Classic Onion: Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master's Thesis

Reported in The Onion:

WALTHAM, MA—A courageous young notebook computer committed a fatal, self-inflicted execution error late Sunday night, selflessly giving its own life so that professors, academic advisors, classmates, and even future generations of college students would never have to read Jill Samoskevich's 227-page master's thesis, sources close to the Brandeis University English graduate student reported Monday.

As a master's candidate living in Waltham, and sometimes using the same model of notebook computer described in the Onion article, I had to chuckle. Read why Samoskevich's thesis was so bad here.

Rioting at Shengda College

The New York Times and other sources have highlighted student riots at Shengda College (I think the simplified Chinese is 升达经贸管理学). The problem: Shengda has an affiliation with Zhengzhou University in Henan province that until this year allowed Shengda students to receive diplomas identifying them as graduates of the more prestigious Zhengzhou University. New national laws in China apparently forbid this type of arrangement, and the new Shengda graduates, upon seeing the designation on their diplomas, rioted. The campus has been shut down.

The EastSouthWestNorth blog has translations from the Chinese press and photos of the damaged campus.

Review: Grave Of The Fireflies

We watched Grave of the Fireflies tonight, one of the outside-view DVDs for my Harvard Summer School class on Japanese and Chinese film. I haven't been so disturbed by an animated film since seeing Watership Down when I was a kid.

Grave of the Fireflies is a Japanese story about a boy and his young sister set in the closing days of World War II. The suffering of civilians during this conflict, especially German and Japanese civilians, is something that's glossed over in the war films and documentaries I've seen in the past. Grave of the Fireflies does not shrink from showing the suffering of ordinary Japanese during this period -- firestorms, bombs, strafing, injury, hunger, rationed food and housing, familial strains, propaganda, and the other desperate qualities of that period are depicted in anime style. There are many, many touching moments as well, as the relationship between the boy and the girl comes across as authentically loving and protective.

The story could have been told with film and special effects, but not with the same degree of emotional intensity. The fact that the little girl, Setsuko, is just a little younger than my daughter made an especially difficult connection in my mind. I have to admit: I cried at the end.

Wikipedia's Protected and Semi-Protected Articles: The China Connection

From the New York Times, a list of Wikipedia articles that are so contentious that they have restrictions on editing them:

Protected Articles
Cannot be edited.

2004 United States election voting controversies, Ohio
Cuba
Islamophobia
Elitism
Kosovo
Human rights in the People's Republic of China
Military budget of the People's Republic of China
Messianic Judaism
George Bernard Shaw
Islam and anti-Semitism
Freedom fighter
Mail-order bride
Moscow Metro

Semi-Protected Articles
Users can edit only if they have been registered with the site for at least four days.

Palestinian refugee
Michael Jackson
Falkland Islands
Gay
Republic of Moldova
George Washington
Jew
Romania
God
Emo
Christianity
French Revolution
William Shakespeare
John Wayne
Ku Klux Klan
Blog
September 11, 2001 attacks
Anarchism
Afghanistan
Michael Jordan
Hamas
Sex
Food
Comfort women
Mahatma Gandhi
Sony
Transcendental Meditation
PlayStation 3
Boston, Massachusetts

The Wikipedia PRC military budget article appearing in this list intrigued me. Here are the reasons why this Wikipedia article is "protected" and labeled "The neutrality of this article is disputed".

Review: Chungking Express (重慶森林)

In less than two weeks my Harvard Summer School film class starts, and I'm trying to get as many "outside viewing" screenings in beforehand. Last night we watched Chungking Express (重慶森林), directed by Wong Kar-wai (王家衛).

Where to start with this review? Well, the title deserves a mention. It may sound like it has something to do with the fast train to Sichuan province's second-largest city, Chongqing (the new pinyin spelling of "Chungking"), but it has nothing to do with trains or the Sichuanese city. "Chungking" is a reference to Chungking Mansions, the gray, hulking, decrepit high-rise building that squats on Nathan Road in the southern part of Kowloon, across the harbor from Hong Kong. "Express" refers to the little fast-food restaurant in or near the building that is central to the movie's plot. However, the Chinese title of the film translates to "Chungking Forest," which refers to the forest of concrete that is the setting for most of the film. The director paints this setting with a gritty mixture of rain, neon, underworld activity, and a clash of cultures; this reminded me very much of the cityscape and social environment depicted in Blade Runner.

