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sissij

Your Dog Remembers More Than You Think - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dogs-memory.html

brain science language research

shared by sissij on 24 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • In people it is called episodic memory, and it involves a sense of self. In animals, it’s called episodic-like memory, because it’s difficult to try to plumb something as elusive as self without the aid of language.
  • Dr. Fugazza and colleagues reported online in Current Biology that this showed that the dogs remembered an event they hadn’t been concentrating on, the trainer’s action. She said one aspect strengthened that conclusion: The dogs tended to lie down immediately when they got back to the mat, suggesting that their heads were in “lie down” mode, not “do it” mode.
  • He said human episodic memory is lost in Alzheimer’s disease and he and others study animal memory in hopes of learning how to combat that loss. The work on dogs offers a new technique that could be very useful, he said.
  • sissij on 24 Nov 16
     
    I found this experiment very interesting because it shows some aspect of how animals memory works. The result can be used to see how memory work without language. I think language and memory have an intertwined relationship because sometimes I can feel that the information stored in my brain is in language rather than abstract form such as knowledge. For example, my memory of chemistry knowledge is stored in English, so when I am reading a chemistry related book in Chinese, I would usually get lost because there aren't any vocals on Chemistry in Chinese in my memory. It would be a very interesting question to consider that how our memory will construct if we don't have a language. There is a kind of mental disease called "aphasia", meaning the loss of ability to understand language. How do they remember things when they lose the ability to assign meanings and communicate? --Sissi (11/24/2016)
Javier E

Professors Are Prejudiced, Too - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...essors-are-prejudiced-too.html

prejudice university professor racial gender education

shared by Javier E on 10 May 14 - No Cached
  • we sent emails to more than 6,500 randomly selected professors from 259 American universities. Each email was from a (fictional) prospective out-of-town student whom the professor did not know, expressing interest in the professor’s Ph.D. program and seeking guidance. These emails were identical and written in impeccable English, varying only in the name of the student sender. The messages came from students with names like Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh and Chang Huang
  • Surprisingly, several supposed advantages that some people believe women and minorities enjoy did not materialize
  • response rates did indeed depend on students’ race and gender identity.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities
  • We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities
  • our own discipline of business showed the most bias, with 87 percent of white males receiving a response compared with just 62 percent of all females and minorities combined.
  • We computed the average response rates for each category of student (e.g., white male, Hispanic female), dividing the number of responses from the professors by the number of emails sent from students in a given race or gender category.
  • Were Asians favored, given the model minority stereotype they supposedly benefit from in academic contexts? No. In fact, Chinese students were the most discriminated-against group in our sample
  • Did reaching out to someone of the same gender or race — such as a black student emailing a black professor — reduce bias? No. We saw the same levels of bias in both same-race and same-gender faculty-student pairs that we saw in pairs not sharing a race or gender (the one exception was Chinese students writing to Chinese professors).
  • Did it help to be in a discipline with a greater representation of women and minorities? Again, no. Faculty members in those more diverse disciplines, like criminal justice, were no less likely to discriminate than those in less diverse disciplines,
  • Did it help that these were students in the pre-applicant stage, when some believe underrepresented groups enjoy advantageous access to selective opportunities? Again, no
  • each of the supposed hidden advantages of being a woman or minority proved to be no more than a phantom.
maddieireland334

Western manners: The latest Chinese status symbol - 0 views

diigo.com/07ocwn

culture knowledge

shared by maddieireland334 on 01 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 01 Jun 15
     
    Meet Twitter's Chinese rival Expat shock at coming home Picking a winner A Frenchman takes China global Before you lift your chopsticks Five Chinese women are sitting upright in their chairs, designer handbags at their heels, listening attentively to a trendy Chinese Tatler magazine photographer describe how to pose in public.
pantanoma

Chinese censorship is nothing new, but artists shouldn't trade freedom for money - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ouldnt-trade-freedom-for-money

sense perception

shared by pantanoma on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • publishing industry to increase sales in China.
  • “whether certain topics were off limits for writers and if his publishing house adhered to government guidelines
  • ‘The censors felt that it did not portray Shanghai in a positive light, so that scene was removed from the movie,’ ”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • As I’ve noted elsewhere, what was fascinating about the “Mission: Impossible III” anecdote is that the Chinese censors weren’t always worried about heterodox ideas — a plea for freedom of speech or gay rights, say — but simply looking bad, losing face. The treatment of art as nothing more than a means of transforming the perception of China has a long and storied history under the communist regime.
  • “Likewise, [Hu] opposed the party’s dictum that ‘bright things’ be emphasized and elements of backwardness and darkness be de-emphasized,”
oliviaodon

