the chinglish files

I, for one am all in favor of cross-cultural pollination, but not at the expense of the purity of the english language, as in these superb examples of chinglish.

It's official, Australia is Asian

Well, not exactly, but the big news in the world of Australian soccer is that the Asian Football Federation has formally invited Australia to wean themselves away from the puny Oceania Football Federation to join the much larger Asian Football Federation.

Normally the province of painters and poets, in this case, it's soccer players who are the harbringers of change. And the future is Asian.

Of course, Australia joining Asia is only the latest episode in the entertaining sideshow Australia gets jerked around by FIFA. But it's precisely because geographically, Australia is located awkardly between the America and Asia, that Australian sport can be jerked around. It's not that FIFA is blind to geo-politics: Israel plays in the European Federation, whereas the rest of the Middle East play in the Asian Football Federation.

In previous years, for Australia to make it into the World Cup tournament, it would have to win the Oceania Federation - in which the only decent opponent is New Zealand - and then Austalia would have to beat the fifth placed South American team. Beating a South American team is always a daunting prospect as South America has produced some of the greatest players ever, Pele, Ronaldo, Romario, Maradona. North America and Asia players do not inspire nearly as much fear.

Over the last few years, the qualification to the World Cup has been a roller-coaster of capricious changes. For the 98 World Cup in France, FIFA changed the rules to help Australia where Australia had to beat the fifth-based Asian team on a wild-card to get in. Australia got so close, leading 2-0 in the penultimate match, only for the plucky Iranians to squeak in 2 goals in the last 20 minutes. But then for the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan, Australia got put back into South America, as FIFA had to make room for both South Korea and Japan, thereby reducing the number of places for Asian teams. Australian officials then tried to get an automatic qualification for Oceania. This was accepted by Fifa but then immediately rejected, and rightly so, because the entire population of Oceania barely fits into a province in Brazil.

It's not that Australia lacks talent, players like Harry Kewell, Mark Viduka, and Tim Cahill ply their trade in the upper-echelons of European club soccer. But it's hard to imagine these Premiership millionares getting worked up to swat past the amateur players that some of the Oceania nations offer. Now with the tough new Asian teams (South Korea and Asia), Australian super-stars can look forward to qualifying games that will truly test their steel. If they do qualify, it would be due to a steady accumulation of points and not to a sudden-death Russian roulette with the fifth-placed South American team.

So Australian soccer officials finally saw the light that Australia's future is with Asia, an Asia that welcomes us with open arms. Unfortunately, it is a light that our current Prime Mininster John Howard, in his racist myopia, cannot see - that Australia is the gateway, the door, the doorman for the West to the East. This is something that the previous prime minister, the reviled but neverthteless visionary Paul Keating, clearly understood. Under Paul Keating, the Australian government had started to tilt its cultural axis towards Asia - promoting business and cultural exchanges, bringing in the high-flying Asian tourists, and more imporatantly, implementing educational policies such as requiring all high-school students to learn one asian language.

All this has been reversed under the Howard government. Australians are now pasty yes-men to Americans, immigration policies are used to create fear of anyone non-anglo-american. If Australian soccer followed this strategy, they would be playing stodgy defensive football, with the only attacking option being a hopeful long ball lobbed over the midfield. To its credit, Australian soccer can now play entertaining football, passing its way through the midfield, and finishing with aplomb. Such confidence has allowed Australia Soccer to stake its claim in Asia. And if this is a sign to come, the rest of Australia will surely follow.

Evolution of a Wiki-Article

This is really quite a fascinating analysis (includes audio track) by Jon Udell on collabrative writing as applied to the wikipedia entry on the Heavy Metal Umlat. It covers a diverse range of topics including letter encoding in html, article vandalism, and cultural mores. It is also a neat mix of slides, audio commentary, and timely mouse pointing - a rather useful blueprint for online seminars.

