Archive for May, 2008
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Unwiring
So according to this article, discussed here, about 15% of children in the U.S. live in houses without a landline telephone, almost all because the family only has cellphones.
Here’s the graph:
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Hang ups
Hanging Up in Chinese | Sinosplice: Life in China.
A very nice article by John Pasden on how people get off the phone in Chinese. 就这样
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Earthquakes and dynastic change
I wonder how widespread this view is, although the coincidence of the Tangshan earthquake and the deaths of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong is certainly something people in China are aware of (I’m not sure who the other figure was to whom Pomfret alludes).
By the way, my daughter is teaching in Beijing this year. She’s about as far from the epicenter as the distance from New York City and Orlando, Florida. Nonetheless, she felt the earthquake in her classroom, although luckily there was no damage in her environs.
I hope that there will soon be an easy way to donate funds to help with the earthquake, and that Americans and other foreigners will be generous. In a time of conflicts, misunderstandings, and mutual suspicion between China and the US, it would be an important gesture, as well as a way of providing real help to a country that, despite its image in the US, is still quite poor.
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Psychogeography
I’m pretty skeptical about the magnitude of the differences, but this is an interesting idea (plotting distribution of the Big 5 personality traits by geographical location):
Interestingly, America’s psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a center for the manufacturing industry, has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams.
The Northeast corridor, including Greater Boston, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin, are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. While it is hard to identify which came first – was it an initial concentration of personality types that drew industry, or the industry which attracted the personalities? – the overlay is clear.
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Consumer spending — excellent graph
This is an amazing graph. If you mouse over it, you can see what the unlabeled categories are, as well as what percent of spending it made up, and how that changed over the last year. From looking at it quickly, it seems clear that
1. We’re complete outliers,
2. As a group, Americans have ample room to spend less money,
3. Quite a few prices have gone down over the last year (although it wasn’t clear if this is price or spending).
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Nice example of systematic biases in sampling
This is an elegant demonstration showing a simple, systematic bias in sampling. I’m not sure when I’d have the opportunity to use it, but perhaps sometime it will be apt.
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Happiness abounds as country cheers — or conservation of gloom
When my wife and I lived in Beijing for half a year in 2003, she pointed out how much she enjoyed listening to the news on China Radio International. Unlike in the U.S., the news was relentlessly upbeat—progress was being made, and where there were problems, they were being addressed.
James Fallows today notes a classic example of the genre, discussed here, and a scanned image of the article itself is posted here.
But, there’s another side to this picture. American movies are relentlessly upbeat (think Hoosiers). Chinese movies are not. One that brought this home was a popular movie about a family and their dog, Kala shi tiao gou, which shows a relentless quest to find what’s become of a dog confiscated by the police (probably nothing good). At the end of the movie, there was a page of text saying that they got their dog back, presumably because test audiences found this too grim. Notably, it said nothing about what happened to their son, who was in jail at the moment.
So I don’t know what it means that our news is quite downbeat and our fictional depictions relentlessly upbeat, while Chinese culture seems to swing the other way. Perhaps someone should propose a “conservation of gloom” theory…