The plot of Chungking Express is divided into two parts. I am not going to spoil it here, but suffice it to say that loneliness, and an inability to make human contact, figure prominently. A very un-Chinese aspect of the characters is the absense of family members, or references to family relationships (with one minor exception). There aren't any close friendships among colleagues, or even old friends to fall back on. Everyone is an island, adrift in a concrete jungle.

Chungking Express is one of the first Hong Kong films I've seen in many years. When I lived in Taiwan they were staple of movie theaters, MTVs, and television, but I dreaded watching them. Most were mindless gangster, slapstick, or historical dramas infused with heavy doses of gongfu action. "Chopey-Sockey" was what Gavin Phipps, my British colleague at the China News called this genre, and he liked them! Even those Hong Kong films that didn't follow the usual filmmaking formulae were almost unwatchable in Taiwan, thanks to primitive Mandarin overdubs that seemed to be done by the same screechy cast of voice actors. Chungking Express is thoughtful and generally well-made, the acting is good, and it's mostly in Cantonese, with professionally recorded audio.

Watching Chungking Express reminded me of the first few trips I made to Hong Kong in the early '90s. I stayed in several of the backpacker hostels in Chungking Mansions and Mirador Mansions next door, because they were the cheapest beds I could find. One of the places I stayed -- the Garden Hostel -- was even briefly shown in the film! Director Wong captured the feel of the lower floors of Chungking Mansions very well. It really does have a Third-World ambience, with lots of people from South Asia, Africa, and elsewhere doing business in the warren of curry shops, clothing stores, electronics stalls, and money-changing counters. The only thing Wong missed were the long lines at the elevators, and the backpackers.

Even though I haven't been to Chungking Mansions in more than ten years, I can't imagine it's changed much. Apparently it hasn't, judging by the blog posts of this Dartmouth MBA student and a Canadian backpacker doing an Asian tour. It's one of those places that's slowly evolves but won't change outright until it's knocked down or consumed by fire.

Here's an exterior picture of the building, taken by Peter Bihr and licensed under Creative Commons. Thanks, Peter!

Harvard Magazine vs. The Yard

Interesting discussion in the Wall Street Journal about Harvard's decision to publish a new alumni magazine called The Yard -- apparently to get a better grip, as PR folks would say, on "managing the message." The article notes that Harvard Magazine, which gets financial support from the University, but is somewhat independent editorially, is not being nice enough when it comes to University affairs, and is impacting fundraising. Here's what the Wall Street Journal has to say:

Though financed in part by the university, Harvard Magazine has covered Mr. Summers's downfall as aggressively as any media outlet, opening its letters section to furious alumni and offering frank news reports on the campus row. But now university administrators, worried that the bimonthly magazine has gone over the line, have launched a new glossy publication to refocus their message to alumni. The new magazine's second issue was distributed last month, and it contains scant mention of Mr. Summers's troubles, his resignation or the crisis that has enveloped the university.

The move to supplement Harvard Magazine with an even more loyal, in-house organ reflects growing concern among many colleges and universities that editorially independent alumni magazines are damaging fund-raising efforts. The percentage of alumni contributing to their schools has been declining since 2001, according to surveys by the Council for Aid to Education, and Harvard hit a 16-year low in alumni participation in the last fiscal year.

I haven't read The Yard, but I was a regular reader of Harvard Magazine when I worked at Harvard, and really liked it. It was (and I assume, still is) intellectual, covered many obscure areas of research being conducted at Harvard, and was very text-heavy, old-fashioned and even comforting, in a New Yorker kind of way. I hope The Yard and the independent 02138 magazine don't put Harvard Magazine out of business; but I fear that the Alumni Affairs and Development Office's decision to fund The Yard may be a precursor to the administration pulling the plug on funding Harvard Magazine.

Disclosure: I worked in the Harvard University Alumni Affairs and Development Office Communications Department from 2002 to 2005.

Chinese media as a lens of Chinese politics

The information revolution and increasing openness in Chinese society has done wonders for making China more understandable to outsiders, but it's still amazing to me how little things have changed when it comes to understanding Chinese politics and Chinese Communist Party power struggles.

Case in point: The recent return of vice premier Huang Ju to the Politburo's nine-member Standing Committee, after an unexplained five-month absense. He just disappeared from public view earlier this year, and then suddenly reappared, according to the account in the Washington Post by Edward Cody.

