Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged surnames

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
cvanderloo

Why 1.2 billion people in China share the same 100 surnames - CNN - 0 views

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

China surnames dialects knowledge science language

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • five most common surnames in China -- shared by more than 433 million people, or 30% of the population
  • With 1.37 billion citizens, China has the world's largest population, but has one of the smallest surname pools. Only about 6,000 surnames are in use, according to the Ministry of Public Security. And the vast majority of the population -- almost 86% -- share just 100 of those surnames.
  • To put that in perspective, the United States -- with less than a quarter of China's population -- reported 6.3 million surnames in its 2010 census
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It also has to do with language; you can't just add a random stroke to a Chinese character and create a new surname, the way you can add a letter to an English name.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      Language!
  • people with rare characters in their names, which aren't compatible with existing computer systems, can get left behind -- pushing many to change their names for the sake of convenience, even if it means abandoning centuries of heritage and language.
  • China's history, full of migration, political turmoil and warfare, meant people's names were often in flux -- which is partly why many have since vanished.
  • People sometimes changed their names for convenience, too -- for instance, simplifying complex characters by adopting similar-sounding ones with fewer strokes. Other times they did it out of superstition, abandoning a name believed to bring ill fortune, said Chen, the associate professor.
  • surnames are lost or die out over time with each new generation as women take on their husbands' surnames.
  • With China roaring into the digital age, nearly everything -- from making appointments to buying train tickets -- has moved online. That meant a world of trouble if you happened to have a rare character in your name, that might not be in the database.
  • China's digitized ID cards made the problem even more pressing. The first generation of these cards allowed people to hand-write their names on -- but the second-generation cards, launched in 2004 and dubbed "smart cards" for their digital features, exclusively used computer-printed text.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      Reminds me of requiring people in Guatemala to fill out a form in Spanish even though half of the population doesn't speak spanish.
  • Another factor exacerbating the increasing commonness of Chinese names is the government's efforts to standardize and regulate the language.
  • Various dialects of Mandarin are spoken between the provinces, with some so different that speakers are unintelligible to each other.
    • cvanderloo
      cvanderloo on 17 Jan 21
       
      Dialects vs languages and the bariors they form
  • To try to address this, experts have increased the database from 32,000 characters to 70,000 characters, according to the government. They're still working to expand it to include more than 90,000 character
  • This struggle, and the cost of adapting to the modern age, was exemplified in a village in the eastern Shandong province in the late 2000s. Many villagers shared the ancestral name "Shan" -- but when they began applying for the digitized ID cards, local officials advised them to change their surnames to "Xian," a similar-sounding but more common character, according to state-owned news service CNTV.
  • In the end, more than 200 villagers were forced to change their surnames, a source of sorrow for many.
Javier E

Wine-tasting: it's junk science | Life and style | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-tasting-junk-science-analysis

taste sense perception research

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'lifeandstyle'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on guardian.co.uk because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on guardian.co.uk ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } Wor
  • Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
  • Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine."The results are disturbing," says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. "Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year."Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win."
  • French academic Frédéric Brochet tested the effect of labels in 2001. He presented the same Bordeaux superior wine to 57 volunteers a week apart and in two different bottles – one for a table wine, the other for a grand cru.The tasters were fooled.When tasting a supposedly superior wine, their language was more positive – describing it as complex, balanced, long and woody. When the same wine was presented as plonk, the critics were more likely to use negatives such as weak, light and flat.
  • In 2011 Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist (and former professional magician) at Hertfordshire University invited 578 people to comment on a range of red and white wines, varying from £3.49 for a claret to £30 for champagne, and tasted blind.People could tell the difference between wines under £5 and those above £10 only 53% of the time for whites and only 47% of the time for reds. Overall they would have been just as a successful flipping a coin to guess.
  • why are ordinary drinkers and the experts so poor at tasting blind? Part of the answer lies in the sheer complexity of wine.For a drink made by fermenting fruit juice, wine is a remarkably sophisticated chemical cocktail. Dr Bryce Rankine, an Australian wine scientist, identified 27 distinct organic acids in wine, 23 varieties of alcohol in addition to the common ethanol, more than 80 esters and aldehydes, 16 sugars, plus a long list of assorted vitamins and minerals that wouldn't look out of place on the ingredients list of a cereal pack. There are even harmless traces of lead and arsenic that come from the soil.
  • "People underestimate how clever the olfactory system is at detecting aromas and our brain is at interpreting them," says Hutchinson."The olfactory system has the complexity in terms of its protein receptors to detect all the different aromas, but the brain response isn't always up to it. But I'm a believer that everyone has the same equipment and it comes down to learning how to interpret it." Within eight tastings, most people can learn to detect and name a reasonable range of aromas in wine
  • People struggle with assessing wine because the brain's interpretation of aroma and bouquet is based on far more than the chemicals found in the drink. Temperature plays a big part. Volatiles in wine are more active when wine is warmer. Serve a New World chardonnay too cold and you'll only taste the overpowering oak. Serve a red too warm and the heady boozy qualities will be overpowering.
  • Colour affects our perceptions too. In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as "jammy' and commented on its crushed red fruit.The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye
  • Other environmental factors play a role. A judge's palate is affected by what she or he had earlier, the time of day, their tiredness, their health – even the weather.
  • Robert Hodgson is determined to improve the quality of judging. He has developed a test that will determine whether a judge's assessment of a blind-tasted glass in a medal competition is better than chance. The research will be presented at a conference in Cape Town this year. But the early findings are not promising."So far I've yet to find someone who passes," he says.
cvanderloo

Have you ever wondered how much energy you put in to avoid being assaulted? It may shoc... - 1 views

theconversation.com/saulted-it-may-shock-you-65372

sexism women assault prevention energy science research

shared by cvanderloo on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A recent article offering men advice about how to proposition a woman wearing headphones – encouraging them to block her path to prevent her from ignoring them – rightfully provoked a major backlash. But the backlash also brought a certain phenomenon to wider public attention – the fact that women sometimes wear headphones as a way to avoid unwanted approaches in public.
  • The short moments when women are alone in public space, away from commitments at home or at work – the only moments many people have to themselves – are disrupted.
  • They recognised that they were making certain decisions about routes home, or where to sit on public transport. They spoke about using sunglasses or headphones in order to create a shield – a way to give the impression that they didn’t hear that man making a sexual comment, or didn’t see that other man touching himself as he walked behind them.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The women I spoke to knew they were doing some of these things but other behaviours were less conscious.
  • What was most surprising was how all 50 of the women I interviewed significantly underestimated the amount of work they were putting in to avoid intrusions by men in the street, and the impact this had on them.
  • This kind of safety work goes largely unnoticed by the women doing it and by the wider world.
  • The trouble is, women are only ever able to count the times when such strategies don’t work – when they are harassed by a man, or assaulted. The work put into the successes – the number of times women’s actions prevent men from intruding – go unnoticed.
  • Challenging this silence means talking about the range and extent of what women experience, from unwanted comments to flashing, following and frottage.
  • Recognising the sheer scale of the effort women are habitually putting in to avoid public sexual harassment could help us to change a culture that makes victims accountable for not preventing assault. We continue to talk about the problem as though women need to take more responsibility for preventing sexual assault. But preventing sexual assault is something women do daily, often without realising it.
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page