No way to know how long this will last. Flickr still appears at least partially blocked (checked using Safari), the same as it has been since June. Wordpress.com blogs are working again, too, at least for the moment. Blogspot doesn’t look to be so lucky.
At least now I can watch the next Heroes preview, and other weird crap like this:
Dalian is not the easiest place to stay on top of news. National news, sure, that’s everywhere, but local news? Not so much, at least not in English. About six months ago, a few of us here started working to fix that.
The result thus far is here: DalianDalian.com. Last week I applied for a Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant to fund the project, explaining it this way:
DalianDalian.com is a hyperlocal, community-driven site that will provide news, information and ways to connect for people living in Dalian, China. The city is home to six million people and a growing foreign population, divided geographically and linguistically among an urban center, rural suburbs and special districts. DalianDalian will use geographical search and integrated social networking to build links within and among this city’s disparate communities.
China’s second-tier cities are experiencing a boom in foreign investment and becoming more attractive to expatriate communities. For newcomers, the first year is often trial and error, full of horror stories of people living on instant noodles because they can’t find decent restaurants, of missed opportunities, of wasted time and money. When people arrive, there is no easily accessible, frequently updated source of information about the city.
Much of what can be found is scattered among blogs and forums, passed haphazardly by word of mouth, or in Chinese. Large media organizations rarely noticed Dalian until a few weeks ago, when the city hosted the World Economic Forum’s “Summer Davos” conference, and those that did come have since disappeared. But Dalian is being discovered: Intel is moving in, and the city is already renowned as an outsourcing hub, hosting IBM, Dell, HP and local firms. There is a growing need for people here learn about their community, to connect, to find out what is going on. Nothing currently available fulfills that need.
The site is being built in Drupal and will feature databases, maps, forums, and wikis. It will host and aggregate local blogs, sharing ad revenue with contributors to give everyone who joins a stake in the site. It will integrate existing web2.0 applications to build on and localize those social networks. Wherever possible, information will be posted in English and Chinese.
Eventually, we believe this model of an online, multilingual, interactive site could be adapted to China’s other fast growing second- and third-tier cities.
Unfortunately, the Knight Foundation wasn’t as enthused about the project as the rest of us are. The upshot is that we open-source software and content aggregation technology have reached a point where it’s possible to build quite a bit with little more than knowhow and spare time (working on getting more of both). Everyone doing this is a volunteer, each with our own reasons, each bringing a different skill set. It’s a fun project, and we’re trying to keep it that way.
Mullenweg says Open Source is a moral issue: “Software should be free; it’s our philosophy as a company.” And that means anybody can get on there and start writing what they want. Maybe that’s what makes governments so nervous sometimes. It got Wordpress blocked in Turkey, and I’d bet it has a lot to do with almost every free blogging platform being blocked in China.
“We had a bigger problem in China. It set the moral compass for the company. About a quarter of our traffic was coming from China. Overnight it disappeared. For a young company, that’s a big deal - it was a million pages a day. We found out if we were willing to forbid certain words, track people and give up their information if asked, we could be turned back on.
“It was tough. We decided that being there under those circumstances isn’t worth it - we’d rather not be there.” Does that mean WordPress is still blocked in China? “Yes, still blocked two years later.”
Just checked. Wordpress.com is down again. Blogspot, too. And YouTube and Flickr (despite earlier reports).
There’s a case to be made for getting in at any cost, that limited access is better than no access. But it’s good to see someone defining the other end of the spectrum here, saying, “This is the line. We don’t cross it.”
This debate has gone on since the Internet arrived in China, and it won’t end soon. Sometimes you just need a proxy. For anyone needing to evade the Net Nanny, follow instructions posted at Lost Laowai.
One last note: Does anybody else older than 23 get depressed reading profiles of Matt Mullenweg and Mark Zuckerberg? Just checking.
Thousands of students across Asia hoping to enter American graduate schools took the GRE yesterday, finishing the second half of the split administration given in China, Taiwan and South Korea. And I was sitting right there with all of them.
I took the computer-based analytical writing section in July, just before I flew to Madagascar. I scheduled it a week prior and went in on a Tuesday. I was the only one there. The administrator made me leave my bag, phone and everything in my pockets in a locker. A security camera watched me the entire time, and cubicle walls kept me from seeing the empty stations next to me.