Culture Clash at a Chinese-Owned Plant in Ohio - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ohio-factory-jobs-china.html

culture politics trump

shared by oliviaodon on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • When a giant Chinese glassmaker arrived here in 2014 and began spending what would become more than a half-billion dollars to fix up an abandoned General Motors plant, it seemed like a tale from opposite land: The Chinese are supposedly stealing American jobs — as no less an authority than President Trump has pointed out.
  • But now the Chinese were suddenly creating them. More than 1,500 jobs, in fact.
  • At Fuyao, a major culture clash is playing out on the factory floor, with some workers questioning the company’s commitment to operating under American supervision and American norms.
tongoscar

What do tense US-Iranian relations mean for China, North Korea? | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...rth-korea-200113043519574.html

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Deepening fractures in the relationship between the United States and Iran pose economic headaches for China but create strategic opportunities for North Korea, experts say - one of many reverberations from the weeklong crisis.
  • Its top sources are Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which has been exporting 100,000 barrels of crude oil a day to China since October as part of an infrastructure deal.  Beijing is also the biggest buyer of Iran's crude, although imports have fallen since waivers from US sanctions expired last year. In November, the Communist state bought 547,758 metric tonnes (539,106 tons) of crude from Iran, well below April's 3.04 million tonnes, according to Chinese customs data.
  • Chinese President Xi Jinping's administration, which held naval war exercises with Iran and Russia in the Gulf of Oman last month, has sternly criticised the US for Soleimani's death but there is not much else it can do, according to analysts. "China is keen to avoid further strain in its relations with the US, as ensuring regional stability and ending trade war are currently its top foreign policy priorities," said Kaho Yu, a senior Asia analyst at consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft in Singapore.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "The US taking out a top Iranian leader may cause Pyongyang to rethink the scale of its next provocation," Leif-Eric Easley, an associate professor of international studies at Seoul's Ewha University, wrote in a Tuesday note published on The Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank. "Pyongyang may now point to Iran's case to justify resisting denuclearisation and enhancing its self-avowed strategic deterrent for regime survival," he continued.
  • In September, the White House slapped sanctions on various Chinese people and companies, including two COSCO Shipping Corporation units, for "knowingly engaging" in the transport of Iranian crude in breach of US sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Telecommunications giant Huawei, deemed a national security risk by the US, has also come under fire over alleged sanctions violations. Its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou is currently battling extradition to the US on charges of fraud and misleading HSBC Holdings over Huawei's business in Iran.
  • Given the riskiness of US foreign policy actions, other countries may be unwilling to continue cooperating with Washington, he warned: "With the current escalation in Iran-US ties, other countries with an interest in seeing a nuclear-free North Korea may be less willing to trust the US' good faith." "This is particularly true as China and Russia continue to set themselves up as an alternative force for North Korean denuclearisation in contrast to the US-led campaign of sanctions," Rinna said.
tongoscar

