Lapinski's Corner

Interpreters play bigger role in local courts

2012-01-07T14:16:00.000-08:00

As King County has grown increasingly diverse, interpreters have become integral players in the state's largest court. The National Institute of Justice singled out King County Superior Court's Office of Interpreter Services as one of three model programs in the country in a 2006 report.

By Sara Jean Green
Seattle Times staff reporter
Originally published January 5, 2012 at 8:01 PM | Page modified January 5, 2012 at 9:16 PM

Vietnamese interpreter David Neathery, left, explains a question directed at 44-year-old Seattle gang leader Quy Nguyen by his defense attorney, before relaying the defendant's answer to the court. King County Superior Court Judge Julie Spector is at right.

Martha Cohen is the program manager of the Office of Interpreter Services. She says an interpreter's job, which pays $40 to $45 an hour, is mentally challenging and fatiguing. Frequent breaks are necessary because accuracy is compromised after about 40 minutes.
Enlarge this photo

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

The leader of a Vietnamese street gang apparently suffered "buyer's remorse" after hammering out a plea deal with prosecutors and admitting he was guilty of ordering a hit on a fellow gang member-turned-rival.

Quy Nguyen was supposed to be sentenced in King County Superior Court on Nov. 4, and even picked the occasion to beg his victim's family for forgiveness. But the Vietnamese-speaking defendant then said through an interpreter that he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea.

He claimed his public defenders did not spend enough time on his case, and his "crazy" and "possessed" cellmates had left him confused and sleep-deprived when he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder with a firearm and conspiracy to commit organized crime.

But Nguyen, the 44-year-old leader of Young Seattle Boyz, heaped the most blame on his court interpreter, Nova Phung. Not only did Nguyen claim Phung had interpreted months of legal proceedings inaccurately, he said Phung had suggested Nguyen could bribe his way out of prison or have his sentence halved because of government cutbacks.

Judge Julie Spector denied Nguyen's motion to withdraw his plea on Dec. 20 , saying he was "clearly aware of what he was pleading guilty to and the consequences of the plea." She said Nguyen had fabricated his complaints against his attorneys and "the maligned interpreter, Mr. Phung."

As King County has grown increasingly diverse, interpreters such as Phung have become integral players in the state's largest court, which includes the downtown Seattle courthouse, King County Juvenile Court and the Norm Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent.

Court interpreters, who typically work as private contractors and travel to courts across the state as needed, participate in criminal proceedings as well as civil cases and family-law matters. Many also work in U.S. District Court.

The National Institute of Justice singled out King County Superior Court's Office of Interpreter Services (OIS) as one of three model programs in the country in a 2006 report examining how well the nation's courts help non-English-speaking, battered women obtain protection orders against their abusers.

The office, which "was started from scratch" in 1992, assigned interpreters to roughly 650 cases involving 50 languages in its first year, said program manager Martha Cohen, who is also a Spanish-language interpreter.

In the past year, OIS — which has a $1.1 million budget — found interpreters to participate in 3,000 cases, she said. A couple of weeks ago, Falam Chin, a language spoken in western Myanmar, became the 139th language that Cohen and her six-member team had to find someone to interpret.

Haven for refugees

She explained that King County is one of the top five regions in the country for refugee resettlement. "This is a very desirable place to live, ... and we're just a reflection of all that," she said.

Spanish always has been the most-requested language to be interpreted, followed by Vietnamese and Russian, Cohen said.

In a later wave, Cohen saw increased demand for Korean, Lao and Cambodian interpreters, then for speakers of a number of African languages, including Somali, "which is definitely in our top five now, where it wasn't five years ago," she said.

If Cohen and her team can't find a local interpreter, they will launch a national search, as they did recently to find someone to interpret Oshiwambo, a language spoken in Namibia in southern Africa.

"We ended up with two — a man in Nebraska who was a Peace Corps trainer in Namibia and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania," she said.

The complex case against gang leader Quy Nguyen and his Vietnamese-speaking co-defendant caused a temporary shortage of Vietnamese interpreters, requiring the OIS to fly in interpreters from Salt Lake City and Denver as the murder case in Superior Court readied for trial, according to Cohen.

More than 120 witnesses, many requiring the assistance of interpreters, were to testify. At the same time, other gang members faced charges in federal court and were assigned separate interpreters.

For Cohen, turning people away because of the language they speak is not an option. "It's a question of access to services, access to exercise their rights, access to justice," she said. "People who don't speak English have a right to understand what's said around them and to participate in their cases. We do whatever it takes."

Cohen described an adoption case from last year as a prime example.

The birthparents, who live in Korea, and the adoptive parents, who live here, are deaf and use Korean sign language to communicate. Cohen found a woman in Lakewood who spoke Korean and knew Korean sign language but didn't speak English well enough to interpret.

"So we did it as a relay," in which another interpreter interpreted translated English into Korean and the Lakewood woman then interpreted Korean into Korean sign language, with the biological parents participating in a family-court interview via Skype, she said.

The job of interpreting — the oral rendition of something spoken in one language to another (translation is the written form) — is far more involved than "just knowing two languages," Cohen said. "It's a very spontaneous activity and you have to be creative and resourceful," especially interpreting English idioms or sports references that often don't make sense in another language.

A demanding job

Interpreters are paid $40 to $45 an hour, although they aren't compensated for any prep work they do on a case. The work is mentally challenging and fatiguing because interpreters must simultaneously listen, speak, change syntax, adjust grammar and sometimes change word structure, all while ensuring meaning isn't lost. Frequent breaks are necessary because accuracy begins to be compromised after about 40 minutes of straight interpreting, Cohen said.