Rearranging Tori Amos

I have the power! The power to erase filler from albums. Thanks to the power of iTunes, I can trim the fat from a cheap-cut album and get a muscular collection of songs - slicing away until I end up with the album that I would have wanted to listen to.

Why, you might ask, would I even buy albums that I don't want to listen from beginning to the bitter end? Loyalty.

There is a period in your life, around early adolescence, where your mind is plastic and your tastes embryonic. Whatever happens to lodge itself into the little space between your eyes will quickly ossify and exert an undue influence on the listening habits of the rest of your life. (Of course, a few exceptional individuals have fresh ears their whole lives and include many music critics and sycohpahnts).

One of my idols is the tremendously talented tiny bundle of vocal histrionics, the one and only Tori Amos. All the way back in 1992, I stumbled onto her album, "Little Earthquakes" and quickly fell in luurvee. Heartbreak, poetry, gorgeous melodies, ethereal harmonies, and a very wry sense of humour packaged in, what is for me, an almost perfect album. Alas, it's been downhill ever since. It's not that she lost her ability to write great music, or her facility for language. It's just that somewhere along the way, Tori decided to produce her own material. You can definitely hear the learning-pains in "Boys for Pele" where the production veers from the harshly underproduced to songs that were bewilderingly over-layered. Compare that to the almost perfect production in "Little Earthquakes", which were produced by some real old-hands. But sonic-wise, she has always had a firm grasp of the sublime - evidence her experiments with the harpsicord and electronica.

Her main problem is that without someone else as producer, there isn't anyone else who is in a position to say, "huh! what the f*#uck are you yakking on about????" Maybe her writing is simply dense poetry. Yes, great poetry is similar in many respects to great lyrics, but there is one important difference. Poetry is written, and the speed of comprehension can be slowed right down to a single crawling word. Lyrics, on the other hand, must flow to the music. You cannot afford Joycean levels of overreading in lyrics. Besides, the words just plain don't make sense. So without some other control freak in the mixing room, what you get is stream-of-consciousness pomo ramblings that lack emotional omph.

Evidence? "The Beekeeper", the latest offering from Tori, is a case in point. According to Tori, a hexagonal garden theme is the underlying structure to the latest album "The Beekeeper". Knowing this adds absolutely no insight to the songs, it even detracts from my joy from finding my own interpretative line through the album. Standing at a good 80 minutes, it is a chore to listen-to straight through. Listening to music is meant to be joy-ride, not a punishing pilgrimmage. And so, after a few listens, I gleefully deleted all the songs that made my eyelids droop. No, I do not want to hear about Tori's Saab roaring through Ireland. No I don't have to suffer through the cringe-worthy pun "Original Sin-sinuality".

So I merrily zapped away, and I cut the album down to a very listenable 30 minutes of music. And listening to the revised album, I am reminded that when all-is-said-and-done, Tori is still an amazing musician. Buried in the middle of "The Beekeeper" is the heart-breaking "Ribbons Undone", surely one of the most beautiful paens written by a mother for her daughter. It is a slow balland, effortlessly, capturing a fleeting moment of motherhood.

Listening to "Ribbons Undone", I couldn't help but think of "Winter", a song on "Little Earthquakes". "Winter" is still one of her most poignant songs, a song about the emotional bond between a girl on her father. And I couldn't help but notice how the two songs bookend the 15 year transformation from the wide-eyed girl of "Winter" to the wordly mother of "Ribbons Undone". It is for moments such as these that rewards the musical devotion of all these years.

Boltzmann in JavaLand

I found this rather impressive java applet that simulates a box of bouncing balls. This java applet makes it easy to picture how the Second Law of Thermodynamics works.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics was the master-work of the great 19th centur physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann. Boltzmann gazed into the heart of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and found statistics. Then he rephrased the Second Law of Thermodynamics in terms of statistics: the probability of the system increases until it reaches the maximum probability.