Trump's Iran strike could present an opportunity to China - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Last June, however, world leaders flocked to the capital of Kyrgyzstan for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a key regional security and political alliance. Attendees included Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, as well as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, with whom they posed alongside in photos from the event. It was a pertinent reminder of Tehran's strong ties with two of the world's foremost powers, further underlined when the three countries held joint naval exercises near the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz in the Indian Ocean last month.
  • A statement added that Tehran hoped China could "play an important role in preventing escalation of regional tensions."Such sentiments are also likely shared well beyond Iran's borders, including among other Middle Eastern powers which are no fans of Tehran. The killing of Soleimani could present Beijing with a major opportunity, not only to prevent another disastrous war, but to increase its influence in the region, supplanting an increasingly unpredictable Washington.
  • "China's emphasis on noninterference, state-led economic development, and regional stability resonates with many autocratic leaders in the Middle East, allowing China to promote its 'alternative' model of great power leadership."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • So far -- in no small part thanks to its humungous checkbook -- China has managed to thread the needle of maintaining ties with traditional allies such as Iran and Syria, while also improving relations with their rivals in Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Beijing has also resisted strong pressure from Washington to ditch both Tehran and Damascus, using its role as a United Nations Security Council member to rein in some international action against them.
  • Tehran's enemies may frown at Beijing's refusal to ditch its old ally to make new ones, but this policy will appear far more attractive in the wake of Soleimani's death. And the distinct chance we could now be headed for another Middle Eastern conflict -- or at the very least a period of saber-rattling and disruption to global trade -- could prop up Beijing's ability to play all sides, perhaps indefinitely.
  • "China is not a revisionist state. It does not want to reshape the Middle East and take over the responsibility of securing it. It wants a predictable, stable region -- as much as that is possible -- in which it can trade and invest,"
  • Such a role will likely be welcomed by many players in the region. Indeed, it's difficult to think of a more pertinent example of the contrast between Chinese and US policy than Trump threatening -- just as Beijing was calling for calm -- to target Iranian cultural sites, in what could well be a war crime if it was carried out.
tongoscar

China's electric car market has more than 400 competitors - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...le-could-be-over-electric-cars

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • SHANGHAI — As Tesla inaugurates a $2 billion electric-car factory in China this month, a brief stroll around an upscale shopping district here shows the company already has plenty of local competition.
  • For all the success China has had conquering other industries, it never really mastered the art of manufacturing cars with internal-combustion engines. Foreign brands have dominated since the 1990s, when General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen and others began ramping up sales, turning China into the world’s largest auto buyer.
  • The Chinese government has spent at least $60 billion to support the fledgling electric-car industry, including research-and-development funding, tax exemptions and financing for battery-charging stations, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. That’s encouraged a whopping 400-plus Chinese companies to get into the electric-car business, CSIS said.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Unreliable batteries and other quality problems have also dampened consumer enthusiasm.
  • For now foreign car companies continue to see gold in China and are boosting local production of their own electric vehicles.
  • Consumer demand remains uncertain. On a recent afternoon, several drivers at a battery-charging station in an underground parking lot were lukewarm about their Chinese-brand electric vehicles.
johnsonel7

Baidu has a new trick for teaching AI the meaning of language - MIT Technology Review - 0 views

www.technologyreview.com/...gle-bert-natural-language-glue

language artificial intelligence research

shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Earlier this month, a Chinese tech giant quietly dethroned Microsoft and Google in an ongoing competition in AI. The company was Baidu, China’s closest equivalent to Google, and the competition was the General Language Understanding Evaluation, otherwise known as GLUE.
  • GLUE is a widely accepted benchmark for how well an AI system understands human language. It consists of nine different tests for things like picking out the names of people and organizations in a sentence and figuring out what a pronoun like “it” refers to when there are multiple potential antecedents. A language model that scores highly on GLUE, therefore, can handle diverse reading comprehension tasks. Out of a full score of 100, the average person scores around 87 points. Baidu is now the first team to surpass 90 with its model, ERNIE.
  • BERT, by contrast, considers the context before and after a word all at once, making it bidirectional. It does this using a technique known as “masking.” In a given passage of text, BERT randomly hides 15% of the words and then tries to predict them from the remaining ones. This allows it to make more accurate predictions because it has twice as many cues to work from.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • When Baidu researchers began developing their own language model, they wanted to build on the masking technique. But they realized they needed to tweak it to accommodate the Chinese language.In English, the word serves as the semantic unit—meaning a word pulled completely out of context still contains meaning. The same cannot be said for characters in Chinese.
  • It considers the ordering of sentences and the distances between them, for example, to understand the logical progression of a paragraph. Most important, however, it uses a method called continuous training that allows it to train on new data and new tasks without it forgetting those it learned before. This allows it to get better and better at performing a broad range of tasks over time with minimal human interference.
  • “When we first started this work, we were thinking specifically about certain characteristics of the Chinese language,” says Hao Tian, the chief architect of Baidu Research. “But we quickly discovered that it was applicable beyond that.”
tongoscar