Often, two interpreters are assigned to a defendant so they can spell each other off during lengthy trials. Interpreters who are assigned to a defendant cannot interpret for any co-defendants, witnesses or victims in the same case, nor can they interpret for someone they know — safeguards meant to remove the potential for conflicts of interest and ensure attorney-client privilege isn't violated. It's why some cases, such as Nguyen's, require multiple interpreters.

Interpreters don't interpret word for word, but instead convey "the meaning as close as we can," said Angela Torres-Henrick, a Peru native who has interpreted Spanish in Western Washington courts for 25 years. She was the first president of the Washington State Court Interpreters' and Translators' Society, which was founded in the late 1980s and was behind a statewide effort to certify interpreters and create a code of conduct.

The state Administrative Office of the Courts in Olympia now certifies interpreters in 15 of the most frequently used languages and requires rigorous testing and recertification every two years. An additional 39 languages are registered with the state, meaning interpreters are tested only for language fluency.

Torres-Henrick mostly works on criminal cases and said court interpreters, who can't offer advice and are ethically bound to keep confidential any discussions between defendants and their defense attorneys, can suffer "vicarious trauma."

"After difficult trials — it could be rape of a child, it could be murder, it could be vehicular homicide — you come home after interpreting all day and you just want to cry," she said. "Because we cannot share, many times it just stays with you."

Nguyen took the witness stand during his Dec. 20 hearing and tried to convince Spector he had not understood the guilty plea he entered a day after opening statements in his trial.

During his testimony, Nguyen's new interpreter, David Neathery, twice told the court, "The interpreter is repeating the question again," when Nguyen indicated he didn't understand what was being asked. Neathery's statements were necessary for the court record because interpreters aren't allowed to provide explanations or make comments to defendants.

"He wasn't behaving the role of interpreter. ... He was advising me like a teacher," Nguyen complained of Phung, his previous interpreter who was dismissed after Nguyen said he no longer trusted him.

But Spector wasn't swayed. She said Nguyen "looked thunderstruck" after the prosecution's opening statement, when he began to understand the overwhelming evidence against him. He actively participated in negotiating a plea deal the next day, she said.

Spector said Nguyen's attempt to withdraw his guilty plea amounted to "buyer's remorse."

He faces a prison term of 17 to 25 years when sentenced Jan. 20.

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654

Related

* Archive: Upcoming murder trial opens a window on Seattle-area street gang (Oct. 5, 2011)
* Archive: Vietnamese gang leader pleads guilty to murder (Oct. 13, 2011)

Language and the law
Top languages interpreted in King County Superior Court

1: Spanish

2: Vietnamese

3: Somali

4: Russian

The following languages are not ranked but also are frequently translated in court: Cantonese, Korean, Amharic, Tigrinya, American Sign Language and Cambodian.

Source: King County Superior Court Office of Interpreter Services

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017171327_interpreters06m.html

In South Korea, Plastic Surgery Comes Out of the Closet

2011-11-03T21:36:00.000-07:00

Jean Chung for the International Herald Tribune

Dr. Park Sang-hoon, head of a top-ranked clinic in southern Seoul, consulted with Chang Hae-jin after her double-jaw surgery, a procedure that involves cutting and rearranging the upper and lower jaws.

By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: November 3, 2011

SEOUL — With a blue pen, Dr. Seo Young-tae drew arches on Chang Hyang-sook’s eyelids, marking where to cut and stitch to create a new fold to make her eyes look larger and rounder. It is an operation so common here that most women on Seoul streets seem to have a double fold, though only one of every five Koreans is born with one.

Chang Hyang-sook, a makeup artist, paid the 2.3 million won, or about $2,000, to make her eyes look larger and rounder.

“Promise you’ll do a great job on my eyes,” Ms. Chang said to Dr. Seo. “Never mind the pain. I can take it.”

For Ms. Chang, 25, a makeup artist, the 2.3 million won, or about $2,000, eye job is just the finishing touch in a program several months long to remake her face. In the previous two months, Ms. Chang had not only had her teeth rearranged, but her jaw bones cut and repositioned, for 22 million won.

“You must endure pain to be beautiful,” she said, adding that an eye job is so routine these days “it’s not even considered surgery.”

Cosmetic surgery has long been widespread in South Korea. But until recently, it was something to keep quiet about. No longer.

And as society has become more open about the practice, surgeries have become increasingly extreme. Double-jaw surgery — which was originally developed to repair facial deformities, and involves cutting and rearranging the upper and lower jaws — has become a favorite procedure for South Korean women who are no longer satisfied with mere nose jobs or with paring down cheekbones to achieve a smoother facial line.

Celebrities have helped to drive the trend, as they scramble to keep ahead of digital technology that mercilessly exposes not only their physical imperfections, but any attempts to remedy them, said Rando Kim, a professor of consumer science at Seoul National University.

“Wide-screen and high-definition TV put pressure on them to look good in close-ups,” Mr. Kim said. “And with the Internet, where people like to post ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures, they can no longer hide it. So they go public, often talking proudly about it on TV.”

That, in turn, has encouraged greater openness among ordinary South Koreans.

“It used to be all hush-hush when mothers brought their daughters in for a face-lift before taking them to match-makers,” said Dr. Park Sang-hoon, head of ID Hospital. “Now young women go plastic surgery shopping around here.”

Dr. Park’s is a top-ranked clinic in Seoul’s “beauty belt,” a swarm of hundreds of plastic surgery clinics clustered around a string of subway stations in the upscale districts of southern Seoul.