Yesterday was the opposite. When I arrived at DaWai, several hundred students were already waiting outside the academic building, reviewing and cramming, waiting to be let in.
The paper side of the exam is only given twice a year, and only in certain cities, so students flowed in from across the Northeast. We piled at the door, then piled inside, then piled into the testing halls.
Even in China, the GRE is an English test, and none of the material is in Chinese. A Chinese professor read an English script to a room full of Chinese students. Only after several runs through was anything translated, and then only the most essential directions.
As the administrator was reading and re-reading instructions, the student next to me picked up his test booklet and pushed the ends together to bow out the pages. Separating sheets of still-classified material with the point of a pencil, he examined the questions he could make out in that skewed angle. He was cheating.
I looked around the room. Nearly every student in the testing hall was trying to get an advanced look at the test questions while the administrator continued reading instructions. No one was shy about it. Some folded back covers; others bent the pages like the computer science major next to me.
A proctor walked up and down the aisles, either oblivious or (more likely) unconcerned. I looked at a student two rows back. He shrugged, as if to say, “You know a better way?”
A friend taking the test, another American, complained afterward that students near her were working ahead when they finished the designated section, or going back to a part of the test that was finished. I didn’t notice this, but I wasn’t looking for it, either. The guy next to me kept working after time had been called, almost up to when his exam was collected, and several minutes after mine was turned in.
I hate to make this sound like a “This would never happen in America” post, but, well, it wouldn’t. In the universities where all these students are applying, breaking rules on a test will get you at best a failing grade, if not a ticket home.
The student who sat next to me wants to attend NYU, pursuing a doctorate in computer science. There’s more opportunity there, he said. As fast as China is developing, it’s not fast enough for some, and won’t ever be. For some, studying abroad still conveys an advantage that can’t be gained here.
Maybe he’ll get in. Hopefully, he won’t try the same thing and be thrown out.
Fires are burning in seven counties in Southern California. Three are incinerating parts of Santa Clarita, where I grew up, as I type. My parents’ house is right in the middle. The theme park where I worked in high school, 10 minutes from home, looks like Baghdad.
My dad was in San Jose, about to fly home, when I spoke to him last night (Monday morning in California). It sounds like everything is OK, so far. A friend whose family lives in San Diego told me a few hours ago that parents had just evacuated.
Since it’s the middle of the night back home, I’ve been digging up as much news on the fires as possible. I’m especially concerned with the Magic Mountain fire, burning in Stevenson Ranch, just across the freeway from my parents’ neighborhood. Three newspapers cover Santa Clarita (to varying degrees). With that kind of overlap, there’s a lot to sort through. I eventually found this nugget, which put me more at ease:
Stevenson Ranch appears out of danger
Near Valencia:
“Stevenson Ranch is no longer in danger,” Fire Inspector Mike Brown said this evening, adding that the wind seemed to be dying down.
The 1,200-acre fire that started Monday afternoon south of Magic Mountain, which once threatened Stevenson Ranch, was 20% contained by 7 p.m.
The LA Times posted a good map and has been “liveblogging” the fires. I put that in quotes because it’s not really live, and not really blogging, at least not in the way I’d like to see it. So far, the posts have been more like a tumblog of vignettes about what people ran back inside to save and how they felt returning to the smoldering ruins of the place they grew up, with some political finger-pointing thrown in. That’s all lovely, but I can’t bring myself to care, not today, not when my parents are downwind of the Magic Fire. Print the feel-good stuff and the blame game tomorrow. Put it in the paper. At least separate it out from what I need to know, now, on the other side of the world when my home might be burning.
The Signal, my hometown homegrown paper, has gone low-tech, but they’re also sticking to the basic and most recent facts. Whether one is related to the other, I can’t say, but it makes it a lot easier to search when I don’t have to filter out Malibu.
The LA Daily News has the best map. It’s embedded above, and it gets my stamp of approval because it includes more than the fires. It answers questions I was asking when I went looking for news: What’s burning? What roads are closed? Where are evacuees going? The LA Times didn’t have that.
