Archive for June, 2007
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Happy endings…
I’ve often been struck by the positive tone of news here, of which this is just a recent example. I’m staying in a fancy on-campus hotel at BNU that has TV with two English language stations, CNN-International and Star Movies. The former provides that vital international perspective on Paris Hilton. Looking at the movies on Star Movies, though, I’m struck with how many American movies feature really ridiculously unrealistic happy endings, such as one that had a football player with severe brain damage in a car crash who recovered his abilities thanks to the belief of his young daughters and an extensive series of flashbacks.
Chinese movies, by contrast, seem much less predictable and often fail to have anything likea happy ending. Same for music videos, many of which involve pensive people looking out windows as rain falls on them.
I’m not sure what either the sources or implications of having happy endings in one’s news or in one’s movies are, but it seems an odd contrast.
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Chinese college exam essay questions
Courtesy of danwei.org, here is an interesting article about the essay questions Chinese high school students have to write about for the college entrance exams.
Below are translations of some of the essay questions as reported by the Beijing Evening News and the Xinmin Evening News; they may not be accurate or complete.
· National I
“Taking a tumble” (摔了一跤)An image of a child surrounded by three adults representing Society, Family, and School. The three are all saying “There’s been an accident” (出事了) Choose a format and a title. 800 characters.
· National II
1. The famous singer Cong Fei lived frugally to donate 3 million to a business in trouble, but after he fell ill, none of the workers at that company came to visit him. One of the beneficiaries said, “Cong Fei has really lost face.” Cong Fei was very troubled, but he said, “I no longer need any money for treatment.”2. Xiao Li, a student at Huannan Agricultural University, donated money to a charity school by collecting and selling trash. However, not long after, she was diagnosed with leukemia. The school solicited donations from its students. One fourth-grade student gave ten yuan, and when asked why she donated her New Year’s money, the girl said that we should remember Xiao Li’s words: “We must learn to help those people who need help. We must help others.”
Write an essay according to the above materials.
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The future of Chinese text input — a prediction
I’ve been thinking about pinyin and computers lately, and also thinking about the (to me) odd belief of Western linguists such as John DeFrancis and Victor Mair that Chinese characters are destined to wither away and be replaced by an alphabetic system.
It does seem to be the case that pinyin as a way of putting text into cell phones or computers is wildly popular and widely used. As anywhere, people are self-conscious about their handwriting (maybe more so here than in the West).
So one could easily imagine at least three possibilities, although I will predict a fourth.
1. Alphabetic imperialism. Because pinyin has advantages for text input, young people will learn and use it and then slowly realize that they could just ditch characters and use pinyin. There are many problems with this—the Chinese language didn’t evolve to work well with pinyin (on a character level, homophones are very common, and the regularity of Chinese syllables means that pinyin has even less visual variation than English does—e.g., no written consonant clusters beyond ch, zh, sh, and ng—and I’m aware that these aren’t consonant clusters in the spoken language]. Still, I suppose it could happen.
2. A fork in the road. If pinyin and keyboards are really the best way to input characters into computers, one can envision a future in which pinyin is used to write and characters are used to read. This seems inelegant, as it would involve constant switching between a sound-based pinyin mode and characters, but it’s a small step from current reality for many young computer-intensive Chinese speakers. Still, it does strike me as inelegant.
3. Speech to text. I’m not up to date on the current state of Chinese language speech recognition, but as pinyin approximates spoken Chinese one could imaging cutting out that middle man and using speech recognition. Dictating requires a level of privacy that is often impossible, although perhaps subvocalization-based systems will get around this problem. I suspect that speech recognition-based systems will be very popular here at some point.
4. Gestures: toward a pen-based renaissance. Currently, pen-based input systems are not very popular. I have a friend who has one on his cellphone and really dislikes it. He needs to be very accurate in his writing and it ofte n makes mistakes. Listening to him talk about it, though, it reminded me of the state of the art of pinyin input systems say 10 years ago. I used them, because I really didn’t have any alternative, but I knew no native speakers who did.
Because I think that modalities are important, my guess is that the most effective system would be one that worked with characters to produce characters, but took advantage of the growing power of computers. Thus, one should think about simplified gestures rather than simply writing strokes, so that the computer could adapt to short cuts. For example, the character 小 is often written in a single continuous stroke (vertically down like a capital J and then continuing into a horizontal stroke). The Microsoft tablet input panel accepts this in XP, and the late Apple Chinese Input System did, too. But one could imagine a wider world of such gestures. And, more importantly, the predictive power that has made pinyin-based systems feasible could work just as well for pen-based systems. In this world, you’d begin to write characters in their boxes and the computer would try to guess the following characters. If it guessed right, you’d skip on; if not, you’d write the correct character in the box. My guess is that such a system could be very quick.
The computational and graphic power required for such a system would certainly tax the current state of the art, as with speech recognition (but also adding the graphic element). But I bet it will be developed and I suspect that it may become a preferred way of working with Chinese on computers.
So that’s my prediction. You read it here first (in fact, you probably didn’t, so please let me know where you did read such a prediction, and/or why it’s wrong, in the comments).