“Where did you get it?” asks one of the ads for clinics that cover the walls at the entrances of the Apgujeong subway station, the center of the beauty belt. “What about your nose? And your chin?”

Parents may promise their daughter an eye job if she passes her college entrance exam. In Apgujeong, it is not hard to find young women shopping in department stores immediately after their surgeries, wearing masks or sunglasses.

“Korean women want a revolution with their face,” said Dr. Park, a leading practitioner of double-jaw surgery.

“What we do in double-jaw surgery is to reassemble the face,” said Dr. Park, whose clinic has performed 3,000 such procedures in the past six years. “Normal people become, sort of, super-normal, and pretty people prettier.”

In traditional Korea, tampering with the body bestowed by one’s parents was a violation of Confucian precepts that also discouraged cremation and, later, organ and blood donations.

But in recent decades, cosmetic surgery has become a weapon in Koreans’ efforts to impress others, “like buying an expensive handbag,” said Whang Sang-min, a psychologist at Yonsei University.

Cosmetic surgery is not covered by national health insurance, making it difficult to determine the exact size of the industry. A survey last year by the Seoul city government found that 31.5 percent of residents 15 or older were willing to undergo surgery to improve their looks. In 2007 the percentage was 21.5.

In a 2009 survey by the market research firm Trend Monitor, one of every five women in Seoul between the ages of 19 and 49 said they had undergone plastic surgery.

The number of doctors trained as plastic surgeons has almost doubled in the past decade to 1,500. But 4,000 clinics provide cosmetic surgery, most of them in Seoul’s beauty belt, because the law allows other doctors to switch to this lucrative field. As competition heats up, some clinics host “Cinderella events,” where patients are given free surgery and appear in their ads.

Doctors say their main patients are young women entering the marriage and job markets. “As it gets harder to find jobs, they’ve come to believe they must look good to survive,” said Choi Set-byol, a sociologist at Ewha Woman’s University.

When the government imposed a 10 percent tax on five popular types of cosmetic surgery in July, civic groups as well as surgeons protested that this discriminated against women and the poor.

One consequence of the boom is that young women look increasingly alike, doctors say. “They come in with photos of starlets whose face they want to copy,” Dr. Park said.

“Koreans agree on what constitutes a pretty face,” he said. “The consensus, now, is a smaller, more sharply defined youthful face — a more or less Westernized look. That makes 90 percent of Koreans potential patients because they’re not born with that kind of face.”

Not everyone is happy with this development.

The film director Im Kwon-taek says it has become all but impossible to find an actress who still has a traditional Korean face. “They all have that surgery to have their eyelids scrolled up,” he said. “What kind of eye is that?”

He said that one day he was watching a provincial beauty competition on television and almost jumped up when he saw a young woman with a relatively round face with natural eyes.

He cast her in a movie set in old Korea.

In August, the Education Ministry issued a booklet warning high school students of “plastic surgery syndrome,” citing Michael Jackson and a local woman whose addiction to plastic surgery left her with a grotesquely swollen face. Last November, a woman hanged herself after her double-jaw surgery went wrong. “Every waking minute is hell,” she wrote in her diary of the pain.

Recently, a local television station secretly filmed a hospital official trying to sell a double-jaw procedure to a woman. “You want to get married?” he asked. “Then you have to do this, you have to take the risk.”

Chang Hae-jin, 21, an art student who was self-conscious about her slightly protruding teeth and chin decided to take that risk with Dr. Park. For weeks after the operation, she could not speak with her heavily bandaged swollen face. But it was worth it, she said.

“It opened a new world for me,” she said. “In the train today, a man sitting next to me talked to me. He said I looked younger than I am.

“My life has become much brighter.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/world/asia/in-south-korea-plastic-surgery-comes-out-of-the-closet.html

After Report on Speed, a Rush of Scrutiny

2011-09-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, the only thing that traveled faster than the speed of light was gossip.

Tiny Neutrinos May Have Broken Cosmic Speed Limit (September 23, 2011)
Martial Trezzini/KEYSTONE, via Associated Press

Dario Autiero, of the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon, on Friday explained his team's findings on neutrinos.

Thanks to the Internet, the whole physics world was watching on Friday when Dario Autiero, of the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon in France, in front of a palpably skeptical roomful of physicists, put a whole new category of speed demons on the table, namely the shadowy subatomic particles known as neutrinos. He was describing a recent experiment in which neutrinos were clocked going faster than the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit set by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity back in 1905.

According to Dr. Autiero’s team, neutrinos emanating from a particle accelerator at CERN, outside Geneva, had raced to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy — a distance of 454 miles — about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 25 parts in a million.

“We cannot explain the observed effect in terms of systematic uncertainties,” Dr. Autiero told the physicists at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research. “Therefore, the measurement indicates a neutrino velocity higher than the speed of light.”

Dr. Autiero said his group had spent six months trying to explain away the result, but could not do it. Given the stakes for physics, he said, it would not be proper to attempt any sort of theoretical interpretation of the results. “We present to you this discrepancy or anomaly today,” he said.

The purported effect sounds slight, but to be even slightly on the wrong side of the speed of light is forbidden in the world that Einstein described. Faster-than-light travel can also lead to the possibility of time travel, something that most physicists do not believe is possible.

Relativity has been tested over and over again for a century, and as Carl Sagan, the late Cornell astronomer, liked to say: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. “This is quite a shake-up,” said Alvaro de Rujula, a theorist at CERN. “The correct attitude is to ask oneself what went wrong.”

