-a-brac increased exponentially. Everywhere I went, I was seeing red. As you can see from the pictures, people started taking the Chinese flag (国旗) and sticking it all over their bodies. There were T-shirts with "I [heart] China". And then there were the anti-Tibetan T-shirts, such as "Tibet is, always was, and always will be part of China" and "Tibet in China, Torch in Heart" [gag!].

The more of that kind of crap that I saw, the more I was overcome by a deep feeling of sadness. Just with regards to the Tibet slogans, I wanted to shake them and tell them how wide of the mark their silly T-shirts were. They have no idea, to take just one example, that the Dalai Lama is not trying to achieve independence for Tibet -- that he conceded that point over twenty years ago. While I'm on the topic, anyone with any interest at all should read this article on the New York Times, Thunder From Tibet. Even though it's a review of a book that was written before the current hullabaloo, the first part contains a brilliant, well written summary of what's been going on recently.

So, after being jostled around in this sea of country-love (爱国 àiguó) for a while, I decided I couldn't support the torch at all, even in so minor a gesture as going with my classmates to see it.

On my walk along the route, I also noticed that security was tight, and in more than a few ways, I think, specifically designed to prevent any kind of political display. For example, this photo shows a pedestrian bridge above the route -- note that there are only a very few people on it. I suspect that those few were either police or news reporters. The bridge was definitely closed to the general public. The reason must have been that they were afraid people would hang banners or signs.

Likewise, there is another place where a road that goes through the university overhangs the torch route for a short stretch. There, police wouldn't let spectators within two meters of the railing, even though, standing that far back, nobody could really see anything. Same reason, I'm sure.

I often hear from the Chinese news and from Chinese people that they don't want the olympics to be politicized. They say that anybody who brings politics into it is going against the olympic spirit. Apparently, they're only referring to people whose politics they don't agree with. After all, what are all these flags, except political expressions? And what about the Tibet T-shirts?

I'll admit that in the days leading up to the torch's arrival, I fantasized about staging some kind of demonstration on my own. I'm going to write about it -- keep in mind that it was just a fantasy (although I actually let it become a pretty mature one) so don't laugh.

It was this: I imagined hanging a big sign from some prominent place, with three slogans in Chinese. I didn't want to say "Free Tibet" or anything like that, which would just piss Chinese people off. I wanted something maybe would get at least a few people to think a little, so I came up with: "Aren't the Tibetans our brothers and sisters? "We should fight for their rights." and "Don't believe the Chinese media." I'd get a friend to translate them for me, without telling her what they were for.

For the place, I picked here: . Haha! Can't get much more prominent than that! This is the big sign that I wrote about a long time ago, that they have pointing directly at Taiwan, that says "One country, two systems, re-unite China." I scoped it out a few days ago, and it's easily accessible and easily climbable.

Finally, I imagined making the signs out of a few pilfered propaganda banners that are hanging all over the city. They put these up everywhere -- especially along walls that are used to hide unsightly heaps of rubble left over from recently torn-down historical neighborhoods. In fact, there's a collection of them that would have been perfect, hanging along a not-too-well-traveled section of the Island Ring Road, not far from the above location. All that I'd have needed would have been a pair of scissors, some paint, and some wire to string them together. Then, maybe some rope to hang it.

So, I thought it all out, but then, of course, didn't go through with it. After seeing all the security around Xiamen University, I'm certain it wouldn't have succeeded, and would only have resulted in me being kicked out of the country. Oh well, maybe next time!

Earthquake Prediction

2008-04-10T09:15:00.000-07:00

One of the urban myths that I'm consistently confronted with here in China is the idea that animal behavior can be used to predict earthquakes. It came up again in my English class yesterday, and so I thought I'd do a little digging.

One valid way of predicting earthquakes is based on the fact that "P-waves", which are non-destructive, travel faster than "S-waves", which cause most of the damage. They could theoretically provide a warning of 1 second for every 5 miles distance from the epicenter. I.e. it could only provide a warning of a few seconds, up to maybe a minute or so for a large earthquake, depending on how far away you are from the epicenter.

A very famous instance of a successful earthquake prediction happened in Haicheng 海城, China (in Liaoning 辽宁 Province) in February, 1975. Chinese officials ordered the evacuation of Haicheng (population about 1 million) one day before a magnitude 7.3 earthquake struck. Only 2,041 people died and 27,538 were injured. It was estimated that the number of fatalities and injuries would have exceeded 150,000 if no earthquake prediction and evacuation had been made.

Prior to the quake, over a period of months, changes in land elevation and ground water levels were observed. There were widespread accounts of peculiar animal behavior. There was regional increase in seismicity (which later was recognized as foreshocks) which had triggered a low-level alert. Then, the day before the quake, there was a marked increase in foreshock activity, which triggered the evacuation.

However, in July 28, 1976: a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the city of Tangshan, a city with approximately one million inhabitants, without warning. None of the precursors observed near Haicheng were observed this time. There were 250,000 fatalities and 164,000 injured.

Earthquake Prediction and Myths summarizes: "The point is, consistency of the precursors has always been a problem in earthquake prediction research."

