Archive for February, 2008
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Video deja vu (I)
In late 2000, we started a project that involved working extensively with digital video, featuring multiple languages, multiple (ok, two) synchronized video, and transcripts. We learned how to get such video onto computers, do light editing, compress it into formats tractable with then-current computer technology.
Right now, one of the decisions is problematic in hindsight. This was using the RealVideo format, primarily because it worked well with the SMIL markup language. That format hasn’t aged well, and in particular isn’t supported well in the Macintosh world.
Recently, we’ve begun a new video-based project, with the opportunity to make new decisions about equipment, formats, etc. The next posting will discuss the decisions we’ve made, and we’ll see if we’ve learned anything from this experience…
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Go believe
This article discusses the new English name for the Goubuli (狗不理) chain of steamed bun restaurants, centered in Tianjin (but also in Beijing, and probably elsewhere). The name is striking because one translation would seem to imply that this is something not even a dog would eat. Apparently that’s not the right one, though. The U of M crew ate there, and a taxi driver in Tianjin said their quality had deteriorated since they’d expanded. Probably similar to my disappointing experience going to a Chen Mapou doufu (陈麻婆豆腐) restaurant in Chengdu.
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On food and connections
Every year, during Lent, we try to use up as much as possible of the food that we’ve accumulated over the years (things bought in too-big amounts, or for some long-lost purpose). I’ve finally used up a very large container of caraway seeds that must be at least seven or eight years old (by putting a quarter cup in each batch of bread), and some Japanese pickled plums that came with us from Champaign in 2004, and weren’t newly bought then.
This year we also decided to give up meat for Lent, which was an interesting connection with the traditions of this fast. Trying to use up all the meat in our freezer before Lent (which we almost succeeded in doing) was interesting, and suddenly the tradition and name of Mardi Gras makes complete sense (in a time before refrigeration, you would really need to consume your meat supplies before Lent began). Looking slightly further, I see that the word “carnival” comes from “farewell to meat,” something that would have been clearer if it were spelled “carnevale” in English as it is in Italian.
Modern life in the U.S. affords relatively few opportunities for seasonality. Obviously that’s a good thing, but I think that seaons are built deeply into our psyches.
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The state of the presidential campaign, 2-18-2008
Mayhill Fowler: TX: Bill Clinton Takes Aim At Obama – Off The Bus on The Huffington Post
“Bill Clinton is our modern-day Sitting Bull, replaying old victories for the bleachers in a new kind of Wild West Show.”
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Better than free
Kevin Kelly, of Cool Tools fame, wrote a very thoughtful article on economic issues related to funding intellectual work in an age of free digital content. The basic question is, “what’s worth paying for when copies are free?” His answers (but read the whole article here) involve a set of “generative” qualities that add quality to free copies:
1. Immediacy (and parenthetically, it’s always seemed to me that the New York Times got it precisely wrong when they made their current information free, but charged for old stuff). I think if they charged for immediate access to information you could get free access to in a few hours, they’d have a market.
2. Personalization (customized for your needs, interests, biases).
3. Interpretation (including support).
4. Authenticity (some kind of guarantee that it’s bug-free).
5. Accessibiilty (getting someone else to maintain and back up information, so that you can just access it when and how you want it).
6. Embodiment (i.e., getting it on a t-shirt or framed).
7. Patronage (the opportunity to pay people you support).
8. Findability.
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Fareed Zakaria
...has an interesting article in the forthcoming Newsweek about the issue of “experience” in the Democratic Presidential selection: The Wrong Experience.
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Who could possibly be “ready from Day 1″ to be president?
The Bush administration entered office prepared to devote their foreign policy energy toward containing China. It didn’t work out that way; as someone who works in China, that’s not altogether a bad thing, but it’s clear they weren’t prepared for the challenges that faced them. Hillary Clinton claims that she is. If she really believes this, it’s a mark of pretty amazing hubris. So, hopefully, it’s a campaign claim.
But something that makes me think she might really believe this comes from an old description by an economist who impresses me as being of sober judgment, Brad DeLong at Berkeley. He was part of her health care task for in the 1990s, and wrote this:
My two cents’ worth—and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994—is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation’s health-care system…
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch—the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.
I really think that we could have achieved universal health insurance in the early 1990s. Bill Clinton had run on doing this, he had majorities in the Senate and the House, and the leader of the Senate (Bob Dole) was sympathetic. In the end, though, they spent more than a year toiling in secret and produced something that was bizarrely complicated and appealed to know one. It was presented as a fait accompli to the Senators and Congressmen, and they were happy to reject it when it became unpopular.
Looking at what I can see of how she’s built and run her campaign, particularly this article, does nothing to convince me that she learned very much from that experience.
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