And the assembled CERN physicists were only too happy to oblige, diving in, after Samuel C. C. Ting, an M.I.T. Nobelist in the audience, offered his congratulations for work “very carefully done.” They asked detailed questions about, among other things, how the scientists had measured the distance from CERN to Gran Sasso to what is claimed to be an accuracy of 20 centimeters, extending GPS measurements underground. Had they, for example taken into account the location of the Moon and tidal bulges in the Earth’s crust?

The recent history of physics and astronomy is strewn with reports of suspicious data bumps that might be new particles or new planets and — if true — could change the way we think about the world, but then disappear with more data or critical scrutiny. Most physicists think the same will happen with this finding. The prevailing attitude was perhaps illustrated best by an XKCD cartoon, in which a character explains his intention to get rich betting against the new discovery.

Neutrinos are still a cosmic mystery. They are among the weirdest denizens of the weird quantum subatomic world. Not only are they virtually invisible and able to sail through walls and planets like wind through a screen door, but they are shape-shifters. They come in three varieties and can morph from one form to another as they travel along, an effect Dr. Autiero and his colleagues were trying to observe.

Their experiment, known clunkily as Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus, or Opera, is a collaboration of 160 physicists from 11 countries, primarily Japan and Italy. It is based at the Gran Sasso laboratory, a center for underground physics experiments that need sheltering from cosmic rays.

The action begins in a tank of hydrogen gas inside a building at CERN. Atoms in puffs of gas from the tank get stripped of their electrons, becoming naked protons, and then get sent on a Coney Island-style speed ride through a series of particle accelerators, eventually winding up in the main ring of the Large Hadron Collider — the mother of all particle accelerators.

For the Opera experiment, some of the protons are siphoned off at an intermediate energy and slammed in pulses 10 microseconds long into a graphite target, where they produce a pulse of lesser particles called mesons. The mesons in turn decay into neutrinos, which then disappear into the Earth in the direction of Gran Sasso. There, the arriving neutrinos run into an assemblage of lead bricks and photographic emulsion.

In theory, during the trip, which takes a few milliseconds, some of the neutrinos should shape-shift from a variety known as muon neutrinos to tau neutrinos. The goal of the Opera experiments was to study this transformation: In three years, the researchers have recorded some 16,000 neutrinos in their detector, but only one tau neutrino.

Measuring the speed of the neutrinos was only a side ambition, explained Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern, the head of the Opera collaboration. “Now it is becoming a main issue,” he said, adding, “we would like to see some tau neutrinos,” to appreciative laughter from the audience.

In the old days, when scientists sent around copies of journal articles and wrote letters to one another, the process of scrutiny of a controversial measurement could have happened quietly, but the Web has changed all that. Dr. Autiero’s talk at CERN and the appearance of a paper by the Opera group on the Internet Thursday night came at the end of a drumbeat of rumors and blog postings. One blog called it “Rumour of the Century.”

Some physicists, inside and outside of CERN, were critical of this process, saying the laboratory was giving too much weight to a premature result by a group that was not even part of CERN.

Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said in an e-mail, “There was no need for a press release or indeed even for a scientific paper, till much more work was done. They claim that they wanted the community to scrutinize their result — well, they could have accomplished that by going around and giving talks about it.”

Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, said in an e-mail from Spain, “I agreed to the seminar at CERN because it is the duty of a lab like CERN to give the collaboration the possibility to ask the community for scrutiny of their findings.”

The scrutiny is surely coming.

An earlier measurement of neutrino speeds was performed by a collaboration known as Minos, for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, in 2007. Jenny Thomas of University College London, said the Minos experiment would be able to do a more precise measurement in four to six months.

“They’ve done their best,” Professor Thomas said of the Opera group. “The light’s going to shine on us now while we repeat our experiment.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/science/24speed.html

网评员工作守则

2011-07-24T22:41:00.000-07:00

2011-06-27 11:24

网评员工作守则通知，网评员的工作守则。请大家严格按照规范开展工作。

网管办《网评员内部资料(严禁外洩)》

总则:

网络舆论战争0000为了祖国母亲的繁荣富强，为了中华民族的复兴，每一个网络评论员必须时刻准备着用自己的智慧和艰苦劳动保卫国网络防线。

基本工作方法∶

1、在工作时间内必须每小时至少查看一次工作邮箱，时刻注意领会上级指示的最新精神。

2、网络评论员根据上级指示进行合作，根据工作需要，将由跨地区、跨专业的网络评论员组成工作小组，执行特定的任务。在有必要增加人员时，上级将从其他小组抽调人员加以充实。

3、基本工作方法：日常工作按照网站分小组，每个重要网站的有关论坛由一个小组负责。日常工作是按照总体方针，维护正确的网络舆论导向。遇到突发事件，则按照上级部门的专门工作组的指令行事，暂时停止日常工作，把有关人员资源投入到突发事件的舆论导向工作。

4、网络评论员要善于隐瞒自己的真实身份，必需有多个不同的网名，而且不同的网名要发表不同风格的文章。必要的时候，可以由不同小组成员制造网友辩论的假象，然后由第三方推出强有力的证据，把公众舆论引导到第三方。

5、某些网络谣言出来的时候，必须尽快搜索到谣言的首发地点和首发人，然后勒令网站管理员删除原贴，网络评论员则拷贝内容，以不同的IP地址发表自己就是事发所在地的当地人的申明，然后由版主或以其他网友身份指出：他的IP地址不在事发所在地，该消息纯属谣传。