Cantonese will survive, despite popularization of Mandarin: experts - People's Daily On... - 0 views

en.people.cn/...c90000-9242725.html

shared by tongoscar on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • “As one of the most important varieties of the Chinese language, Cantonese is losing its former glory following the popularization of Mandarin. Less young people prefer to use Cantonese to communicate with each other,
  • the use of Cantonese has seen a decrease at places of work and in education due to the national promotion of Mandarin, which has led to a decline in the number of Cantonese users.
  • According to an official document released by the Ministry of Education in April, 80 percent of China’s population will be able to communicate in Mandarin by the end of 2020, compared to the current number of 70 percent.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “A language’s vitality depends on its daily use both inside and outside home.
  • Currently, the Chinese government has made some effort in protecting Chinese languages, mostly for research purposes.
  • “In my hometown, if you speak Wu language instead of Mandarin at school, the teachers will criticize you. Some people will laugh at our accent and say it’s a shame we don’t use standard Chinese,”
  • “The language spoken by somebody and his or her identity as a speaker of this language are inseparable.
  • “In order to keep a language alive, bilingual education at school, as well as the promotion of language equity, is crucial. I hope dialects are not only preserved for research purposes, but are used by the public,”
Dunia Tonob

The World Today - Speculation rife over missing Chinese leader 11/09/2012 - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...s3587507.htm

shared by Dunia Tonob on 11 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Listen to MP3 of this story ( minutes) Alternate WMA version | MP3 download ELEANOR HALL: China's anointed successor to Hu Jintao as leader of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, has been missing from public view in recent days.Officials are yet to provide
  • an explanation for his absences, and now speculation is building about why and what it could mean for the transition to a new generation of leaders in China later this year.
  • This is a bit unusual, but it is not totally surprising in view of the age of the Chinese leaders. I do believe that the Chinese authorities are extremely sensitive and worried about various potential adverse events or developments that may affect the image of the leadership succession process and the coming party congress.
  • ...2 more annotations...
    • Dunia Tonob
      Dunia Tonob on 11 Sep 12
       
      Such a culture shock! If something like this occurred in America, I do not believe that the government would get away with keeping it hidden.
  • convention that one should ask about top leaders' health and should not talk about it.
Javier E

Chinese Journalist Detained in Beijing, One Day After Human Rights Talk With U.S. - NYT... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...st-is-detained-in-beijing.html

history lessons China analogy

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Mr. Xi has indicated that proposed economic reforms would not be accompanied by any significant political relaxation. He has instead repeatedly stressed his loyalty to party traditions and political orthodoxy
  • Chinese state-run news media featured a commentary from the official Xinhua news agency that warned that if China embraced democratic ideas promoted by liberal intellectuals, it would succumb to turmoil worse than that in the Soviet Union after the collapse of Communism.
Javier E

Why Save a Language? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-save-a-language.html

language ext extinction languages value

shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • “TELL me, why should we care?” he asks.
  • if indigenous people want to give up their ancestral language to join the modern world, why should we consider it a tragedy? Languages have always died as time has passed. What’s so special about a language?
  • The answer I’m supposed to give is that each language, in the way it applies words to things and in the way its grammar works, is a unique window on the world.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.
  • experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think
  • If a language dies, a fascinating way of thinking dies along with it.
  • One psychologist argued some decades ago that this meant that Chinese makes a person less sensitive to such distinctions, which, let’s face it, is discomfitingly close to saying Chinese people aren’t as quick on the uptake as the rest of us. The truth is more mundane: Hypotheticality and counterfactuality are established more by context in Chinese than in English.
  • extrapolating cognitive implications from language differences is a delicate business.
  • But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?
  • The answer is still yes, but for other reasons.
  • First, a central aspect of any culture’s existence as a coherent entity is the fact of its having its own language, regardless of what the language happens to be like
  • because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.
  • Second, languages are scientifically interesting even if they don’t index cultural traits. They offer variety equivalent to the diversity of the world’s fauna and flora.
  • As with any other feature of the natural world, such variety tests and expands our sense of the possible, of what is “normal.”
  • Cultures, to be sure, show how we are different. Languages, however, are variations on a worldwide, cross-cultural perception of this thing called life.
Javier E

A Meditation on the Art of Not Trying - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-on-the-art-of-not-trying.html

spontaneity psychology education natural morality virtue intrinsic Confucius Taoism Mencius authenticity habit