What does that mean for our box of balls? Since thermodynamics deal with energies, it turns out that the speed of a ball is a great proxy for its' energy. So for a slice of time, you can count how often any of the balls has a certain speed. And so the probability of a box of balls can be understood as the distribution of speeds of the balls. This distribution is the probability that Boltzmann is getting at.

So the Second Law of Thermodynamics for a box of balls means that (1) there is an ultimate distribution of speeds, which we call the "equilibrium distribution" (the formula for this was derived by James Clerk Maxwell), and (2) any collection of balls will collide and mix-up their speeds until the distribution of speeds reaches this equilibrium distribution, after which no matter how the balls collide further, the distribution will not really change any more.

In this java applet, you can see how distribution of speeds change over time, as the balls do their thing and collide. Be sure you play around with the "parameters" - reduce the number of balls and bump up the radius of the balls. See how the Second Law works as the distribution of speeds changes inexorably towards the equilibrium distribution, even for a few balls.

Open access is spreading

The sprawling publications of the American Chemical Society, which encompasses 33 peer-reviewd journals, will now be submited to public-accessible archives after 1 year of publication. It seems only fair that all not-for-profit organizations to do the same. We will see.

Jazz Flash Animation

Micheal Levy animates: vector block graphics meets John Coltrane.

Classic Science Papers

Boldy advancing rat science, where no rat has gone before...

Hormone treatment facilitates penile erection in castrated rats after sleep deprivation and cocaine.
Andersen ML, Bignotto M, Tufik S.
Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
J Neuroendocrinol (2004) Feb;16(2):154-9.[link]

"...we conducted two experiments to determine whether sleep deprivation and cocaine administration could also induce spontaneous penile erection in castrated rats ...

"...these data show that progesterone treatment facilitates penile erection in sleep deprived-cocaine castrated rats."

Classic Science Papers

I was told about this fantastic paper by a fellow grad student many years ago. I thought I'd lost the reference, but I found it again:

Lysergic acid diethylamide: its effects on a male Asiatic elephant
by West, L. J., Pierce, C. M. & Thomas, W. D.
Science (1962) 138:1100-1104.

In this article, they found that a single, intramuscular dose of 297 mg of LSD caused sudden death in an elephant tested in Lincoln Park Zoo, Oklahoma City.

Scientific Self-abnegation

This story has recently been doing the rounds in my postdoc circle.

"Don't become a scientist," advises physics professor Jonathan Katz from Washington University, St. Louis, in a polemic op-ed piece for brash-young would-be scientists. It was written in 1999 but if anything, is even more relevant with the diminishing science budget of the United States. He's voicing a lot of things that we postdocs have been muttering amongst ourselves.

Essentially, "American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them." And using elementary economics, Katz shows how the labor "glut of scientists" has completely changed the career path of scientists, from what it was 30 years ago when Katz started. Now the postdoc stage is greatly prolonged, frequently up to 10 years, as opposed to the 2 years that Katz did. And how did this happen? The glut was due to "funding policies (almost all graduate education is paid for by federal grants)... [where] ...for many years the NSF propagated a dishonest prediction of a coming shortage of scientists".

I recently brought up this article with a colleague of mine, a visiting professor. He was much annoyed by the article. "A scientist," he said, "A true scientist is not swayed by external factors. Science is a calling." Although I liked his idealism, I feel a human being cannot be shovelled into one definition, whether it be scientist, or doctor, or builder. It's important to keep the rest of your life in view.

Like family, for instance. Katz points out that it's normal for a would-be scientist to be a post-doc for up to 10 years. And as a post-doc in your thirties, Katz asks if you "can support a family on that [postdoc] income?" One postdoc in my lab is leaving science because he wants to start a family.

Regardless, the article should make any postdoc wake-up and smell the (probably instant) coffee.

Art Lesson

Punk'd refers to the MTV show where a bunch of skaters go around performing practical jokes on celebrities. The pranksters reveal their hoax by yelling out "Punk'd" to the victim.