Here’s what I’d like to see:
What’s burning, where, and how much is contained. I want constant updates on this.
Updates separated by town. LA County is the biggest county in America. There are 88 cities and more than one million people living in unincorporated areas. Break up the information so I can find it.
Evacuations. Who, where, and where people are gathering.
What roads are closed. How can people get in or out if they need to? Where should people absolutely not go?
Updates available by email, Twitter, RSS, mobile, radio, TV, and any other way the information can get to me.
Lost Remote has a great round-up of how other news organizations are getting the word out, especially in San Diego, which looks like it’s getting hit harder.
I know most of this will be in news stories that come out over the next 24 hours. But news organizations dedicating the resources to maps and blogs—which they should—need to get this stuff up, front and center, somewhere I don’t have to go hunting for it.
Secondary things: Rounding up Flickr and YouTube contributions is great. Again, get this connected to a location, especially in LA County. Here’s what Santa Clarita looks like:
YouTube seems to have finally gone too far. I suppose it was only a matter of time, and considering that the 17th Party Congress is happening in Beijing right now, well, that’s life in a harmonious society.
After all, the Net Nanny’s job is to purify the internet, to keep “unhealthy” content away from vulnerable Chinese eyeballs. Along with political no-nos like the Three Ts, porn is the other major target of China’s censorship regime.
But wait a tick, Danwei says porn is getting a pass:
Is it because of the 17th Communist Party Congress currently going on in Beijing?
The 17th Communist Party Congress is abbreviated to å七大 (shiqi da) or ‘17 big’ in Chinese. Mainland Chinese soft porn website 17da.com and overseas-hosted hard porn link site 17big.com seem to be open for business.
Just to show how f*cked up the Chinese net-nanny is, I pinged pornotube.com for shits and giggles, and it works like a charm. Apparently some of the powers that be are not quite ready to part with that one.
So what’s going on here? Had minding YouTube taken up all the talent in the censorship corps? Have the powers-that-be loosened up on porn to focus on politics? Has someone realized that all those extra men will need something to stem their sexual frustration? None can say for sure.
Whatever the reason, whoever the decider, may they all get river crabs in places even wearing three watches won’t cure.
Oh, and on the upside, BlogSpot and Wordpress.com blogs seem to be working again…for now. So yeah, rejoice…
I can’t say I did anything special for Hua Guofeng Day. Actually, I didn’t do anything, because I didn’t read Granite Studio’s declaration of said holiday until a day later.
But I did a little celebrating today. Hua was back in the Great Hall of the People, where he was spotted by the AP, clearly reliving his old glory days.
Or…maybe just dreaming of the time when he wasn’t Chairman Who.
My old high school tennis coach used to say before every match: “Don’t take anything onto the court, and don’t take anything off.” Or something like that. It’s been a while. The point was that all the hormone-driven, stress-induced, angst-ridden teenage crap we normally carried around with us wasn’t supposed to be in our heads during the match. Focus on serves, ground strokes and volleys. Coach Kellogg is big on this mental-game stuff.
The match has been in the making for three years ever since Yohei Kono, speaker of the House of Representatives of the Japanese Diet, proposed the idea during a meeting with China’s top legislator Wu Bangguo in 2005 as a way of improving relations between the two countries, according to Sheng Huaren, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC).
Rather than citing thorny diplomatic relations in recent years, Sheng said China took so long to accept the invitation because the NPC didn’t have a football team at the time.
Probably best not to bring up those “thornydiplomaticrelations,” much as I’d enjoy seeing a legislator—any legislator—take a World Cup class head butt.
I suppose a more immediate concern might be what kind of a game we’ll get from two teams made up of middle-aged legislators who’ve been practicing for just over a month, but maybe that misses the point. Sport has a long history of bringing countries together, from ping-pong diplomacy to the Olympics. If two dozen out-of-shape lawmakers can help keep things calm in East Asia, I’ll resist the urge to poke fun (at least for a day or two).
Dalian is an obvious choice for China and Japan to meet up in a no-history-mentioned goodwill soccer game, given it’s history. This was, after all, Japan’s city for 40 years (and Russia’s for a decade before). Now it’s the go-to locale for outsourcing, drawing largely on a pool of Japanese speakers whose parents and grandparents grew up under colonial* rule. A large Japanese expat community still thrives here.