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • It’s the default prescription for any tense situation: a blind date, a speech, a job interview, the first dinner with the potential in-laws. Relax. Act natural. Just be yourself. But when you’re nervous, how can you be yourself?
  • Edward Slingerland. He has developed, quite deliberately, a theory of spontaneity based on millenniums of Asian philosophy and decades of research by psychologists and neuroscientists.
  • He calls it the paradox of wu wei, the Chinese term for “effortless action.”
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Wu wei is integral to romance, religion, politics and commerce. It’s why some leaders have charisma and why business executives insist on a drunken dinner before sealing a deal.
  • the quest for wu wei has been going on ever since humans began living in groups larger than hunter-gathering clans. Unable to rely on the bonds of kinship, the first urban settlements survived by developing shared values, typically through religion, that enabled people to trust one another’s virtue and to cooperate for the common good.
  • But there was always the danger that someone was faking it and would make a perfectly rational decision to put his own interest first if he had a chance to shirk his duty.
  • To be trusted, it wasn’t enough just to be a sensible, law-abiding citizen, and it wasn’t even enough to dutifully strive to be virtuous. You had to demonstrate that your virtue was so intrinsic that it came to you effortlessly.
  • the discovery in 1993 of bamboo strips in a tomb in the village of Guodian in central China. The texts on the bamboo, composed more than three centuries before Christ, emphasize that following rules and fulfilling obligations are not enough to maintain social order.
  • These texts tell aspiring politicians that they must have an instinctive sense of their duties to their superiors: “If you try to be filial, this not true filiality; if you try to be obedient, this is not true obedience. You cannot try, but you also cannot not try.”
  • is that authentic wu wei? Not according to the rival school of Taoists that arose around the same time as Confucianism, in the fifth century B.C. It was guided by the Tao Te Ching, “The Classic of the Way and Virtue,” which took a direct shot at Confucius: “The worst kind of Virtue never stops striving for Virtue, and so never achieves Virtue.”
  • Through willpower and the rigorous adherence to rules, traditions and rituals, the Confucian “gentleman” was supposed to learn proper behavior so thoroughly that it would eventually become second nature to him.
  • Taoists did not strive. Instead of following the rigid training and rituals required by Confucius, they sought to liberate the natural virtue within. They went with the flow. They disdained traditional music in favor of a funkier new style with a beat. They emphasized personal meditation instead of formal scholarship.
  • Variations of this debate would take place among Zen Buddhist, Hindu and Christian philosophers, and continue today among psychologists and neuroscientists arguing how much of morality and behavior is guided by rational choices or by unconscious feelings.
  • “Psychological science suggests that the ancient Chinese philosophers were genuinely on to something,” says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Particularly when one has developed proficiency in an area, it is often better to simply go with the flow. Paralysis through analysis and overthinking are very real pitfalls that the art of wu wei was designed to avoid.”
  • Before signing a big deal, businesspeople often insist on getting to know potential partners at a boozy meal because alcohol makes it difficult to fake feelings.
  • Some people, like politicians and salespeople, can get pretty good at faking spontaneity, but we’re constantly looking for ways to expose them.
  • However wu wei is attained, there’s no debate about the charismatic effect it creates. It conveys an authenticity that makes you attractive, whether you’re addressing a crowd or talking to one person.
  • what’s the best strategy for wu wei — trying or not trying? Dr. Slingerland recommends a combination. Conscious effort is necessary to learn a skill, and the Confucian emphasis on following rituals is in accord with psychological research showing we have a limited amount of willpower. Training yourself to follow rules automatically can be liberating, because it conserves cognitive energy for other tasks.
  • He likes the compromise approach of Mencius, a Chinese philosopher in the fourth century B.C. who combined the Confucian and Taoist approaches: Try, but not too hard.
  • “But in many domains actual success requires the ability to transcend our training and relax completely into what we are doing, or simply forget ourselves as agents.”
  • The sprouts were Mencius’ conception of wu wei: Something natural that requires gentle cultivation. You plant the seeds and water the sprouts, but at some point you need to let nature take its course. Just let the sprouts be themselves.
sissij