6、必要时可以制造更加耸人听闻的假新闻，吸引网民视线，然后很快澄清该消息纯属谣言。

7、某些论坛人气不错，网友信用度比较高，这时首先要做的是制造一种混乱，通过似是而非的文章进行干涉，跟贴作非理性的故意曲解、制造误会和争辩，转移网民注意力。

8、0000较难控制，当不能主导论坛舆论的时候，可以采用大量短贴、无实质内容贴、非理性贴进行刷屏，令版面充斥无意义的混乱，使读者失去兴趣，这样达到避免反思想流通传播的目的。

9、不断学习，提高文字水平，学会使用不同的文笔风格写作，善于模仿他人文笔，这是网络评论员的基本功。

10、学会与网友交流的技巧，与网友私下打成一片，获取网友的信任，尤其是那些文章有影响力的网友。如果有可能，争取一些重要论坛的版主位置。

11、培养高超的判断力，能够在诸多贴子中迅速找到真正有影响力的帖子和写手，作为重点工作对象。

12、注意培养政策法规意识，不可误解当前的工作精神。注意吃透上级指示的近期发贴类型实例，融会贯通，举一反三。

13、灵活性与原则性相结合。一定要制造真假难辨的形象，成为一个不容易被监别身份的人。不仅要熟悉我们的观点，更要熟悉对方的思路，知己知彼。

14、网络评论员要时刻牢记自己的光荣任务，不被困难和误解阻挡，不在乎表面上的面子，做到任何情况下不会真正被对方激怒，永远保持理性、冷静的心理。

15、网络评论员要立场坚定，头脑清醒，在各种富有迷惑力的思潮面前保持清醒的头脑，珍惜自己的政治前途。

16、网络评论员实行小组监督和纠察监督相结合的原则。其工作成绩由上级有关部门评定。

网评员《上级通知》

为了防止台湾民主影响的扩大化，进一步做好舆论引导工作，根据上级要求“讲策略、讲技巧”的工作方针，希望网评员认真研究网民心理，掌握国际动态，更好地做好网评工作。特通知如下：

一、尽量以美国为批评目标，淡化台湾的存在；

二、不要直接以“民主”为敌，而要以“什么样的制度才能真正实现民主”为题构思帖子内容；

三、尽多地挑选西方国家的各种暴力、不合理事件以说明资本主义是不适合民主；

四、用美国等国家对国际事务的干预说明西方民主实际是对别国的侵略和强行推行西方价值观；

五、用历史上弱小民族的血泪史激发人们的爱党爱国心情；

六、多对国内事件正面宣传，进一步配合做好维稳工作。

http://hi.baidu.com/%CE%E5%C7%A7%C4%EA%D7%EE%BA%DA/blog/item/e846dcddaa9cc52c32fa1c69.html

Boeing's wartime tax rate: less than zero

2011-07-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

Originally published Saturday, July 2, 2011 at 8:52 PM
Danny Westneat
Seattle Times staff columnist

Who would you guess pays more in federal taxes: me or Boeing?

I don't mean in rates but in actual dollars. Has the federal Treasury gotten more money of late from the huge aerospace company, which booked $4.5 billion in pretax profits last year? Or from me?

"It's not even close," says Bob McIntyre. "In the past three years, you have paid way more into the system than Boeing."

McIntyre is a tax wonk, the director of a couple Washington, D.C., think tanks that focus on who actually pays the government's bills.

Last month, his group, Citizens for Tax Justice, released a study showing that 12 major U.S. businesses, with $171 billion in profits, combined to pay negative $2.5 billion in federal taxes the past three years. Meaning that even with all that profit, they paid no taxes.

Boeing was in this group. The company made $9.7 billion in profits in 2008, 2009 and 2010. It paid nothing in federal taxes, booking $178 million back from the government in various credits, for a total federal tax rate of -1.8 percent.

These figures are from the company's financial reports. Still, I was expecting when Boeing executives went to Congress recently to ask for even lower taxes that they would deny this report. But they didn't.

"Over the last three years, we have not paid," confirmed James Zrust, Boeing's vice president for tax.

One congressman was incredulous.

"I think in testimony I heard earlier that Boeing would like lower taxes," said Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif. "How much lower could you possibly need?"

Zrust explained the zero tax bill isn't likely to last. It's due to temporary factors, he said. Such as pension payments, and the costs of the development — but not yet any deliveries — of the 787 Dreamliner.

"Those same things that gave rise to low tax payments in the last three years will reverse in the next few years and result in considerable tax payments," Zrust predicted.

I asked McIntyre about that. Is he casting Boeing as a tax freeloader by looking at only a three-year window?

"Well, let's look at 10 years," he suggested. He tapped away at a database he keeps of financial statements.

"In the 10 years ending in 2010, Boeing had $29 billion in profits, and paid minus-$948 million in federal taxes."

McIntyre said if you include the past 11 years, Boeing's effective tax rate was positive, but only barely.

In other words, for the decade when the government launched two wars and ran up historic red ink, one of our largest companies — one that's a major beneficiary of military spending — contributed essentially zero to the ledger.

Now, Boeing pumps $1 billion a week into the U.S. economy. Its 160,000 employees have no doubt paid billions of income taxes in a decade. So it has great value beyond what the corporation itself pays to support the common good.

Boeing also didn't do anything wrong. As Zrust testified, the company is under ceaseless IRS audit, with 30 agents eyeballing it from offices located at Boeing. The zero tax bill isn't a sign it got away with something. It's just the way it is.

But should it be this way?

"I just think they ought to pay something," McIntyre says. "Like we all should. Every other time we've gone to war, the government has raised taxes to pay for it. In particular, it has asked the corporations to pay more.

"But nothing was asked this time. We're in two wars and we've cut their taxes, given them new loopholes, allowing them to pay, in some cases, nothing."