Unlike other countries, Chinese media cannot discuss or offer speculation regarding appointments, factionalism, or policy regarding senior state and CCP officials. News must originate from the New China News Agency (新華社). In Huang's case, members of the public did not know he was back on the scene until state television (I assume China Central Television) and the People's Daily (人民日報）mentioned that he was back, and taking part in committee procedings. The Washington Post reporter describes a lot of rumor about why he disappeared; you can read it here.

Getting back to the original point of this post: The central government's methods of letting people know about internal operations -- and observers' methods of making sense of what's going on -- is not much different than it was in the 1970s, or even earlier. Roger Garside, who lived in Beijing in the 1970s, recalls the period after Mao Zedong's death in his book "Coming Alive: China After Mao" (1981) and how state media played a role in understanding political shifts:

“Small changes in emphasis, the reformulation of a set phrase, the appearance of a new slogan or the quiet dropping of an old one occurred only by design and reflected a political development whose meaning one must search for.”

This excerpt is from page 3 of Garside's book.

40th Anniversary of the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命)

1966 was a significant year for China. It's the year the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命) began. Howard French of the New York Times today profiles two figures from the Cultural Revolution in "Hearts Still Scarred 40 Years After China's Upheaval". One of them, Nie Yuanzi, was the college professor whose big-character poster allegedly started the Cultural Revolution. While it may seem like an example of non-state-controlled mass media sparking great cultural upheavals in China, one could actually argue that state-controlled media did in fact get things rolling before and after the poster was placed on the wall. From the article:

After the publication of an article criticizing Mao's political rivals, Ms. Nie, then Communist Party secretary of Beijing University's philosophy department, put up a poster that claimed the university was under the control of the bourgeoisie. Mao had the poster read over the radio, giving it his stamp of approval and encouraging attacks on authority figures.

The NYT article doesn't say which Chinese publication carried the article that prompted Nie to create the poster.

Approaching the situation using a counterfactual argument: Would the Cultural Revolution have taken place if the unnamed Chinese newspaper or magazine not published that article, and Nie didn't feel compelled to write a big-character poster?

Primary Source from the Vietnam War: The Diary of Dr. Tram

Seth Mydans of the New York Times has a fascinating story about a diary written by a young Vietnamese doctor during the Vietnam War, which was recovered by an American soldier named Fred Whitehurst after the doctor's death and eventually published in a Vietnam. The NYT article, "Diary of North Vietnam Doctor Killed in U.S. Attack Makes War Real", notes that the tale of the doctor, Dang Thuy Tram, has made a lot of younger Vietnamese aware of the struggles of that era:

When the diary was serialized in newspapers last year, people cut out and saved the articles, passed them among their friends and read them aloud to one another. When it was published as a book, its print run was a sensational 300,000 or more in a country where books are generally published in small numbers, well under one-tenth that number.

"I really admire her," said Vu Thi Lan, who works in a camera shop and said she was 38, "the same age as her daughter if she had had one."

Ms. Lan said she had read everything she could find about Dr. Tram in newspapers and on Web sites, and wondered whether, in the doctor's place, she could have found the strength to endure.

"In my generation we haven't had a chance to live in that kind of situation," Ms. Lan said. "And it's a diary. It's real. That's what makes it interesting. She didn't mean for people to read it. It was just to release her feelings."

My own research is based on computer-assisted analysis of media content, but the diary of the young doctor is something that apparently isn't meant for computerized parsing and analysis. It's one of those primary sources that has the power to touch people on an emotional level, as it illustrates a personal view of the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam and the United States.

The Vietnam Center at Texas Tech has scans of the original diaries, as well as photos, but has removed the English translations -- the family has apparently contracted a company in the U.S. to publish it in print.

ALM Candidates Needed as 2006 Commencement Volunteers

If you're an ALM candidate, and you can be on campus from 10:30 am to 4 pm on Thursday, June 8, the Extension School needs your help as a Commencement Volunteer! Spouses and significant others are welcome to volunteer with you. Call Peter O'Malley at the ALM office before 5 pm on Wednesday. Email peter_omalley@harvard.edu or telephone 617-495-9417.