As far as the animal behavior goes, from what I've read about the Haicheng earthquake (which admittedly is not a lot) it seems possible that the animals were reacting directly to the foreshocks, and that the foreshocks themselves were the primary indicators of the major earthquake. That is to say, if I were setting up an earthquake-prediction center, I would set up scientific equipment to detect foreshocks, as opposed to centers for observing animals, since the former are really what I'd want to monitor.

Yet, I still have a nagging question about the blanket statement by mainstream scientists that "Science cannot predict earthquakes -- and may never have the ability." [also from "Earthquake Prediction and Myths"]. Just because the precursors are not consistent doesn't mean they are totally useless. In fact, the Chinese authorities did successfully predict the Haicheng earthquake, and saved thousands of lives. Whether based on foreshocks or whatever, the prediction scheme is not perfect, but it did yield some results. Any prediction scheme will have some false positives (predicting earthquakes that never happen) and some false negatives (failure to predict earthquakes that do happen) but there are ways to analyze data to determine if the scheme is statistically significant, and if so, worthwhile.

As far as animals predicting quakes goes, though, I am just not buying it. I haven't read any plausible explanation of how it could be possible. A typical web page arguing in favor is Whispers from the Earth, which lists some things to look for, including:
- Some animals eat more
- ... cats, will ... clean themselves frequently or be especially attentive to their owner, crying or acting nervous.
- Dogs ... become preoccupied with sniffing the ground.

These are brilliant! We should all run for cover the next time we see any dogs become preoccupied with sniffing the ground.

On the flip side, reports of animals behaving strangely before an earthquake, that come out after the earthquake has occurred, should be viewed suspiciously (or better yet, thrown out completely), as this short FAQ answer puts it succinctly: "Animals change their behavior for many reasons and given that an earthquake can shake millions of people, it is likely that a few of their pets will, by chance, be acting strangely before an earthquake."

Washers and Pennies

2008-03-27T08:35:00.000-07:00

My schedule for this semester has finally settled down, now that we're nearing the end of the fourth week of classes. I'm taking a pretty grueling load this time -- 24 credits, because that's how many I need to graduate. So, this is definitely my last semester as a full-time student of Chinese. I don't think I'll be able to find any more excuses to avoid looking for a job.
I have a lot of cool classes, but my favorite, I've decided, is a Go (Wéiqí 围棋) class. Go is an amazing game that I've known about since I was a kid, but have never known how to play. My earliest memories of it were of my brother Tom, who excelled at every game ever invented, bringing home a hand-made Go board, and a pair of matching jars, one filled with washers, and the other with Pennies.
I learned then that the general concept is to try to surround and capture your opponents pieces, but I don't think I ever really grokked the rules. It's an amazing game because it's so simple, and yet so complicated. My classmate found a cool tutorial.

Only in China

2008-03-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

I was teaching my English class tonight the vocabulary words "encourage" and "discourage", and I asked, "When a friend comes to you and tells you a new idea, should you encourage them or discourage them?" They all dutifully quacked "encourage".
Then I wondered, "What if it's a really stupid idea?" I tried to think of the most stupid idea I could, and what came to mind was from Da Ali G Show. He was walking around to different businesses trying to promote his "ice-cream glove". You see, it's a glove that you wear when you eat ice-cream cones. It prevents the ice-cream, when it melts, from getting all over your hands.
This example didn't work at all -- they all loved the idea!

Gladder and gladder

2008-02-05T06:30:00.000-08:00

I just discovered a new way around the Great Firewall, a Firefox add-on called Gladder, short for "Great Ladder". So far, this one is working like a charm, so I'm back on with my daily dose of Wikipedia. (Yes, there are lots of Wikipedia portals, but none are quite as sweet as seeing the real Wikipedia home page -- I don't know why.) Gladder works pretty much transparently, and is a lot quicker than tor.

I found this through a New York Times article, which is interesting reading in itself.

Gladder installs very easily, and you might never know it's there, if you didn't know where to look. It puts a little ladder-icon in the lower-right of the browser window, that looks like this:

If you left-click on that, you can turn it on and off. Right-click, and you get a menu that lets you (among other things):
- switch to a different proxy -- click "Change proxy"
- mark a site as banned, or unbanned -- just click on the URL of site of the current page (at the bottom of the menu)
- bring up the options dialog box -- click "Options"

Under the "Help" tab of the options box is some useful information explaining what the software actually does.

As a final lagniappe, one of the links the author gives is to this page of web proxies. Who had any idea there were so many?

Net Nanny vs. Great Firewall

2008-01-21T23:48:00.000-08:00

I'm a little bit proud to have started this discussion over at Danwei.

The Rest of the Story?

2008-01-21T07:22:00.000-08:00

I'm still spending a lot of time on the Green Breathing Association, and though it's a huge time-sink, I think it's worth it.

Anyway, the founder of this group is a very kind woman whom I mentioned before, Bonnie, and she is tireless, to say the least. Nevertheless, I've found myself butting heads with her a couple of times already. I think that some of the anti-smoking materials that she comes up with go too far, and distort the truth. For example, she claims that the residue left by cigarettes gets into drapes, people's hair, and onto furniture, and continues to release harmful toxins long after the smell has gone. This kind of claim makes me uncomfortable. It might be technically true, in that miniscule amounts of toxic substances are emitted, but I feel in my gut that whatever those amounts are, they are small enough so as to be insignificant.

