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Keffir in Beijing
I’ve been on a big probiotic push this past year, in an effort to reduce my seasonal allergies (seems to have worked fairly well, although last summer’s weather was unusually unseasonal) and decrease my susceptibility to getting sick in China (again, seems to have worked exceptionally well, although my circumstances this trip were pretty different than usual). This has consisted of: growing and eating Keffir, eating a lot of yogurt, drinking a cup of Kombucha in the morning, and taking Saccharomyces Boulardii [comes from lychees, so seemed relevant], and Primadophilius Reuteri capsules. While in China, I drank yogurt every morning, and brought along the capsules, and figured I’d give up on the Keffir and the Kombucha. So I was surprised to see a store that sells Keffir, and only that, about a quarter mile away from where I was staying (it’s on Xueyuan Nan Lu, about 500 meters west of the intersection with Xingtan Lu). The Keffir itself tastes more like Chinese yogurt than what I make, and more of the texture of western yogurt than either Chinese yogurt or my keffir), and I see from the picture of the product that it has its own website: http://www.xnsnw.com/. It costs 5 yuan a serving (about 75 cents US at current exchange rates), and I was happy to be able to incorporate it into my Chinese dietary routine.
I probably ate less adventurously than usual and was fairly conscious of the need to stay healthy as the trip leader, but for whatever reason this is first trip where I didn’t have any real bout with food poisoning or tourista.
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Language gaffe of long standing
I was listening to a Chinesepod lesson this morning and learned that it’s really boastful to refer to yourself as a “家” or “expert”, as in “我是儿童心理学家” [“I’m an expert in child psychology”]. I thought it was more like “specialist” but apparently not. Nor can you say “我是儿童心理学者”, because -者 is only used for a few occupations.
Something like, “我搞儿童心理学” (I do child psychology) is apparently more acceptable.
If you try my favorite trick of using Google to look up pages that have “psychologist” in them but are in Simplified Chinese, you come up with this link: http://www.nciku.cn/search/en/detail/psychologist/1710645 which tells you that “心理学家” is the way to go. Another example of the limits of dictionaries in learning a foreign language.
Thinking back, though, I think I have changed to saying “我是儿童心理学教授” or “我是一个儿童心理学教授.” So perhaps I did intuit that there was something wrong with using “家” in this self-referential way, or at least that others don’t do it.
That leaves aside the whole “儿童心理学” (child psychology) vs. “教育心理学” (educational psychology) issue, which has nothing in particular to do with Chinese.
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Parsing problem
I’m interested in cases where the lack of explicit marking of word boundaries in Chinese causes problems. Interestingly, there are fewer than you might think. But this picture is one, given the importance of “5-4” (May 4, 1919) in Chinese history. I first read the restaurant as being something like “Old May 4 season (?) hot pot”, which seemed odd. But it’s really “Old 5” (perhaps the 5th child?) Four seasons hot pot”.
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17千
I found this article interesting for a couple of reasons, I wonder how disruptive it is for a native Chinese speaker to read 17
一箱苹果连箱重17千克，
吃了一半苹果后，连箱还重9千克，原来苹果中多少千克？箱子重多少千克？
A box of apples has a total weight of 17kg. After eating half the
apples, the weight is 9kg. What’s the original weight of the apples? Of
the box?
(Chinese uses 10,000 as a base [as well as 1,000], so large numbers can be confusing to English speakers, since they’re group by ten thousands, rather than thousands).
But, interestingly, it sticks with “千克” (kilogram) as a unit, so that 17千克 is correct and, apparently, 1万7千克 would not be. I wonder if “十七千克” is also correct, or if that gets too odd.
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I am now officially part of the problem
Today I sent in the paperwork so that I can retire from the University of Illinois, where I taught from 1990-2004. Illinois has a bizarrely generous system of retirement that’s in the process of driving the state into financial ruin (although primarily because they didn’t fund it as they went along). The system took money out of employee salaries, which was supposed to be matched by payments from the State. It invested the money, and did very a good job of investing. When it comes time to calculate retirement benefits, it does so on the assumption that the state had paid into the fund as it was supposed to and that that money earned the same return as the money actually invested. It also pays out at a very high rate (8.85% per year, as opposed to the 4-5% that people recommend if you want retirement savings to last), and guarantees a 3% yearly increase. Much of this is in the state constitution, so there’s little that can be done about it. It also doesn’t tax pensions, which probably could be changed and is manifestly unfair (apparently Michigan does the same thing). It didn’t (and perhaps still does not) participate in Social Security, so it saved the employer’s part of the FICA tax and I’ll have to work until I’m 72 to be able retire without a reduction in my Social Security payment (because of something called the “Windfall Elimination Provision”), so this wasn’t the extent of their short term thinking.
Because of all this, the state is in a big financial hole. It’s trying to fix the problem by making the retirement system much less generous to new employees, but this won’t help the state finances for another 35 years or so.
So, starting in a few months, I’ll get paid 39% of what I earned when I left there for as long as either Alice or I shall live, and be guaranteed that amount (including a 3% increase each year). If I waited, this could rise to about 80% of that salary, but given that I can save this money until I actually retire, it appears to be a better deal (for me)—under all the scenarios I could come up with—to take the money now rather than wait for the amount to increase.
Michigan, in contrast, moved to a “defined contributions” system and isn’t in the same straits. It takes some money out of my salary each month, which it generously matches (two to one), and I get to decide how to invest it within broad limits. Whatever that adds up to is what I’ll be able to spend when I really retire. It also has not committed to this level of matching (and will probably decrease it, since they say it’s more generous than peer institutions), so it will be able to spread the pain of changes among a broader group. Because of all this, the state of Michigan does not have a pension funding problem, despite being in far worse shape financially than is Illinois.
It’s a shame that the state of Illinois couldn’t manage to run a pension program, but it appears that that’s the conclusion that needs to be drawn here. Studies show that individual investors don’t do a good job of managing their investments (I was too lazy to make any changes after the various stock market crashes, which has always proved to be a good thing in retrospect, but that’s not the norm). But Illinois managed to bungle this issue even worse, while making commitments that are going to be very hard to fix.
As you can probably tell, I feel conflicted about this. On the one hand, it’s clearly the rational thing to do. On the other hand, I can’t ignore the damage that this overly generous pension system is doing to a state where I spent about half my career and that educated my only daughter (and did so very well). Oh well. At the very least, I hope I always stay conscious of just how cushy a deal my generation has had.
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Today’s William James quote
Apropos the winter weather, and thanks to George Rosenwald:
“Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow ; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.”
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Merry Christmas!
We spent 6 years in Texas, and it remains a fascinating place to me. I only got to see Robert Earl Keen play once, but he remains one of my favorite singer/songwriters. So it’s nice to see this on YouTube. Merry Christmas, everyone!
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I think I need to learn Ruby
Perhaps this will help. After I’m done with grading and letters of recommendation…
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Something interesting I would never had read if I weren’t on the UM University Senate
A 1915 AAUP statement on Academic Freedom. John Dewey was President of the group then. I don’t know what role, if any, he played in the statement, but it’s thoughtful and very well-written.
Not an issue I’d ever thought much about before.
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Best thing I’ve read today
Different disciplines have their own ways of being stupid. I’ve been intrigued by the ways that economists have of being dumb. I thought that this piece by Andrew Gelman was a very cogent discussion of a prototypical case:
Here’s what he’s responding to:
Stephen Dubner quotes Gary Becker as saying:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not
all!) deaths are to some extent “suicides” in the sense that they could
have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging
life.Dubner describes this as making “perfect sense” and as being “so unusual and so valuable.”
