The reason I mention this is that I stumbled across a short commentary by Hessler on the Wenchuan earthquake:

In the minds of many Chinese, major earthquakes are often connected with political events. This week’s disaster is the largest since 1976, when a quake in eastern China killed more than two hundred and forty thousand people. That was the year that Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong both died, and the Cultural Revolution ended. At that time, Willy was a newborn in rural Sichuan, far from the epicenter, but even there his parents felt the tremors. His mother was bathing her two sons and her first instinct was to put some clothes on them—later, she said that she couldn’t stand the thought of them dying naked. In a neighboring village, the peasants slaughtered all the pigs, even the smallest ones; they believed that it was best to enjoy what they had before the world ended.

It’s those last two sentences that humanize it all. I was chatting with Echo a few days ago and remember being surprised how shaken up she was. Up until that point, I’d been totally oblivious to the earthquake, donating money in charity drives and reading the news online, but otherwise unaffected by the media blitz. Echo was badly affected though, and what brought it home to me was when she said:

“Beijing is technically a very dangerous place, but it’s actually quite safe because it’s 皇城”.

“皇城?”

“Yeah. Geologists say it’s dangerous, but the city has been safe for more than 800 years because it’s been the seat of the Emperor.”

Pointing out that geomantism went out with dowsing in scientific circles didn’t seem the best response, so I stayed tactfully silent. I figure if I can eventually win on the “drinking-cold-water-does-not-kill” front I’ll be happy enough. But it struck me how illogical and small our efforts are to impose order on the outside world at times of tragedy. Even when they make sense, they don’t make any sense.

At any rate, I’m moving back to Beijing quite soon and am hoping to avoid earthquakes. Will post the details on that later. Hope things are going well for all of you reading. The entire Hessler piece is online at the New Yorker if you haven’t stumbled across it elsewhere.

• downloading 400 MB of java tools and resources for generating the Chinese Perakun plugin.
• downloading 600 MB of a bilingual english-german corpus from http://statmt.org
• downloading 300 MB worth of open source flight simulation software from a Ubuntu mirror
• generating an English language model with SRILM for SMT work

It’s been about a month since I purchased the new laptop and I’m pleased with it (not to mention the new office bandwidth - I’m getting a sustained 200kbps from http://statmt.org on a 600MB file hosted somewhere in the United States). There are minor compatibility issues with Ubuntu and the keyboard that keep me from totally recommending it. The most irritating is that applications occasionally stop recognizing keyboard input when other windows open and I have to shuffle around closing things until I can type again.

Still, the most surprising thing I’ve found since buying this machine is how rarely I switch into Vista and how quickly - once there - I start chafing at the lack of productive software tools. It seems that whenever I’m in Vista I need to throw myself through hoops downloading and installing software. Was it always this much trouble? Or have I just become more reliant on a wider range of software? I’m still stunned that Vista doesn’t include a codec capable of DVD playback by default and that Fujitsu didn’t bother to install it by default. Between Apple’s momentum with mobile devices, Ubuntu’s ease-of-use with apt-get and Microsoft’s attempts to flagellate me with Vista (which often goes unresponsive for non-trivial pauses while it “thinks” about God-knows-what) and Microsoft Office 2007, I ‘m happy to be out.

Why doesn’t Microsoft run a software repository anyway?

一、晚上9-11点为免疫系统（淋巴）排毒时间，此段时间应安静或听音乐 。
二、晚间11-凌晨1点，肝的排毒，需在熟睡中进行。
三、凌晨1-3点，胆的排毒，亦同。
四、凌晨3-5点，肺的排毒。此即为何咳嗽的人在这段时间咳得最剧烈，因排毒动作已走到
肺；不应用止咳药，以免抑制废积物的排除。
五、凌晨5-7点，大肠的排毒，应上厕所排便。
六、凌晨7-9点，小肠大量吸收营养的时段，应吃早餐。疗病者最好早吃，在6点半前，养
生者在7点半前，不吃早餐者应改变习惯，即使拖到9、10点吃都比不吃好。
七、半夜至凌晨4点为脊椎造血时段，必须熟睡，不宜熬夜。

What can I say about the weekend except that it was good. Flew to Beijing on Sunday and encamped at a hostel in the university district. Spent Monday morning wandering through 中关村 in a quest for the Fujitsu outlet: I really like their ultraportable S-series because the machines are light, compact, have great battery life and come with a 13-inch screen, which hits the right balance between size and usability: it’s usable on a plane but still “feels” like a fullsized machine. Eventually found them tucked away in the basement of one of the main complexes, and bought an S6410. Have been using it for two days and am happy with the choice. The only downside is that the machine came preinstalled with Vista, which refuses to play nicely with SSH, despite my best efforts to coax the firewall into opening port 22. Assuming I can massage the wireless card into working with Linux I’ll be happy to remove it. Sad to see that Linux has made essentially zero progress in the laptop market since my last purchase about three years ago.