In my view, the most irresponsible thing we've done in my lifetime was to go to war while cutting taxes. That put war on a perpetual credit card, as if we were buying a sofa. Ten years in and still no one will say how we pay that bill.

Now Congress is going to political war over the deficit. Spending will be cut, as it should. But one side, the Republicans, insists that taxes not only cannot be raised, but are so high they must be cut still further.

As that one congressman wondered: lower than zero?

I'm not sure what the formula is for getting out of this mess. But somehow I doubt less than zero is going to pencil.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2015494306_danny03.html

What The Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes

2011-07-03T13:29:00.000-07:00

Christopher Helman, 04.01.10, 3:00 PM ET

HOUSTON -

As you work on your taxes this month, here's something to raise your hackles: Some of the world's biggest, most profitable corporations enjoy a far lower tax rate than you do--that is, if they pay taxes at all.

The most egregious example is General Electric. Last year the conglomerate generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.

Avoiding taxes is nothing new for General Electric. In 2008 its effective tax rate was 5.3%; in 2007 it was 15%. The marginal U.S. corporate rate is 35%.

In Pictures: What The 25 Top U.S. Companies Pay In Taxes

How did this happen? It's complicated. GE's tax return is the largest the IRS deals with each year--some 24,000 pages if printed out. Its annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission weighs in at more than 700 pages.

Inside you'll find that GE in effect consists of two divisions: General Electric Capital and everything else. The everything else--maker of engines, power plants, TV shows and the like--would have paid a 22% tax rate if it was a standalone company.

It's GE Capital that keeps the overall tax bill so low. Over the last two years, GE Capital has displayed an uncanny ability to lose lots of money in the U.S. (posting a $6.5 billion loss in 2009), and make lots of money overseas (a $4.3 billion gain). Not only do the U.S. losses balance out the overseas gains, but GE can defer taxes on that overseas income indefinitely. The timing of big deductions for depreciation in GE Capital's equipment leasing business also provides a tax benefit, as will loan losses left over from the credit crunch.

But it's the tax benefit of overseas operations that is the biggest reason why multinationals end up with lower tax rates than the rest of us. It only makes sense that multinationals "put costs in high-tax countries and profits in low-tax countries," says Scott Hodge, president of the Tax Foundation. Those low-tax countries are almost anywhere but the U.S. "When you add in state taxes, the U.S. has the highest tax burden among industrialized countries," says Hodge. In contrast, China's rate is just 25%; Ireland's is 12.5%.

Corporations are getting smarter, not just about doing more business in low-tax countries, but in moving their more valuable assets there as well. That means setting up overseas subsidiaries, then transferring to them ownership of long-lived, often intangible but highly profitable assets, like patents and software.

As a result, figures tax economist Martin Sullivan, companies are keeping some $28 billion a year out of the clutches of the U.S. Treasury by engaging in so-called transfer pricing arrangements, where, say, Microsoft's overseas subsidiaries license software to its U.S. parent company in return for handsome royalties (that get taxed at those lower overseas rates).

"Corporations are paying lower amounts of their profits in taxes now than in the past," says Douglas Shackelford, who teaches tax law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Other countries have been lowering their rates, but not the U.S."

Mind you, not all global megacorps enjoy such low tax rates. Try to muster some pity for Big Oil. ExxonMobil in its 2009 annual report to the SEC, recorded a larger income tax expense than any other U.S. company last year, some $17.6 billion, or 47% of pretax earnings. Exxon's peers Chevron and ConocoPhillips likewise recorded similarly high effective tax rates. The oil companies are oddities among the multinationals because many of the oil-rich countries where they do business levy even higher taxes than the U.S.

Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. Exxon has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas. Likewise, GE has $84 billion in overseas income parked indefinitely outside the U.S.

Though Exxon's financial statement's don't show any net income tax liability owed to Uncle Sam, a company spokesman insists that once its final tax bill is figured, Exxon will owe a "substantial 2009 tax liability." How substantial? "That's not something we're required to disclose, nor do we."

Naturally the Obama administration wants to put an end to this. It has proposed doing away with tax deferrals on overseas income. If the plan passes, a U.S. company that pays a 25% tax on profits in China would have to pay an additional 10% income tax to Uncle Sam to bring it up to the 35% corporate rate. "Eliminating deferrals would put U.S. companies on an unlevel playing field," says the Tax Foundation's Hodge, "especially if competing with the likes of Germany, which only taxes companies on domestic operations."

Hewlett-Packard and others among the top 25 state in their annual reports that if Obama's tax measures pass it would mean a certain tax hike, probably amounting to billions of dollars.

Would no more tax holiday for GE really end up helping Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer? Doubtful. "The average Joe should be in favor of lower corporate taxes," says Hodge, "because ultimately they are paying the corporate income tax. Either as workers, getting lower wages and fewer jobs, or as consumers, paying higher prices, or as retirees, getting lower dividends and earnings on their investments."

In the same vein, JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has spoken out against an Obama proposal to levy a special tax on banks to recoup bailout costs. "Using tax policy to punish people is a bad idea," said Dimon. "All businesses tend to pass costs on to customers."

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/01/ge-exxon-walmart-business-washington-corporate-taxes.html

Public hospital execs make big bucks

2011-05-25T00:12:00.000-07:00

by SUSANNAH FRAME / KING 5 News
Posted on May 23, 2011 at 11:48 PM

RENTON, Wash. -- Top salaries at a publicly-funded hospital in Renton, Valley Medical Center, have become intensely controversial since two hospital district commissioners were voted into office. The elected officials call themselves reformers. Others in the community call them troublemakers.