Chinese Mistake Satire on Trump for Real News - The New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-trump-media-satire.html

new york times social media language

shared by sissij on 09 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • A frantic President Trump, holding court in a bathrobe, ordered his aides to wrap the White House telephones in tinfoil, several Chinese publications reported this week, citing The New Yorker.
  • Internet readers were puzzled. The state-run news media — and China’s army of censors — are not known for making jokes. Was this for real?
  • Others were more discerning. “This was made up and meant to be funny,” another user said. “Surprising it was treated as news. Editor, could you be more professional?”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It was not the first time that American humorists have unintentionally duped the Chinese news media.
  • sissij on 09 Mar 17
     
    I think this is not that the editors in China are being unprofessional. It is just they are not used to the satire in America. The news style in different country is very different. It reminded me of an online course I took over the winter break about social media. The teacher in that course highlighted that the social media in western culture are not tightly controlled by the government so their language are more personal. The social media in China is tightly controlled by the government so the language it uses is usually very formal and serious. --Sissi (3/9/2017)
sissij

Trump Is a Chinese Agent - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-is-a-chinese-agent.html

new york times social media bias

shared by sissij on 29 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The big story everyone is chasing is whether President Trump is a Russian stooge. Wrong. That’s all a smoke screen. Trump is actually a Chinese agent. He is clearly out to make China great again. Just look at the facts.
  • That’s called l-e-v-e-r-a-g-e, and Trump just threw it away … because he promised to in the campaign — without, I’d bet, ever reading TPP. What a chump! I can still hear the clinking of champagne glasses in Beijing.
  • O.K., Mr. President, let’s assume for a second that climate change is a hoax. Do you believe in math?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • How can America be great if we don’t dominate the next great global industry — clean power?
  • Finally, Trump wants to slash the State Department and foreign aid budgets and make it harder for people to immigrate to America, particularly Muslims. This opens the way for China to expand its influence across the developing world and signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their start-ups overseas and not in America.
  • sissij on 29 Mar 17
     
    After we watched about storytelling in politics today in TOK class, I think it is very interesting that people with good stories are often very popular. In entertainment industry, it is very common that the stars create stories intentionally to keep them hot and famous. Sometimes, they even create scandals and affairs to make their story interesting to the general population. I think the news are keep telling stories about Donald Trump, or Trump intentionally make himself a great story to be told. People that with different perspectives have different stories to tell about Trump. Trump is very "famous" in this sense. --Sissi (3/29/2017)
sissij

There Is No Such Thing As Soy Milk | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...e-is-no-such-thing-as-soy-milk

science language bias

shared by sissij on 19 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • But are they all milk? No. There is no such thing as soy milk.
  • The same goes for almond, coconut, hemp, rice, cashew, hazelnut, and oat. Milk comes from mammals and there are no lactating almonds.
  • since the Chinese company Vitasoy entered the US market in 1979, the Food and Drug Administration still has a very specific, cow-centric, definition: "Milk is the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows."
  • sissij on 19 Apr 17
     
    I found that the definition of milk is gradually changing as people have new inventions and ideas. It shows that language is not dead and unchanging. Language is closely associated with the development of the society. I think another reason why we call it soy milk is partly because of the translation problem. Soy milk is originally from China and I think western country has never seen it before. The Chinese use soy milk as the name of their product is because they want to give a connotation to their product therefore the western customers would be less afraid about it. People tends to accept things that has some familiarities to them. --Sissi (4/29/2017)
aprossi

Elon Musk is trying to win China back - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

china science research Elon Musk technology

shared by aprossi on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Elon Musk is trying to win China back
  • Elon Musk's Tesla has endured a rough couple of months in China. Now he's working overtime to win Beijing back
  • The Tesla CEO lavished praise on China during an interview with state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), where he pledged that the country would become his electric carmaker's "biggest market" in the long run
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • He also lauded China's economic and climate goals — the country is currently the world's top greenhouse emitter, but has promised to drastically reduce the emissions over the next decade or so.
  • The charm offensive may be pivotal to Tesla's future in China. While the company has enjoyed special treatment from Chinese authorities in the past few years, it has faced an onslaught of criticism in recent weeks.
  • Last month, Tesla (TSLA) was summoned by Chinese officials to face questions about the quality of its Shanghai-made cars
  • Musk addressed those spying concerns on Saturday, saying at a Chinese development conference that his company's cars would never be used for such purposes.
  • "These are very aggressive goals. And I think they are great goals. And I wish more countries actually had these goals," Musk said. "I'm very confident that future of China is gonna be great."
  • Musk is one of the most popular American business leaders in China
cvanderloo