For better or worse, Dalian provides a longstanding link between the two nations. I tend to be optimistic about that.
*A good friend of mine recently disputed my labeling of Dalian as a colony, saying it was a concession, much like Qingdao and other treaty-ports. I should know this better, but if anyone has a definitive answer, drop a comment.
Or at least, it will have a problem in 2010. NASA is set to retire the Space Shuttle that year, but the next ride to orbit won’t be ready for another five years—if everything happens on schedule. American astronauts will have to bum rides with Russia (and you know how they drive) until the Ares and Orion vehicles are ready.
In the meantime, NASA is supposed to be on its way back to the Moon. Then Mars. Then Beyond, wherever that is. Americans are supposed to be back where we last went in 1974 by 2020. It’s an awful long walk.
That’s Houston’s problem. Washington’s problem is more complicated. It seems China is likely to get to the Moon first.
“I personally believe that China will be back on the moon before we are,” NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a low-key lecture in Washington two weeks ago, marking the space agency’s 50th anniversary, still a year away.
“I think when that happens, Americans will not like it. But they will just have to not like it.”
Sen. Kay Bailey-Hutchinson of Texas wrote in yesterday’s Houston Chronicle:
The Chinese are gaining ground in technological areas. China recently surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest exporter of information-technology products (and the U.S. has become a net importer of those products). The Chinese are now turning their attention to space technology, and they are determined to use it as a means of strengthening their military. We cannot allow other countries to acquire new weapons technologies while America does not keep up.
There must not be a space gap. Or a technology gap. Or a cave gap. “The Chinese” are starting to sound a lot like “the Soviets” of old. This is not an accident. Hutchinson begins and ends the op-ed with Sputnik, noting how the satellite’s launch 50 years ago gave America the swift kick it needed to start seriously funding science education and its own space program, and to eventually get to the Moon first. Now the Chinese are going to beat us, as the warning goes. They’ve only been putting people in space four years, and they’re already shooting down satellites and launching lunar probes.
It’s no coincidence either that a greater investment in spaceflight would benefit Sen. Hutchinson’s constituency, and Griffin’s sad song could easily be read as a plea for more funding. It’s certainly easier to justify buying expensive new rockets when it feels like there’s a cold war going on and those Chinese might win.
Off to the races, then? Not so fast. “The U.S. has to get over this feeling that it has to be a competition,” White House science adviser John Marburger told The AP. Nothing like being masters of our own low expectations.
The Russians haven’t gone away, though. Colonel-General Vladimir Popovkin, Russia’s Space Forces Commander, is telling everybody to cool it: “We do not want to fight in space, and we do not want to call the shots there either, but we will not permit any other country to do so.†(h/t The Great Beyond)
So what’s this really about? Will Americans see a Chinese flag planted on the Moon and ask themselves and their government, “How did this happen?” Or will we shrug our shoulders and welcome China to the lunar club?
Four local photographers have work on display right now in Heping Guangchang. The exhibition, called “I love Dalian” (they didn’t get to choose the name) runs until Oct. 15, after which two of them will move to their own show. Details aren’t available for that one yet. Directions to the current show are at DalianDalian.com.
All four studied photography in Dalian over the past year, three completing masters degrees from Bolton U./Dalian Medical University. Much of what they photograph is the same, or follows similar themes: beaches, migrant workers, strange food, blue skies. Yet they see it very differently from each other.
Curious about their perspectives, I interviewed each one and built audio slide shows with their photos. The result is here.
Production notes:
This started as one slide show but became four when the interviews got too long. I figure anything over two minutes better be damn important, so I gave each photog their own piece. Doing that meant I needed a launch page of some kind. There are ways to do that in Flash (tutorial at Multimedia Shooter) but I neither know nor own Flash. And considering that I really just started learning web design for real, I figured that was a bit out of my league anyway, so I did it in html. So, for those of you keeping score at home, this would be soundslides number three, stand-alone, coded-from-scratch web page number one. As always, critiques are welcome and appreciated.