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Ruth in China
My daughter, Ruth, has accepted a job teaching in Beijing next year, at this school, which is out near the Capitol Airport. Should be an interesting adventure.
I’ll use the comments to collect advice to her, or suggestions on things to bring or quickly acquire here, as well as things to avoid.
If I were going to spend a year or more in Beijing, I would quickly acquire: a comfortable desk chair (perhaps from IKEA), a cheap laser printer, a decent surge protector (do you still need an uninterruptible power supply?), a humidifier for the winter, bottled water service with hot/cold water. Anything else?
I would bring: a good laptop with a warranty that worked here, dental floss (maybe this is available here), good running shoes. Anything else?
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Making democracy look bad
Interesting article about why the set of remaining Communist countries in the world hasn’t diminished in the last almost 20 years. It’s sad to extend this argument to thinking about what the tragedy in Iraq will do to the attractiveness of democratic institutions.
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Situation awareness is all around us
really interesting article in Wired magazine, although he calls it “field sense” and it’s much more perceptual than the examples I’m interested in. The idea of periodic occlusions seems potentially interesting, though.
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Random observations
The nice thing about coming to China once a year, every year, is that it’s like one of those motion-capture videos where they show growth by animating a series of time-lagged snapshots. So here are a few random things I’ve noticed this time:
Signs of new wealth:
- Electrically-assisted bikes have really taken off. I think I want one, too: they’d be perfect for where we live in Ann Arbor to help get over the hills that surround our house.
People are talking on their cellphones much more than in the past (rather than using SMS messaging, although that’s still vastly more common than in the U.S.). - It’s really hot over here, and I suspect that when George Bush argues that it’s China’s responsibility to do something about carbon emissions, it doesn’t go over to well to people who know either the reality or the media-presented view of life in the U.S. It doesn’t mean he’s wrong, exactly, but I suspect people in a country that consumes a fifth of the per-capita energy of the U.S. don’t appreciate being told they need to cut back.
- The food keeps getting sweeter here. Today I had pulpy corn juice to drink at lunch, and last night some very sweet ice tea.
- Perhaps related to this, people continue to get larger here, although not so much by American standards. To some extent, though, it seems some of the very fat babies I saw when first visited here in 1984 have grown up to be fairly fat adults.
- Finally, I would really like to know why Buick can sell in China the kinds of cars I’d like to buy in the U.S., but can’t seem to bring them to America or build them there.
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6-4-89
It’s a couple of days after June 4. I haven’t been downtown yet this trip. On the day itself, I was visiting the Institute of Psychology. I asked a couple of old friends if they knew what day it was, and both recalled it after a couple of minutes thought. One said she thought everyone had forgotten it except for those who lost family members or were directly involved. That’s my impression as well. A couple of thoughts
1. One thing I’ve realized since then is that that was far from the worst thing that the government had done, even in recent history, but had the advantage of being televised around the world (thanks to Gorbachev’s visit) at a time when Americans were both paying attention and able to watch.
2. I do think there was a change in Chinese students soon after June 4, 1989, from a very empowered group of people who felt that they were a cohort responsible for deciding the future government of China, to a group of people who had a clearer sense of the domains where they had freedom and those where they did not. I do worry about the most recent generation of urban, privileged college students, particularly when I read articles such as this one. The elite students who come to the U.S. still represent a vanishingly small percentage of a grindingly poor country, and I don’t know to what extent they represent the future of China, although one can hope…
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New bike
I leave a bike at BNU for my use here, because one of my favorite things to do in Beijing is to bike around the city. It’s always a question whether it will be there when I return. This time it was still there, despite the fact that the area where the bikes are kept had been moved. I took it out of the locked area and left it in the general bike area, putting it off to the side so that I could return and clean it up. Unfortunately, in the kind of irony that Dick Nisbett says we like over here, it was stolen before I got back. My guess is that it disappeared into the construction project in what once was an open field across from the Zhuanjialou.
So yesterday I bought a new bike. I got the cheapest Giant bike they have here, which is still pretty good—no gears but coaster brake on the back, reasonably light, and overall not a bad bike for about $50. I asked the owner of the store how many locks people use these days, and she argued that you only need one lock if it’s good enough. I think there’s still some deterrence value in having multiple locks, so I ended up getting one of the cheap ones for the back wheel that mount on the bike, and then a very heavy, strong chain lock. I ended up spending about $15 on the locks, which is a high percentage of the bike’s value, but probably a good investment. She also took a can of spray paint and painted over the Giant logos and otherwise tried to make the bike look old and ugly.
I hadn’t thought through the fact that I wouldn’t be able to ride until the paint dried, so I walked it back to campus and had lunch at McDonald’s. They’ve expanded their menu since I last noticed them, adding breakfast and items like the surprisingly popular “cup ‘o corn.” Biking around, I notice that many of the McDonalds and many others stores are now open 24 hours a day, which is a big change for Beijing.
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Looking on the bright side
When we lived in Beijing in 2003, my wife really appreciated the fact that news here has a constructive tinge to it. The basic message is something like, sure there are problems, but life’s getting better. Sometimes, though, you really need to reach…