Publishing!

For the past month, I've been shopping around an essay about China and the Internet to a bunch of daily newspapers, with no luck. But yesterday, someone bit, and it looks like the essay will publish next week.

After that happens, I'll give more details about the topic and the difficulties I experienced shopping it around. The essay relates to something I initially wrote about in this blog, and a few readers may be interested in how I shaped a rough idea in a blog into a more coherent and polished (and publishable) essay.

Of course, when people talk about "publishing" in academics, it almost always relates to journals, but in this case I felt a newspaper was a better forum. Academic journals will come later, especially once my thesis gets underway.

Positive Extension School comment from Harvard alum

I just posted about the Harvard Extension School's response to Katrina. I wanted to add that I found out about this generous offer through Curt Monash's blog on Computerworld. Curt, who is a Harvard alum (PhD in Mathematics [Game Theory]) had some nice words to say about the Extension School offerings, and not just because of the disaster response:

The Harvard Extension School is not to be sneezed at. Many of its courses are more demanding than (or exactly the same as) regular Harvard courses. The average quality of teaching may be better than that at regular Harvard (although this is an admittedly low standard). Home-schooled teenagers take advanced biochemistry lab courses alongside 50-something career-changers. The distance courses generally work as distance courses.

Harvard and the Extension School respond to Katrina

Harvard has responded to the disaster in the South in a number of ways. The Harvard Extension School has really stepped up the plate, I am proud to say. This is from the Extension School website:

The Harvard Extension School is pleased to join with Harvard University in extending learning opportunities to students affected by the Hurricane Katrina devastation in the Gulf Coast region. We will waive the tuition for up to four courses in the fall 2005 term for eligible students. Eligible students include people who would normally be attending college or graduate school in the flooded areas of the Gulf Coast. Students may enroll in on-campus or online courses. Scholarships for online courses are limited, so students are encouraged to apply as soon as possible.

Eligible students also include high school students from the Gulf Coast who come to the Boston area to attend local schools for the term and who want to enroll in up to two on-campus courses that meet AP requirements.

More details are here.

Biking to Harvard

If you live in the Boston area, and attend classes at Harvard, you should really consider commuting by bike. I have done this for the better part of three years during the warmer and lighter months, and even have a website dedicated to commuting by bike called bike worker (bikeworker.com).

That being said, I only recommend biking to work for people who don't have any pre-existing health conditions, have a safe route, and can get home before it gets dark. Check out the bike worker site for a complete list of biking tips and other advice.

Katrina, the TV news, and parallels with China

I've got a couple of things to say about Katrina. I have been watching this with a lot of concern, and have been especially concerned for those people in New Orleans who are too old, sick, or otherwise incapacitated. We have two young kids, a toddler and an infant, and I can't imagine being in a hospital maternity ward with no electricity, or attempting to evacuate my family from a flooded urban area without help. These are the types of situations that a lot of people are being forced into.

But the network television news programs don't show too much of that. Images of looters and desperate people at the Superdome are much sexier. CBS Early Show anchor Harry Smith even remarked about the "Great Video" coming out of New Orleans, when he started his broadcast this morning at 7:30 am EST. The footage he was referring to was a bunch of people on the roof of a high-rise building in the flood, waving desperately at the helicopter as it circled, obviously hoping it would land or drop supplies. "Great Video"? The nerve! Obviously, there is a segment of the broadcast news press corps who are more obsessed with showing "great" TV imagery than showing compassion for the people victimized by this disaster.

I have a feeling most people in Asia don't really care too much about this. It's like Americans reacting to a flood in Hunan, or an earthquake in Iran. It's happening somewhere else on the other side of the world, to people we don't know, so why should we care? I have experienced this before. I had just arrived in Taiwan from Boston on Sept. 11, 2001 when the planes hit the Twin Towers. In the days that followed, I encountered a few people that expressed sympathy, but no one who could appreciate the depression or anguish that I and many other Americans felt.

But seeing images of people evacuating New Orleans, I wonder if some of the older people in China and Taiwan aren't reminded of similar evacuations in the 20s, 30s and 40s, as cities emptied in advance of approaching armies. There is something universal about the situation of refugees, even if the causes of their plights are the result of any number of man-made or natural disasters.