Timely Snow

HP seems to be the printer vendor of choice at U of M, and it’s very convenient to buy their printers and supplies. I have an HP 2605dn color laser printer, which I’ve generally liked except for an occasional tendency to print pages with a solid red background, which is both expensive and ugly. Now that I sent a grant proposal off, I decided to try to fix it. I quickly discovered that this problem has gone away for some people with a firmware update, so I decided to try that.

Unfortunately, the Mac version of the driver doesn’t work with the current version of the Mac OS (and, let me say, it isn’t a particularly new version of the OS, either). So I tried downloading it under VM Fusion, but the Windows version seems not to work unless you connect directly with a USB cable (and it’s too far away). I resurrected an old XP laptop and after updating the software was finally able to put that in the center of the various cables I need to connect to the network and the printer at the same time, and finally was able to update the printer’s firmware driver.

I’m pleased and relieved that this did, indeed, fix the problem. But I don’t understand why HP can’t keep their drivers up to date. I had a similar experience at home, with an early printer/copier/scanner they sold. After XP came out, they never came up with an updated driver, so I lost the scanning capability. I bought an early tablet computer from them that would suddenly lose its image when connected to a projector for more than 15 minutes. I sent it back and forth three times with them without getting them to connect it long enough to reproduce the problem. When I said that I was going to return it, as I could under the purchase agreement, I got a call from the regional sales manager and a tech person, who acknowledged they’d had that problem but had identified and fixed it. I told them that if they sent me a new computer and it worked, I would keep it and they promised to do so. Unfortunately they didn’t decide between them who was supposed to do it, so neither of them did. That was the last computer I bought from them, and I think this is probably the last printer I’ll get from them.

Other than that, it’s a nice printer—it has an ethernet connection and duplex printing, as well as being a pretty good color printer.

Sometimes it’s good to vent…

Interesting discussion by Simon Winchester on a book tour in China. It captures a sense of how deeply strange it can be to be there, and how you can suddenly be expected to engage in the kind of public discussion that you’d ordinarily want to prepare for (this happened to my daughter, too, who was unexpectedly taken with another newly arrived colleague to what turned out to be a training session for teachers from outside of Beijing. The young man just left, and she tried to do the best she could, but apparently it didn’t go well). Two other things that struck me. First, why is no one in this library? Bookstores in Beijing are constantly crowded. This place (where I’ve never been) is empty, to a first approximation.
Secondly, who decided to title his book on Joseph Needham (which I’ve read, and is certainly above average) “The man who loved China” in the U.S. and “Bomb, book, and compass” in the rest of the world. I think the latter is a much better title.

Inside School Research

Debra Viadero, a reporter from Education Week, came to our presentation at the IES Research conference and put together a brief piece on it here.  The photo shows Lauren Phelps, who’s the project manager on the grant.

I see that the next edition of the Mac OS, due out in September, will allow you to enter Chinese characters by drawing them on the trackpad with your finger. The iPhone already does this, and I’ve been very impressed with it. This is definitely good news.

Apple – Mac OS X Snow Leopard – Refining the user experience
(page down to “Innovative Chinese character input”)—I think that the blue image of the character on the trackpad is a conceptual rendering of the finger tracking, complete with the ability to anticipate the parts of the character the user hasn’t written yet.

This from John Pasden. The translation is correct, but to me the Chinese implies that you Obama is also learning English, but perhaps there’s a nuance I’ve missed.

Interesting discussion about the cultural origins and historical evolution of beliefs about authorship and plagiarism, particularly as apply to China. I wish there were more substantiation of the historical claims, but it was interesting nonetheless.

A nice discussion of Chinese characters by Zhang Jinghe (thanks to Pinyin News). It does, however, state baldly a piece of linguistic dogma that is simply wrong, to wit:

Basically, language consists of words we orally utter…Scripts are for writing down languages, be they Egyptian with Hieroglyphs, cuneiform in
Mesopotamia, Mayan with glyphs in South America, Arabic (using Arabic letters), Russian (using
Cyrillic letters), English (using Roman letters), French (using Roman letters), German (using
Roman letters), Italian (using Roman letters), Spanish (using Roman letters), as well as
Chinese oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, stone inscriptions, seal script, clerkly script,
standard script, running script, grassy script, complicated characters (basically
“kǎishū”), or simplified characters — all are symbols for writing
down languages. The “mothers” of these symbols are various languages. Without
languages, these symbols are just pictures and shapes.

Well, no. I don’t disagree that spoken language comes first developmentally and (almost certainly) historically, nor that it’s profoundly complex and important.

But, to use his metaphor, scripts actually have two mothers (the title of the post is a parody of a controversial children’s book). The idea of writing has completely parasitic upon spoken language breaks down if you look at mathematics, calendars, and (most notably) the historical origins of writing. Furthermore, like bees flying, human beings are not constrained by these simplistic ideas about what writing is, be they children first learning to write or adults using scripts.

You can see this in current Chinese internet usage, most notably the character 囧, which is pronounced jiong3 in Mandarin and is rarely used in its original meaning (a kind of window, or a bright light), but serves nicely as an emoticon for “shock” (see nice discussion here, and another one here.).

Were I a traditional linguist, I’d probably respond that these examples don’t account for the bulk of our language use. I don’t disagree. But I think that if you want to understand how writing systems evolved, how children learn to write, or how native speakers of a language use the writing systems available to them, the belief that writing is simply “Visible Speech” won’t cut it.

A bit more than a year ago (April 15, 2008) we put down our 16 year old dog, Princess. She had clearly come to the end of the road—she couldn’t stand up on her own or manage most bodily functions, and had a fair amount of pain. Still, it was a fairly traumatic loss. We ended up cremating her and planted a tree over her ashes last summer when our daughter came home from Beijing. The tree

In an otherwise pretty forgettable discussion of commencement speeches, Mark Oppenheimer cites this from Richard Russo as his favorite commencement speech. It is, indeed, pretty good. I’ve sat through a number of these, and it’s hard to do well. My own graduation speaker was Isaac Azimov, who gave a really mediocre speech despite being one of my favorite writers as an adolescent. I’ve heard speeches by some fairly well-known speakers (Barbara Jordan) and writers (Maya Angelou), but I think the best commencement speech I’ve personally heard was given by my former colleague, Ed Diener. His major research topic is happiness, and so he gave a very crisp, research-based talk on the kinds of lives that lead people to being happy when they come to the end of it.

Not an easy kind of talk to give.

This post has some interesting pictures showing changes from 2008 to now. I didn’t realize they’d done some reconstruction on the Mutianyu Great Wall section. I think the picture is at the start of the area where you’re not supposed to walk (if you go left once you get to the Wall itself), but it isn’t labeled. I didn’t get there or to the Qianmen pedestrian street on my last trip. I did notice the pollution was much, much better, although I wonder how much of that has to do with the economic slowdown (perhaps in the larger catchment area stretching to Tianjin, because I didn’t notice too much of a slowdown in Beijing itself).