The painting depicts the scene where the Lord sends an angel to tell Abraham that he'd been punk'd. Background: the Lord had ordered Abraham, the Lord's humble and most valued servant, to kill Isaac, Abraham's only beloved son. The very son that Abraham had to wait till his 60's before the Lord gave him strong fertile sperm to impregnate his wife Sarah.

This scene was painted by Caravagio, and is one of the most powerfully composed pieces of drama of the late renaissance. The unity of movement from left to right, as we see the angel staying the hand of Abraham that is holding the knife, moves the eye towards the writhing face of Isaac. As per usual, Caravagio models all three bodies perfectly, and the light unifies the scene. Although the light seems to be of an interior quality.

The Homeless

When I walk the streets and a homeless-looking person approaches me, I normally try to politely avoid them. Sometimes I am walking with someone else, and that someone else might make a comment about the homeless. But the more I think about it the more I realise that I don't anything about them and so, this extract from Alexander Masters book was very revealing.

I Could've Been a Contender

The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) has published a list of the world's best universities . It is gratifying that I did ugrad+grad at #36 and now I postdoc at #20.

This is how THES ranked the universities:

"Universities were placed in the table with the help of findings from a survey for the THES of 1,300 academics in 88 countries. They were asked to name the best institutions in the fields that they felt knowledgeable about."

"The table also included data on the amount of cited research produced by faculty members as an indicator of intellectual vitality, the ratio of faculty to student numbers and a university's success in attracting foreign students and internationally renowned academics in the global market for education. The five factors were weighted and transformed against a scale that gave the top university 1,000 points and ranked everyone else as a proportion of that score."

If you haven't guessed, Harvard, with an annual operating budget of over 2 billion dollars and more than most third-world nations, is at position #1.

Science Pays, For Journal Publishers

The enormous Wellcome Trust has finally knuckled down and produced a report on the viability of scientific publishing as we know it. They should know, since they pay for much of it.

What does the Wellcome Trust conclude? They conclude that "the current market structure does not operate in the long-term interests of the research community" Ouch. And that "the ‘public good’ element of scientific work means market solutions are inefficient." Double Ouch.

Now you might think this is a question of sour grapes because allegedly, the origin of the report occured when the Director of the Wellcome Trust was told about a breakthrough article written by one of the Wellcome investigators scientists working in Africa. But when he went to look the article up on-line, he was greeted instead with a "you are not subscribed to our journal". This is the director of one of the biggest medical funding bodies in the world, and he funded the research.

Nevertheless, this report is a solid piece of investigation into the scientific publishing industry. There is some excellent muckracking. For instance,on describing the business tactics of the largest science publisher Elsevier, the report attributed the Elsevier business strategy to the CEO Crispin Davis, who, the report quotes "was recently described in Forbes magazine as 'an unlikely choice [for Elsevier CEO]. Davis had previously worked for Proctor & Gamble, mostly in Cincinnati, Ohio, before messing up at Guinness, then resurrecting his reputation at Aegis, a midsize European buyer of ad space.' " That's really solid publishing credentials.

The report gives a sobering analysis of the supply-demand economics of science-publishing and shows how there is no feed-back loop, because the buyers of the journals (mostly libraries) are not the readers of the journals (the scientists). This makes it ripe for monopolistic manipulation. Yearly increases in journal prices (30% in 1999) exceed the rate of inflation. And the profit margins, sometimes up to 30% is sweet-as. Science is a public endeavour, a social good paid for federal funds. And as scuh, the largesse of the huge conglomerated publishing houses flows directly from the pocket of the american tax-payer.

Battlestar Galactica

Let me say that I hate Sci-Fi on TV. I never used to, but I do. There. I've said it. It seems wrong to do science and not luurve sci-fi, but dramatic conflict, rich characterizations and layered dialogue are rarely found in space ships zooming around in space on TV. Until now.