Internet vigilantes in China

Further to my post earlier this evening about China's legal system as depicted in The Story of Qiu Ju (秋菊打官司), I saw a Slashdot comment thread about a New York Times/International Herald Tribune article by Howard French, entitled "Mob rule on China's Internet: The keyboard as weapon."

It's about "Internet hunting" (not sure of the Chinese), a form of mob vigilanteism spurred by Internet bulletin boards and anger over criminal acts or bad behavior. From the article:

"[It's a] growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined.

In recent cases, people have scrutinized husbands suspected of cheating on their wives, fraud on Internet auction sites, the secret lives of celebrities and unsolved crimes. One case that drew a huge following involved the poisoning of a Tsinghua University student - an event that dates to 1994, but was revived by curious strangers after word spread on the Internet that the only suspect in the case had been questioned and released."

The IHT article touches upon the fact that the Internet is perhaps the only mass communication forum in which Chinese can speak, or attempt to speak, what's on their mind. However, the article doesn't explore the possibility that certain cases of "Internet hunting" (such as that involving the Tsinghua University student) may be sparked by frustrations with the legal system. "Internet hunting" must make those involved feel unusually empowered, in my opinion.

One other issue that the article neglects to mention is that a form of "Internet hunting" takes place in the West, too, usually involving online mobs hounding a single person who has committed an Internet-based crime, or some other type of online gaffe. The Register publicized a case this week about a man in England named Amir Tofangsazan becoming the victim of an online mob after allegedly pulling an online bait-and-switch for a used laptop. There was also a case in the United States a few years back involving Bernard Shifman, a computer consultant whose efforts to electronically send his C.V. out to a lot of people resulted in an online torch-wielding mob tearing his reputation to shreds.

Related Posts:

Harvard Extended: Shanghai, Sex, and Shades of History

Nicholas Carr: Open-Source Policing

Review: The Story of Qiu Ju

As part of my preparations for my upcoming Harvard Summer School film class, we watched Zhang Yimou's (张艺谋) The Story of Qiu Ju (秋菊打官司). Set in the early 1990s, it tells the story of a village woman (played by Gong Li) who struggles -- via China's primitive law enforcement and legal system -- to get an apology from the local village chief for injuring her husband. It's an interesting, well-told story, with a special twist at the end. It highlights, among other things, various cultural and social issues including the importance of food, "face", and "connections" (guanxi, 關係).

The Story of Qiu Ju also portrays some major weaknesses in China's legal system. I can't describe them in depth here, but suffice it to say that Western concepts of gathering evidence, filing complaints, and preventing conflicts of interest are quite different in China at the time this film was shot. Qiu Ju's struggles with the system are sometimes comical, but mostly awkward and sometimes very discouraging. The problems with the legal system are very apparent, despite an obvious effort to present certain aspects in a very positive light. For instance, characters praise the legal system as fair, and a senior law enforcement figure goes out of his way to help Qiu Ju. I suspect that propaganda had to be inserted into the screenplay in order for Zhang to get the project off the ground and shown to domestic audiences. This would not be surprising, considering the totalitarian information controls that have dictated mass media content in China since the revolution.

I also wonder what domestic audiences thought about the film when it was released in the early 1990s. Qiu Ju is a character many Chinese could identify with -- like the lead character, most of the popoulation at that time was poor and rural, and many had no doubt heard of official abuses against ordinary members of the population, if not directly affected -- remember this film was released three years after Tiananmen Square, 25 years after the Cultural Revolution, and almost 35 years after the Hundred Flowers Campaign.

One last note, about the cinematography. Zhang is well-known for his use of color (as in Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, etc.) but The Story of Qiu Ju is very grey and drab. In fact, the film looks more like a documentary than a staged drama. Many scenes use telephoto or long-shot lenses focussing on the actors in real-life street markets, outside bus stations, and on city sidewalks, with the people nearby clearly oblivious to the fact that a film shoot is taking place! This style of filmmaking lends itself to highlighting the gritty aspects of life in China, circa 1992, and it's very effective -- you get a feel for the poverty of ordinary people, and for the lives that they lead. Seeing the scenes that took place in the city was like stepping back in time for me. I first visited China in April of 1992, and Datong and parts of Beijing at that time looked very similar to the urban scenes in the film. I remembered the dust, the poverty, the fleets of ringing black bicycles, crowds of people dressed in blue, and even those rickety old long-distance busses with the luggage racks on top.