The chief executive officer of the hospital, Rich Roodman, is the highest paid public employee in the state of Washington. Last year he made a base salary of $615,000. He also collected a bonus of $201,201 for meeting performance goals. On top of that he was paid $263,335 in a retention payment.

The five-member board of commissioners who set Roodman’s salary authorizes this annual payment as a way to motivate Roodman to stay on at the hospital. He’s been at the helm since 1983. Most companies provide a retention payment as a lump sum once the executive has fulfilled his or her contractual obligation; not on a yearly basis.

In total, Roodman earned $1,134,837 in 2010 to run Valley Medical Center, which is part of King County Hospital District No. 1. The district collects property taxes from 400,000 residents in Renton, Covington, Tukwila, as well as parts of Bellevue, Newcastle, SeaTac, Black Diamond, Maple Valley and some unincorporated areas of King County.

Roodman makes about 40 percent more than the chief executive officer of University of Washington Medicine and more than double what the executive director of the University of Washington Medical Center earns.

"Do we need to be paying this much? And the answer is no," said Anthony Hemstad, one of the reformer commissioners elected in 2008. “When corners are being cut every which way, public health tax dollars need to be going into maximizing the public health benefit, not the benefit of CEOs.”

Vascular Neurologist Dr. Aaron Heide is the other reformer commissioner. His six year term began last year.

"There are no justifications for making this salary in this current atmosphere," said Heide.

Heide and Hemstad say Valley Medical Center is run more like a private club than a public agency. They ran on platforms to make the hospital’s business more transparent and accountable to taxpayers. But the men say the other three commissioners have no interest in reforming anything.

"I've worked at many layers of government and I've never seen an institution run this way and it raises all sorts of warning bells for me," said Hemstad. "This is an old culture that doesn't want to change," he added.

An example of what the two commissioners say is problematic at Valley Medical Center is the difficulty they have in obtaining information. When they asked for detailed executive pay data, it took four months to obtain it. The numbers weren’t turned over until Hemstad submitted a formal request for public records.

“They certainly didn’t want this [executive pay] to be public, even to the commissioners. If they did they would have given it to us when we asked for it,” said Hemstad.

The KING 5 Investigators had no trouble obtaining salary data from the hospital after submitting a public records request. The reporters found it's not just the CEO, but all top managers at Valley Medical Center who pack home healthy paychecks.

Paul Hayes, the executive vice president, made $588,249 last year, which included a bonus of $154,275 for meeting performance goals.

The senior vice president of medical affairs, Kathryn Beattie, made $489,479. Those figures outpace the top boss at renowned Harborview Medical Center, which is also funded by tax dollars.

The in-house attorney for Valley Medical Center, David Smith, pulled in $352,196 in 2010, which makes him the highest paid public lawyer in the state. Smith makes about two-and-a-half times what Attorney General Rob McKenna is paid.

“Maybe in good times, absolutely. In bad times? I have a tough time when we’re talking about cutting staff and cutting services, and they’re still making more and more and more. I have a problem with that,” said Heide.

KING 5 attempted to conduct on-camera interviews with the other three commissioners and with CEO Roodman. All of them declined. Board president Sue Bowman did speak with KING 5 by telephone. She said the compensation levels are important to stay competitive. They don’t want to lose top talent to other hospitals.

“I don’t know why Rich’s [CEO] pay is an issue? Commissioner Hemstad brings it up over and over again. I told him, 'Anthony, it is what it is,'” said Bowman. “I don’t think the five-member board needs to keep focusing on compensation. What are we doing for the community? That’s what’s important.”

Bowman also said the board carefully considers research presented to them by outside consultants and attorneys before voting on CEO compensation. Milliman, a healthcare compensation consulting firm, provides the hospital with a full analysis of market comparative data every other year. They consistently find Valley Medical Center’s pay structure is right on target.

John Hankerson, principal and strategic rewards practice leader of Milliman, wrote a memo about his findings to Roodman and Bowman dated February 9, 2011.

“We have consistently found that base pay and total cash compensation have been well aligned with [hospital goals] and that the magnitude of the incentive plan is consistent with other healthcare organizations that are striving to improve performance and quality patient care,” wrote Hankerson.

“We defined the appropriate market [comparable salaries] as ‘where VMC [Valley Medical Center] might recruit executive talent from or where it might lose executive talent to.’ In that light we have included such local organizations as Evergreen, Overlake, Virginia Mason to name just a few,” wrote Hankerson. “In our opinion, the current levels of incentives used at VMC are appropriate and consistent with best practice as well as smart management.”

Senator Cheryl Pflug, the ranking minority on the Senate Health & Long-Term Care Committee, doesn’t think public hospitals should be basing salaries on what non-profit and for-profit institutions pay.

“They pick and choose who they compare themselves to. A much more appropriate comparison would be the University of Washington,” said Pflug.

Pflug unsuccessfully sponsored a bill this session that would have banned public hospitals from coming up with salaries by comparing themselves to institutions that aren't taxpayer-funded, such as Swedish Medical Center and Virginia Mason.

“Seriously, is this the Mayo Clinic? No. This is not the University of Washington Medical Center either, which doesn’t pay these kinds of salaries,” said Pflug.

Controversy over money isn't new to Valley Medical Center. Four years ago the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) fined CEO Roodman $120,000 after they found the hospital illegally spent tax dollars on mailings, postage and consultants to sway voter opinion on ballot measures in 2005 and 2006.

The PDC called it the biggest case ever involving a public agency misusing taxpayer dollars for a campaign. Valley Medical Center called it a misunderstanding.