Two stereotypes that diminish the humanity of the Atlanta shooting victims - and all As... - 0 views

theconversation.com/and-all-asian-americans-157762

asian american history racism Atlanta stereotypes bias

shared by cvanderloo on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Since the Atlanta spa shootings, the U.S. media has been working harder than usual to describe and understand Asian Americans.
  • One is that of Asian Americans as the “perpetual foreigner” – immigrants who constantly struggle, never assimilate.
  • Both stereotypes have been levied in tandem against Asian immigrants to the U.S. for centuries.
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  • In the mid-1800s, Chinese laborers made up the first significant wave of Asian immigration to the United States. Recruited during the Gold Rush and to build the Transcontinental Railroad, the men were described by employers like industrialist Leland Stanford as “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious and economical.”
  • The model-minority myth emerged later. In 1965 the Hart-Celler Act opened immigration quotas that had previously favored Western Europeans.
  • Out-earning all other racial groups, Asian Americans became the “model minority,” a term first coined by sociologist William Petersen in a 1966 New York Times article, “Success Story: Japanese American style.”
  • Without the same educational and professional sponsorships as my father had, many in these later waves founded mom-and-pop businesses and peer lending networks. They gravitated toward blue-collar industries and “pink-collar” jobs in salons, food service or child care.
  • The women who worked and died at Young’s Asian Massage, Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa lived in this Asian America – not my father’s or mine.
  • Such workers make up the other side of the high-earning “model minority” statistic. That data masks the fact that Asian Americans have the highest income inequality of any racial group, with the top 10% of this population earning more than 10 times what the bottom 10% earns.
  • When Asian Americans are so easily, and so often, stereotyped, they become categories, not people – not individuals who make lives, raise families and do the best they can in their adopted homeland.
  • “My mother didn’t do anything wrong,” the son of 63-year-old Yong Ae Yue, the fan of Korean soap operas and cooking, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And she deserves the recognition that she is a human.”
caelengrubb

How the Language We Speak Affects the Way We Think | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...speak-affects-the-way-we-think

shared by caelengrubb on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The story begins with the first American linguists who described (scientifically) some of the languages spoken by Native Americans. They discovered many awkward differences compared to the languages they had learned in school (ancient Greek, Latin, English, German, and the like).
  • They found sounds never heard in European languages (like ejective consonants), strange meanings encoded in the grammar (like parts of the verb referring to shapes of the objects), or new grammatical categories (like evidentiality, that is, the source of knowledge about the facts in a sentence).
  • Not surprisingly, some of these linguists concluded that such strange linguistic systems should have an effect on the mind of their speakers
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  • Edward Sapir, one of the most influential American linguists, wrote: “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached” (Sapir, 1949: 162).
  • Now it was suggested that the world might be perceived differently by people speaking different languages.
  • This effect of framing or filtering is the main effect we can expect—regarding language—from perception and thought. Languages do not limit our ability to perceive the world or to think about the world, but they focus our perception, attention, and thought on specific aspects of the world.
  • Chinese-speaking children learn to count earlier than English-speaking children because Chinese numbers are more regular and transparent than English numbers (in Chinese, "eleven" is "ten one").
  • So, different languages focus the attention of their speakers on different aspects of the environment—either physical or cultural.
  • We linguists say that these salient aspects are either lexicalized or grammaticalised. Lexicalizing means that you have words for concepts, which work as shorthands for those concepts. This is useful because you don't need to explain (or paraphrase) the meaning you want to convey.
  • The lexicon is like a big, open bag: Some words are coined or borrowed because you need them for referring to new objects, and they are put into the bag. Conversely, some objects are not used anymore, and then the words for them are removed from the bag.
  • Dyirbal, a language spoken in Northern Australia, for example, has four noun classes (like English genders).
  • This grammatical classification of nouns involves a coherent view of the world, including an original mythology.
  • In summary, language functions as a filter of perception, memory, and attention. Whenever we construct or interpret a linguistic statement, we need to focus on specific aspects of the situation that the statement describes
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