我们台湾这些年
Posted on February 3, 2010 at 8:39 pm by kyliu
Tags: bookreviews, china, culture, taiwan
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《我们台湾这些年》(subtitled “a letter from a young man from Taiwan to the 1.3 billion compatriots of the mainland”), by 廖信忠, was very popular in China a while ago. As the title suggests, it’s a book recounting, from the perspective of an ordinary person, the changes that have swept Taiwan in the last thirty years.
You can take a look at the author’s blog, where he has posted excerpts from the book.
The author is about my age, so he’s equally distant from the horrors of the White Terror as I am from the horrors of the excesses of the Revolution. Although we were born on opposite sides of the Strait and grew up under two completely different systems, I was struck by the constant feelings of recognition and familiarity as he described events in Taiwan that I had no prior knowledge of.
I nodded with recognition at the description of the population’s hunger for a richer mass media environment, and shook my head in sympathy at the inept political indoctrination. Even the children’s games and pranks gave me a sense of warmth, like slight variations on the games I played. The KMT’s book bans and paranoia about “CCP spies” have their exact analogues on the mainland, as do the country’s difficulties in defining what it means to be Chinese in a world dominated and controlled by the West. It seems that these are problems and cultural patterns that no Chinese state and people can escape.
Like the mainland, Taiwan had to figure out how to balance the need for economic development with the need for social and political liberalization. That the mainland has not made as much progress on the latter point may be a result of its sheer size and diversity, and the far more hostile international environment it has had to operate in. But the Taiwan example does offer some helpful lessons and reassurances.
Blood is indeed thicker than water.
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Censorship Comes in Many Forms
Posted on January 30, 2010 at 5:11 pm by kyliu
Tags: absurd, america, censorship, china, copyright, intellectualproperty, ip, music
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I see that Slate has now decided to link to Youku, the Youtube of China, in order to present an unauthorized reproduction of Taylor Swift’s “Today Was a Fairytale.”
Now, there is a legitimate reason for doing this, since Slate is offering up a piece of music criticism. Yet it’s interesting that they don’t link to any Youtube version of this song. Why? Because Youtube cooperates with “content producers” and “respects the law” and presumably would remove any such unauthorized reproductions if and when the rights owners so demand. Slate, I suppose, wanted to avoid that possibility (or else Slate is trying to support the Chinese company, which I seriously doubt).
Hmm, so a Web site that provides a useful service is required by law to eliminate certain expressive materials deemed “illegal” such that people have to go find such materials from Web sites outside the jurisdiction. Is this … the dreaded “censorship” that Slate has been so vocally against in the case of China and Google? Ironic that now that Slate wants real freedom of speech it has to go to a Chinese site to get it.
Yet not a peep out of them regarding the censorship of copyrighted materials.
There are many ways to limit the freedom of speech: whether through “sensitive words” or “copyrighted materials.” J.K. Rowling can stop others from writing reference materials about Harry Potter, and J.D. Salinger can stop others from writing critiques of The Catcher in the Rye in the form of “sequels.” This is not all that different, in a fundamental sense, from forbidding search engines from providing information about certain names, phrases, and numbers.
You’ll note that my examples are not examples of authors being “greedy.” Authors have every right to be greedy if they want. What they shouldn’t have is the right to stop others from saying what they want to say about “their” work. Neither Rowling nor Salinger went to court because they wanted more money. They went for control.
But apparently Slate and others can only see some forms of censorship as wrong.
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The iPad — Judged by My eBook Criteria
Posted on January 28, 2010 at 1:41 am by kyliu
Tags: apple, ebooks, ipad, kindle, kindle2, media, technology
Filed Under geek | 1 Comment |
Just to get the obvious point out of the way, it does seem that the iPad will severely challenge the sale of the Kindle DX. For $10 more you get a lot more functionality in the iPad, and on the lower end it is very difficult to justify purchasing the Kindle DX when the Kindle 2 is so capable.
Anyway, how does the iPad as an eReader stack up against the criteria I listed for a perfect electronic reader in my last post? Some preliminary thoughts based on the Stevenote:
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“Browsing by flipping”: sort of. The video demo made it clear that page turning on the iPad in iBooks would be done by tapping on the edges of the iPad. Pages turn a lot faster than on the Kindle, but it’s unclear if you can flip through pages really quickly by “scrubbing” through the control strip on the bottom. If an interface similar to the quick-scroll feature in the iPad version of Pages exists/is added to iPad I’d give the iPad full points on this.
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Beauty: Also sort of. Books on the iPad look beautiful. But it’s unclear how much of the design/typography is controlled by the designer/publisher. (I’m not real familiar with ePub as a format, so it’s unclear to me how much control the creator really has over the presentation.) Apple’s limited menu of fonts for books does not inspire confidence.
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Real interactivity: didn’t see any. It’s unclear if you can do any highlighting/note taking at all.
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Battery life: not as good as the Kindle, but at 10 hours, very good for a back-lit screen.
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Sharing: unclear. If the DRM is similar to the old FairPlay (can share content across several iPads registered to same account, etc.) then it’s tolerable.