The new Battlestar Galactica has somehow slipped through the cracks, giving us a superbly written sci-fi series. It is a 'reimagining' of the original series, or in this case, throwing out all the camp. Of course, this is anaethema to the fans of the original series. They see high camp as nobility, the lack of real dark human emotions as up-lifting, speechifying dialogue as lofty classical theatre. Oh how wrong!

I have this theory that sci-fi is bad because it used to mainly appeal to adolescent teen-age boy and so the writing has to reflect their level of consciousness. It is the age where fine ideals are imagined, with a tinge of mythological self-importance. Complexity on the individual is non-existent and everything is seen in terms of epic battles between the forces of good and evil. Great for blockbuster movies, bad for TV.

But in the new Battlestar Galactica, people die. Characters betray other characters, and they die. There is real gut-wrenching fear and damnit if the directors don't milk the end-of-the-world for every compulsive moment. Pretty adolesent aesthetics be damned. People have sex, want it, get it, fail to get it, and do very bad things to get it. These are issues that used to be too painful to show as your typical sci-fi fan was emotionally underdeveloped to see it.

The sets in Battlestar Galactica do not look like toys that you can buy at Toys R Us. It is not an extended advertisement for new plastic spaceships you can buy. The ships in Battlestar Galactica look every bit as dirty and tired and old as the captain played by the superlative Edward James Olmos. He's no pretty boy William Shatner that all young adolescent boys used to want to be but Olmos' understated gravitas and weariness is a masterclass in acting compared to the smirking William Shatner as Captain Kirk of the USS Starship Enterprise. Besides William Shatner now plays campy characters such as the host of the Miss America pageant in movies such as Miss Cogeniality.

I've heard it said that whilst the quality of American movies have been debased, the quality of American tv has risen, driven in large, by the wildly succesful HBO. As such, american TV is now confident it can write complex characters in ambiguous situations, and give first-rate actors the room to strut their stuff. Not only is the writing improved but the general production borrows much from shows such as Law Order. In particular, the use of the documentary-style camera work, the floating camera with their human eye-ball angles. The lavish attention on character details and even the Scorsesean camera movements. The producers have even stated that with CGI graphics, the cost of special effects are now miniscule and the larger part of the cost is to pay for class actors.

Much has been said of the battle scenes, and they are groundbreaking. There's no music, only the sounds of the pilots and the sounds of gunfire. This adds layers and layers of authenticity. There are no deux ex machinas and the battle scenes are well thought out action sequences that unfold like a falling sunset. It's as if sci-fi is taking back the depth and seriousness of films like 2001: A Space Odyessey from the giddy simple-minded fun of Star Wars.

Eloquent Defense of Open Source Software

Open-source software is the future - it will commodify computer software. Commodification, in economics, occurs in an industry, when a product becomes generic and completely replaceable. This only occurs in industry where there are enormous competitive market pressures. For instance, it doesn't matter what brand of batteries you buy, they will all work in your sony mp3 player (they're sooo popular). Other things, like aircraft bodies, are not commodifiable. You cannot easily exchange a Boeing 747 body for an Airbus body.

I am stretching the point here, but essentially, some open-source software may commodify certain software markets. When I say open-source software, I mean software that is licensed in such a way that the seller of software is legally obliged to also provide the source-code and the right to change and use the source code for whatever purposes. Certain open-source software might one day achieve parity with or exceed commerical products in terms quality and hence, blow the bottom right out of the market. It may have already happened with Firefox, and OpenOffice.org is on its way.

Is open-source a good thing? Recently, the Peruvian Government contemplated legislation for mandating open-source software in the Peruvian Government. This scared the bejesus out of Microsoft Peru as can be seen in this letter from Microsoft General Manager Señor Juan Alberto González. Microsoft, as you can see, only sees it from a profit point of view. But even more weirdly, Microsoft considers open-source software dangerous, "from the point of view of security, guarantee, and possible violation of the intellectual property rights of third parties." This is a particular interesting conflation of ideas - security is elided into intellectual property rights of third parties.