Spent Monday afternoon and evening working in the 978 art district, and then Tuesday morning back in 五道口 at the cafe that used to be 雕刻时光 but is now called 桥咖啡. I asked the waitress about the name change, and she muttered vaguely about some sort of falling-out between the owners. Whatever it’s called, the cafe is still a good place to work. Had breakfast, telecommuted and ended up in an interesting conversation with a former speechwriter for Pierre Trudeau who is doing management consulting work in China. We talked about both Canadian and American politics (he is very positive on Obama and considers the liberal party to be in disarray). After lunch I rediscovered the old Beijing tradition of the 午觉 and was pleased to find my laptop picking up the Wifi signal from 桥咖啡 about a fifty meters away and through several walls of cement. Way to go Fujitsu!

Headed to see a friend of Echo’s at BCLU later that afternoon before taking the subway to 国贸 for Danwei’s Second “Plenary Session” that evening. The event was well-organized: Jeremy handled the panel while Rob fielded questions from the crowd. There were the standard roster of throwaway questions everyone equivocates on, but still some surprises. The most interesting panelist was a woman from Channel Four News in Britain who deftly skipped past the politics when asked about the protests in western China to point out that no-one in the Western media has access to what is happening on the ground and there isn’t much informed reporting that anyone can do about it.

Ran into Jim, Joel, Elyse and a few others at the session. Chatted with Jim about Marx and the British Labour Movement, and eventually headed off to Sandglass where we hooked up with Joel and eventually Chris and looted the fridge until around 2:00am. I was surprised by how of the Beijing crowd had headed down to Moganshan for the conference on literary translation. Did not sound like I would have enjoyed it though. Waking up early to argue over the wording of sentence-level translations? Sounds like a combination of work and group struggle session.

Only hiccup has been getting back. Shanghai Airlines booked my return ticket for the 27th rather than the 26th and I didn’t catch the error since I’d simply asked for a ticket on Wednesday morning.

A better place to spend some quality time is at Howard Lee’s new site on the Chinese constitution. Howard is a lawyer-in-training in San Francisco and his site offers a fantastic annotated/edited version of the Chinese constitution accompanied by its official translation. Don’t be fooled by page title, the lion’s share of the work here has been done by Howard, who spent significant time editing dictionary entries and adding new content to help Adso get better at parsing legal terminology.

The site is definitely worth a visit. As someone who used to translate real estate contracts, I know that Howard’s work will be appreciated by those in the field who use Adso as a translation support tool too.

Definitely worth checking out. Would love to see Adso on the Chinese so they can stop the irritating habit of translating every proper Chinese name into English.

That being said, I won’t join the chorus slamming Bernanke for throwing emergency loans at Wall Street. It would be nice if there were a way to force financial institutions to realistically appraise their paper-based assets, but I can’t see it. Which leaves the United States and those of us who depend on it’s continued existence lucky that American monetary authorities don’t subscribe to the same sort of zero-inflation zealotry that wreaked havoc on Canada in the early 1990s, especially now that sane fiscal policy is AWOL and Bernanke and the Fed are the only things left between us and illiquid lending markets.

Given that Fed-fuelled liquidity is flooding into commodities markets worldwide and aggravating China’s institutional problems with inflation, I was interested to run across two statistics on the Chinese economy last week that provide some rough endposts for figuring out how inflation is playing out against growth where it really matters: the pocketbook of ordinary people here. The first statistic involved the cost of real estate, which is now apparently a 30 year investment measured in monthly rental costs. To put that figure in perspective, this number was around 14 years in the United States prior to the 1990s and climbed to 20 or so during the recent housing boom. Real estate is really expensive here!

