Timely Snow

Durkheim – Social Facts

“A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint”

From this, which has this nice explanation of why this is interesting:

The cohesion necessary for coordinated group effort can be only be explained by reference to “social facts”, those things that are [...]

China goes to college – in a big way | csmonitor.com
Since 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then president of China, spoke on the 100th anniversary of top-ranked Peking University and issued his bracing call for change, overall college enrollment in China has roughly tripled. The country now outpaces leaders like the US, India, Russia, and Japan [...]

Oneaday
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...now, why don’t the characters show up?

Writing Systems

With apologies for a bad pun
I’ve been considering ways of putting together secure accessible backed-up storage of our growing video archive. We have an older Dell server, which is fast and adequate for many purposes, but limited in storage (I’m not sure, but perhaps 100 gigabytes on SCSI drives).

Given that we do have that fast [...]

One of my favorite people, one of those rare individuals who combine mathematics and cabaret performance. When I was very young, he was part of a TV show called “That was the week that was” that was a precursor of the Daily Show and similar ventures. Courtesy of the Internet Archive. Internet Archive: Details: Tom [...]

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Sometime I’ll have to check out this tool for putting multimedia into PowerPoint. It costs $50, with a two-week free trial, so I’ll want to make sure it really works.

A picture of our new mobile eye-tracker

Finally, the practice of programming is changing. Gartner recently caused a stir by saying there would be 235,000 fewer programmers in the US ten years from now. This would have been like predicting in the 80s, that there would be fewer typists in the US by 2004. Such a prediction would be true in one [...]

The picture shows my collaborator, Fang Ge of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, my former Chinese tutor, Cao Xiuhong, and her husband and my former grad student, Gary Feng, now a professor at Duke.

Tomorrw I return to Beijing for my first visit since the Spring. The main purpose is to [...]