But open-source is much more than monetary saving. It guarantees transparency. This is a social good. But I am explaining it poorly. Perhaps there is no one better to explain this than Peruvian Congressmen Edgar Villanueva Nuñez, who wrote this eloquent defense of the Peruvian software bill. As Nuñez points out, what is valuable about open-source is that it ensures "free access to public information by the citizen, permanence of public data, security of the state and citizens [from intefering foreign software companies such as, oh, you-know-who]".

The bill, incidentally, was passed.

Romancing the Grad Student

Here we go again. Another wave of Recruitments will arive at UCSF in a few days. Like a bunch of matrons preparing for a debutante ball, anticipation and excitement rush through the faculty. Here at UCSF, a purely grad university, graduate recruitment is taken very very seriously.

A cadre of carefully handpicked candidates, from the hundreds that apply, will be flown into the city of San Francisco. They will be put in luxurious comfortable hotels, probably the first time some of them have experienced such luxury. Once ensconced in their comfortable hotels, and after sight-seeing the city, a couple of intensive days are scheduled.

These kids, with their freshly-scrubbed faces and newly-minted bachelor degrees, now partake in an elaborate ritual. Each of them will undergo a long series of interviews with a series different professors. In the interviews, the professors will try to delve behind those sparkling cv's, stratospheric sat scores and gushing personal essays, to see if, indeed, they have the right stuff. The right stuff, that is, to slave away for the next five years. For the kids who are accepted, they are the clay for these masters of science to mold into the next generation of scientists. What are they looking for? A sharp mind, passion, acuity, but most of all, the ability to submit.

Submission? These kids might think they've been treated like royalty, but little do they realise that, for the calculating professors tenured at ucsf, those who end up here, will provide el cheapo research-per-dollar. Research can be counted in real dollar terms. An top research school like UCSF is judged on its research. This can be measured in terms of papers published in big journals, and on the number of citations. High-quality incoming students will provide the best shock-troops in the battle for the research dollar.

For the next five years, the kids who choose grad-school will watch their friends from college who did law or engineering, one by one, begin to find jobs and earn vastly more money than they. They will suffer the iniquities of being a shit-kicker, but do research that may grace the most prestigous science journals, whilst working hours that might even make a lawyer blush. Of course, this will not dawn on them until far into the future.

Meanwhile, the magic is to make all these worries dissappear. The trick is alcohol. High class catering companies are called in and liberal amounts of alcohol will be served. During the next few days, there will be reception after reception. Waiters in tuxedos and white gloves will pour glass after glass of medium quality wines (after all, what does a 21 year old really know about wine?). Roasted meats, sweetmeats, hors d'oeuvres, cakes will be provided in obscene mountainous piles. This is obscene mainly because the grad students who are already at UCSF, will eye the available food and alcohol with ravenous envy, such is the disparity between life-before-recruitment and life-after-recruitment. Some will manage to sneak into the reception and gorge themselves, despite the best efforts of the Recruitment officers to quarantine them. Others will only look on longingly, unable to break etiquette.

Yet there is something a little stiff about a reception at the university. No, the piece-de-resistance, will be the "after-party". A spontaneous expression of camaderie and scientific togetherness? No, it's planned. Before every recruitment, a "socially-active" grad student or post-doc is tapped. "Don't you just want to hold a party for the recruits?" asks the Recruiting Officer. The tapped student equivocates. "You know, it will be funded by the school," the officer reassures. "Generously." The student begins to cave; just one more push should do it. "But don't worry, we won't need to know what happens. Just show the kids a good time. A very good time." The last Recruitment party ended up in the nether regions of the Castro.

So after a heady weekend of interviews, receptions and parties, most of these kids pack their bags and head-off to their next recruitment.