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All the other stuff: unclear. I’d expect there to be good integration with the dictionary and the Web, but the demo didn’t show any.
So, all in all? It doesn’t seem that Apple has made a great electronic reader. I’d have to wait until more reviews are published and/or I get to play with one to be sure, but right now it doesn’t seem like the iPad is going to kill the Kindle just yet.
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What I Want In an eBook
Posted on January 26, 2010 at 9:03 pm by kyliu
Tags: culture, ebooks, ipad, kindle, kindle2, media, technology
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Since Apple is going to reveal the Jesus Tablet tomorrow, I might as well join the millions who have written about this and add in my thoughts on what they will release. Actually, check that. Let me write about what I would like a tablet to do, period. This is prompted by Derek Powazek’s thoughtful piece on a dream device that bridges the print and web worlds.
So, here’s what I think an electronic tablet/reading device really needs to replace paper.
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Allow “browsing by flipping.” This is something that I’ve seen very few people talk about when it comes to the Kindle. With a real magazine, you can flip through it in about ten seconds, stopping only when you see something that catches your eye. On the Kindle, this way of reading is impossible. This isn’t just about refresh rate, though that has a lot to do with it. It’s also the interface. An electronic reader needs to be able to replace/exceed the random-access interface of physical books and magazines. You don’t realize how important this is until you don’t have it.
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Allow beauty in books. This means design, fonts, formatting, high resolution, and all the stuff that the Kindle threw out. HTML and PDF are both fine formats for this, but beauty alone is not enough — it needs to be fast. The slow rendering speed of PDFs even on modern hardware is ridiculous, and HTML is inconsistent.
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Allow real interactivity. This doesn’t mean the limited highlighting and note taking that the Kindle allows, though they are better than nothing. Some kind of equivalent to the analog pen, which allows you to do whatever you wanted to the text on a page, is needed.
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Battery life. The Kindle gets this right.
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Allow sharing. It’s sufficient if the ability to share is limited to replicating rights available to physical goods: if you sell it, you don’t have it any more; if you lend it, you can’t read it at the same time.
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The benefits of being connected. Once the first five requirements have been met, you have something that’s as good as real books. After that, go nuts with the improvements: dictionaries, wikipedia, copying passages for commentary, a single SD card for a million books, whatever.
Until you have done the first five things, you have not replaced physical books, and people will have to make tradeoffs between the benefits of what you are offering with the shortcomings. For some people and some purposes, like myself and Chinese books and popular hardcovers, the tradeoffs are worth it. But even I still constantly wish for things that physical books do so well.
I’m hoping Apple’s tablet is the magical device that will fulfill more of those first five requirements than the Kindle.
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Obamazon Bait
Posted on January 26, 2010 at 7:54 pm by kyliu
Tags: absurd, obama, obambi
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It seems that the New Yorker has not learned its lesson. This cover (which I find hilarious) is going to get the Obamazons all riled up again.
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Please Support OCEF in the Chase Community Giving Challenge
Posted on January 15, 2010 at 10:35 pm by kyliu
Tags: blegging, charity, ocef
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Overseas China Education Foundation (“OCEF”), a charity that I volunteer for, is participating in the Chase Community Giving contest. In this contest, charities rally their supporters to vote for them (no donations needed) based on their proposals for a “big idea” on how to improve the communities they serve, and get a chance to win $1,000,000.
That’s a lot of money for a small charity like us. And we need your help. Please click the link below to vote for us.
Voting Link: http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/963678
We have only one mission, which is to improve rural education in China. Rural children in impoverished areas of China lack access to quality basic education, and many have to drop out of high school — free, compulsory education in China ends after the 9th grade — in order to support their families with low-skill jobs. This feeds into a cycle of more poverty —> more dropouts —> more poverty, etc.
Our proposal is to try to use the award to help these children, who are the most vulnerable but also have the most potential to break the cycle. By giving out scholarships to extremely poor children who otherwise would drop out, we give them a chance to finish high school and an opportunity to achieve their full human potential and improve the lives of their families and villages. We’ll also use part of the funds to build school libraries, buy school supplies for rural schools, and start a pilot project in teacher training so that they can start updating their outdated teaching methods and materials.
Here’s a video introducing OCEF’s work, followed by the official call for support:
Vote for OCEF, Win $1MM for Rural School Children in China!
With your enthusiastic support, Overseas Chinese Education Foundation (OCEF) was able to make it to the second round of the Chase Community Giving (CCG) Challenge. The more challenging and exciting second round competition starts on January 15th, 2010, and will finish on January 22nd. During the challenge, the charitable organization that receives the most votes will receive a top prize of one million U.S. dollars; organizations that are placed second to sixth will each receive a prize of one hundred thousand U.S. dollars.
From your Facebook account, with just a few clicks, you can vote for OCEF via the CCG page and help make many rural Chinese school children’s dreams come true. A one million dollar prize would support thousands of high school students complete high school, establish hundreds of school libraries and provide training and resources to rural teachers.