These kinds of claims are often used, and they're hard to argue against. They don't quantify the amounts that they're talking about, and, whatever the substance is, at some point the amounts or durations of exposure become statistically insignificant.

I don't feel comfortable putting out information that I don't believe. So I started looking around for websites that fairly and objectively analyze the scientific evidence related to smoking and second-hand smoke. With these kinds of controversial issues, it's really hard to find sources that you can trust. It's almost as if, no matter what you want to say, you can find some study or other to back you up.

I thought I had found a good site, The Rest Of The Story, Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary. The author, Dr. Siegel, bills himself as a disillusioned tobacco control advocate. His posts are all broadsides against tobacco control groups for misrepresenting scientific findings and distorting the facts. This is just the kind of stuff I was looking for, I thought, so I started reading it regularly a couple of weeks ago. Lots of his posts are great, but lately, I myself have become disillusioned.

His last post, Washington State Anti-Smoking Groups Supporting Feel Good Measure that Protects Nobody; Hypocrisy Running Rampant is a good case in point. I was able to grab the first comment slot, and here's what I wrote:

Wow -- I am so completely disappointed by this website. When I started reading it a couple of weeks ago, I read several of the older posts, and was pretty impressed. It seemed the author had lots of cogent, well-thought out arguments against some of the more egregious anti-tobacco groups' claims. I thought to myself, "wow, we need more of this kind of authorship: here's an anti-tobacco activist who's willing to go against the rest of the movement, for the betterment of it."

But this post, and a few of the other recent ones, have disillusioned me.

The anti-smoking groups' support for this measure is one of the most hypocritical stances I have observed in the tobacco control movement.

This statement is absurd on its face. Why is it hypocritical for a group to support a measure, just because it's more difficult to enforce than one might hope? I'm not familiar with the details of this law or that particular political environment, but I suppose that it's all they could hope to get passed right now. (If that's wrong, then Siegel should explain why that's wrong in his post).

In many previous posts Siegel lambasts the groups for reaching too far. Here he's criticizing them for not going far enough.

Let's look at it by asking these questions: what is the law supposed to achieve, and how successfully does it achieve it? Clearly this law is designed to reduce the incidence of smoking in cars where children are present. How well it might achieve it is a question that could be answered by some research, but I'm willing to bet that the fact of having a law, even though it's a "secondary offense", does have some measurable practical effect.

If you disagree with the above statement, you should argue the above statement. But, clearly it is not unreasonable for some person or group to believe that the law would have some practical effect. I would hope that any reader of this blog would be willing to grant that much: an intelligent person could reasonably believe that a law defining a secondary offense would have some practical effect.

If you grant that, then it follows immediately that such a person or group would not be hypocritical for supporting such a law.

Again, I have to say, this post really disappoints me. The above is so obvious that it forces me to think, which I had really hoped was not the case, that Seigel is, in fact, strongly biased against the anti-tobacco groups. Further, even if he believes it's hypocritical, it's a far cry from "hypocrisy running rampant" and "one of the most hypocritical stances...". These kinds of phrases are inflammatory, and not helpful in a well-reasoned argument.

There have been lots of responses to my comment, but (so far) nothing of merit. Siegel himself wrote back:

Maybe I'm just hung over, but I just can't understand Chris' reasoning. What sense does it make to pass a law and then not allow that law to be enforced? If the problem of secondhand smoke exposure in cars is so terrible that the government must intervene into private cars to regulate behavior and interfere with parental autonomy, then isn't the offense of smoking in a car with kids so terrible that we should be able to actually cite those violators?

This is exactly the kind of reasoning that I fail to understand in the anti-smoking movement today.

Can't we just take a stand and stick to it?

Can't we just stand up for our principles?

Could I get some feedback here -- is my reasoning really that difficult to follow? It seems pretty simple to me, maybe the Dr. is, in fact, hungover.

New blogger blog

2008-01-14T21:08:00.000-08:00

At the urging of a commenter (Steve) I am starting this new blog on blogger. One of the excuses I gave him for my posting so rarely is that Livejournal (my old blog at http://klortho.livejournal.com/) is blocked in China. It really does make it a complete pain to access my own blog, but I'm not sure how much that really affects my writing. The fact is, I'm just a very poor poster, and I don't know if that's ever going to change. I was very disappointed to find that "klortho.blogspot.com" is already taken (it looks like it's abandoned, too).

But, blogger is (as of now) not blocked, hence this post.

By the way, what is the relationship between "blogger" and "blogspot"? Is it just that "blogger" is the name of the service and "blogspot" the name of the domain? Yet, the domain is sometimes "blogger" (as I write this, for example, I'm at www.blogger.com/post-create...) and sometimes "blogspot" (when I registered, I was informed that my blog's address is sinophibe.blogspot.com). Vexing, for us anal-retentive types. (Should "anal-retentive" get a hyphen? I wonder.)