China doesn’t have the same problem with subprime loans that the United States does for obvious reasons: there aren’t any low-income mortgage products in the country. This basically makes housing ownership the reserve of the upper-middle class, or those whose legacy housing has been provided or subsidized by their danwei. Since there is not much of the latter happening these days, most ongoing real-estate investment is being made by the upper classes or by major corporations who’ve clued into the reality that building real-estate - even useless and unoccupied real estate - is a great way to increase corporate book value.

With flooding liquidity and rising energy costs pushing up inflation, this all leads to a pretty fundamental question: which is rising faster in China, the real income of the people or price inflation? According to 厉无畏, an economist with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, we now have some figures on inflation levels in 2007 that set a baseline for figuring this out. Li suggests that inflation was:

4.8 percent in commodity prices

7.8 percent in consumer prices

I’m skeptical that the figures are actually this low since local papers are reporting inflation rates in the double-digits, and pork has soared by as much as 60 percent. Increased oil prices are also pushing up transportation costs significantly. That being said, here’s the annotated Xinhua article for those who like to read government news as close to the source as possible. And regardless of the actual figures, the important thing is really the number against which we have to set this figure: nominal growth in income. The authorities are reporting a 6 percent increase in per capita income in rural areas, and 12 percent nominal gains for urban residents.

What do I think? If these numbers are remotely accurate, they’re really not that very far apart, especially when you realize that wage growth is going to be lagging behind income growth. My instinct is that rural communities are already falling behind, and that urban communities are getting ahead, but that inflation is significantly underreported nationwide and that a lot of the income gains are tied directly or indirectly to unsustainably high prices in real estate.

UPDATE: just found this before going to bed. Claims GDP growth of 8% per year and CPI growth of 8.7% per year. Pretty depressing.

Here’s the story more-or-less in full from its source: The Pencil Farm. You can click on the link there for more details including some hilarious screen comparisons showing the harmonious pro-Olympics version of the game side-by-side with the original.

The Olympics stole my game.
They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren’t being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).

Two of the other games on the Olympic site are obvious rip-offs of Ferry Halim’s Orisinal games. Compare Obstacle Race on the Olympic site with Ferry’s adorable Arctic Blue, and Leap and Leap, a clumsy copy of Winter Bells. I can’t really tell if these are clones or reskinned versions of Ferry’s files, but those stars in Leap and Leap look pretty damn similar to me.

I did some research and it seems that the web site was created by Sohu.com, the company that last year busted Google for plagiarizing from one if its products. At the time Sohu made three requests of Google: that they stop offering the software for download as quickly as possible, that they make an apology, and that they discuss compensation for the offense. I’m currently considering my legal options, but I think these three things sound like reasonable requests to make of Sohu.

The Beijing Olympic Committee has also not been lenient with copyright infringers. Back in October the director of the State Intellectual Property Office, Tian Lipu, pledged to prevent Olympic piracy. Indeed, the Olympic web site even has a page set up where you can report infringement of intellectual property rights. Evidently, they are slightly less concerned when The Olympics infringes on the rights of others.

This is several times more delicious than when Hanban pirated foreign media content for its boondoggle of a Chinese-learning website. I’m personally indifferent to the Olympics as an event (running and jumping aren’t high on my A-list of activities that should be state-subsidized), but a full year of stories like this is just the sort of thing that could make me a convert.

True to form, both Dict.cn and Kingsoft appear to have copied the entry wholesale without lucubrating too much over accuracy or attribution. Still, a definite step-up for them from the depths of “nigger-brown“.

The reason the system is built this way is that Adso aims to offer gist translation and other sorts of generic semantic analysis functionality. Being able to hone down a word to a single definition is much more useful for search/semantic/translation applications than just showing a list of possible definitions. I strongly believe that structuring data in a way that enables this is important for the ability of the open source community to innovate in the long-term in this space.

But maybe this is the wrong approach for data-display, and especially for a project that aims to make it easy for people to collaborate around language. I’ve noticed that a lot of users (especially new contributors) like to pack multiple definitions into the popup windows rather than add new ones. I usually edit these during the review process, but don’t want people to feel disappointed if their edits “disappear” from one release to the next, especially if they aren’t really gone, but merely restructured. Also, if people really WANT more comprehensive definitions when they use an annotator, it is easy enough to change the system and get Adso to produce that sort of output. It’s actually much faster to do as well since this eliminates the hard work of grammatical disambiguation.

Curious if anyone has any thoughts on this, especially since the next review is coming up fast and it looks as if we’ll have more than a thousand new submissions.