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Slate’s Map, Part II
Posted on January 14, 2010 at 7:57 pm by kyliu
Tags: absurd, china
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You remember my entry from a few days ago about Slate’s hilarious map of China that I feared was going to get a ton of angry readers writing in to Slate about “kowtowing” to the “tyrants in Beijing”?
Well, seems to me that Slate has now grown something — maybe borrowed from Google — and it has put up a new map to accompany its latest coverage of the Google-China story. This map ought to please Slate’s readers, as it not only “corrects” the error from before, it in fact goes further and fulfills the dream of Chiang Kai-shek and Presidents Truman/Eisenhower in the 1950s: a complete thalassocracy of encirclement.
I guess the intern responsible for the map from before (or, maybe that was also the result of “hacking”?) has been replaced.
Still, this map probably won’t please Nicholas Kristof. Further modifications are necessary.
(Relax. I kid, I kid.)
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Google.cn
Posted on January 13, 2010 at 7:14 am by kyliu
Tags: america, china, webculture
Filed Under news | Leave a Comment |
From the Official Google Blog:
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.
The conventional wisdom on this in the West is: “Good for Google.”
The reality is more complicated. It’s good for Google to push for less censorship, but not good to pull out of China altogether.
It’s always good to have more information, rather than less. Google made an incredibly brave decision back in 2006 to go into China and subject itself to vociferous Western criticism. However censored its results may be from a Western perspective, it offered valuable access to information to Chinese users and gave them an alternative to domestic search engines. In that process, it also learned to adopt itself to Chinese users’ habits and preferences, and Google’s Chinese engineers and other employees taught Google much about China and Chinese knowledge and information processing, just as they, simultaneously, taught their friends and family valuable lessons about American practices and values. Google’s presence in China is important, both symbolically and practically, as a sign of hope that the Internet will not leave China isolated.
(A quick footnote. It should be clear that Google is pushing, generally, not for less censorship per se, but rather censorship in forms more similar to what it already is engaging in in the West. Whether you think no censorship at all is better (or even possible) than “censorship along Western models” is an important question and open to debate but not really the subject here.)
Much of the criticism of Google’s involvement in China in the West has been short-sighted and/or hypocritical. Those whose desired outcome is a Google not in China at all rather than a Google that is less censored are akin to those who advocate boycotting retailers sourcing from sweatshops in China. The result of boycotting sweatshops is children out of work and unable to support their families, rather than factories with better work conditions or children in school. And Google pulling out of China will similarly be counterproductive.
A Google that is not involved in China cannot offer nearly as much impetus for change in China or do much to bring about the integration of China’s knowledge base with the West’s through the Internet. A censored Google.cn can always work through and around the system to push the boundaries of what is acceptable to China’s government, “leak” censored material, and offer a moderating influence on the Chinese impulse to retreat into insularity. If the alternative to a censored Google.cn is no Google in China at all, then there is a net loss of information and that’s a net loss not just for China, but more important, for the world. China’s Great Firewall does not merely harm Chinese users, but by cutting off the involvement of one fifth of humanity from the building of an integrated global Web culture, it harms humanity’s global pursuit of truth — this point has for too long been ignored in the West. The answer to censorship should be more information and more contact, not less.
Of course it’s important to bear in mind that there are bigger political games behind Google’s public announcement — the timing of Google’s threat is one part of a web of messages that China and the United States have been sending each other in the last (and coming) few weeks. There are important commercial considerations as well: Google’s Chinese venture has been very costly to it due to the extremely negative (and mostly wrong-headed) criticism of it in the West, and at some point it simply cannot make economic sense to plow on for the good of the world despite the damage done. Most of us (including myself) cannot see what that larger pattern is, but my thought and best wishes this moment are with the Google employees in China. They are the most immediate victims of empty political posturing by all sides, but they won’t be the last.
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MP3 for Books
Posted on January 9, 2010 at 5:18 pm by kyliu
Tags: ebooks, technology, webculture
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“It’s like asking bands to release an app for each album. We need MP3 for words.”
(Via Daring Fireball.)
We already do. It’s called HTML.
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Uncommon Carriers
Posted on January 8, 2010 at 12:45 pm by kyliu
Tags: bookreviews, john mcphee
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(If you purchase the book by clicking through the link above I get a referral bonus. Thanks.)
This book was recommended to me by a friend, and I’m very grateful for the recommendation. It’s not a book that I would have picked up on my own, but I loved it. McPhee is a contributor to the New Yorker, and writes nonfiction with the kind of beautiful prose that I admire so much.
The book is a collection of stories about modes of transportation (and the men and women who work on them) that we do not think much about but which are so important for our daily lives: the long-haul truck on the interstates, the towboat on the Illinois River, the coal train between Wyoming and Georgia, etc.
These stories are fascinating on two levels: pure wonder at our technological achievements (the description of the UPS sorting facility at the Louisville Airport is unforgettable) and the intimacy with which McPhee allows us to peek into the lives of the people who are part of the technology and make it work.
It’s such a good book that it’s inspired me on my next story. I’m going to again try to do something in the format of a nonfiction article. And it will also be about an “uncommon carrier.” (And, I bought another of John’s books, The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, as research material, which should give you a hint as to what it’s about.)