In 2009 the Washington State Auditor’s Office found Roodman collected a troubling $1.7 million retirement payment that year, on top of the $900,000 salary he earned in 2009. The auditor found the commissioners authorized this payment “without explanation or public benefit." The auditor also recommended Valley Medical Center should “avoid including similar provisions in future contracts.”

The reformer commissioners say voters put them in place to enact change but it's impossible because they are consistently voted down, three to two.

"To be a little crude, if I were to ask to scratch my butt, it would be voted against three to two," said Heide.

Video of board meetings from the hospital’s website shows dysfunction and conflict within the five-member panel. During a meeting last year commissioners are seen bickering, talking over each other and raising their voices when Dr. Heide continues to try ask questions about executive compensation. He’s told by fellow commissioners that the item is not on the agenda and that he is out of turn and out of order.

"If there is an idea, there is a question, let it be asked, let it be discussed. And that has not been allowed from day one that I've been on the commission. Never. Just sit down and shut up? Correct," said Heide.

Commission president Bowman tells KING 5 Heide and Hemstad create needless trouble and get in the way of progress for the hospital.

“The dissension within the board is very sad because I don’t think they [Heide and Hemstad] understand healthcare,” said Bowman. “They are dead wrong [on most issues.] The things they propose, any board member would vote against.”

http://www.king5.com/news/investigators/valley-medical-center-122473009.html

UW lecturer on the move for change in Libya

2011-05-09T22:26:00.001-07:00

Originally published Monday, May 9, 2011 at 10:04 PM
By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter

Ali Tarhouni handles the finances for Libyan rebels.

Since returning to his hometown of Benghazi in early March to join the Libyan uprising, University of Washington lecturer Ali Tarhouni has had no place to call home. As the rebel government's finance and oil minister, security requires him to stay on the move.

"I usually don't sleep in the same place for more than one night," Tarhouni said Monday from Washington, D.C. "I make sure to stop in and see my mother, but even she complains that she sees me more on television than in real life."

Since arriving in Libya, Tarhouni, a popular UW senior lecturer who teaches microeconomics, has emerged as one of the most high-profile members of the rebel government.

He has the crucial role of arranging for the cash infusions required to keep the rebel movement solvent enough to purchase food, fuel and medicine and other vital supplies.

Tarhouni currently is seeking a line of credit for the rebel government, which would be backed by Libyan assets now frozen by the U.S. and other governments.

He discussed the matter last week in Rome with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and is scheduled to meet this week with members of Congress and Treasury officials.

The return trip to the U.S. also provided the opportunity for Tarhouni to reunite with his wife and four children, ages 16 to 28, who joined him over the weekend in Washington, D.C.

"It was brief. Less than 24 hours," said Tarhouni's wife, Mary Li. "We wished it could have been longer."

Tarhouni, 60, grew up in Benghazi. A vocal critic of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, he left in 1973 and by the 1980s had been put on a government hit list.

He never lost touch with the Libyan dissident movement during his years in Seattle, but by the dawn of the new century he admits to doubting whether he would see Gadhafi's overthrow.

"My family knew I would join the revolution," Tarhouni said. "But the fact of the matter is, as time accumulated, I started losing hope. I didn't think the revolution would take place."

Libyans, inspired by uprisings that unseated leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, took to the streets in February in demonstrations against Ghadafi.

As efforts to quash those protests sparked a wider rebellion, there was no more dreaming about the future for Tarhouni.

He returned to Libya, where he quickly was consumed by the urgency of the moment. In a whirlwind of weeks marked by too little sleep and too many cigarettes, Tarhouni helped transform the rebel movement into a government.

Benghazi, in eastern Libya, is now the headquarters of the rebels' National Transitional Council.

In April, Tarhouni also ventured farther west to the beleaguered city of Misrata, which has been under brutal siege by Gadhafi's forces.

Tarhouni boarded a small fishing boat, and in a risky voyage made his way to that city to show his support for the citizens. He said he kept his plan secret even from other rebel leaders, worried they would try to stop him because of the risks.

"This is a city that has suffered and is still suffering greatly, and I wanted to go there and raise morale," Tarhouni said. "The truth is they raised my morale. Just amazing courage."

Since his return to Libya, the fighting has morphed into a civil war with air support for the rebels from U.S. and NATO forces.

Asked what his message is to Americans, many of whom are wary of a new military involvement, Tarhouni says Libya is not Iraq or Afghanistan.

"We have made a clear decision," he said. "We don't want any armies from the United States or Europe to go to Libya. What we are asking for is the no-fly zone, and for the no-fly zone to intensify to protect the citizens from this dictator."

Despite rebel setbacks, he said he is certain Gadhafi will be forced from government or be killed.

"It is very hard to make the case that Gadhafi will survive," Tarhouni said. "He has lost his legitimacy both internally, in the Arab and Muslim world and other countries in the world. But how many innocent lives will he take before he goes?"

If Gadhafi is deposed, what about Tarhouni's future? Would he return to Seattle or take a long-term role in the Libyan government? "When this task is done, and it will be done, I will have time to contemplate what I'm going to do," he said.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2015009885_tarhouni10m.html

Being Mormon: Does it matter in public eye?

2011-05-08T21:43:00.000-07:00

Originally published Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 10:04 PM

While two likely candidates for the U.S. presidency are Mormon, indicating how widely accepted Mormons have become, some of the anti-Mormon responses to Michael Young's appointment as University of Washington president suggest a continuing wariness. That these two contradictory phenomena are occurring at the same time is likely a consequence of the church's incredible growth.

By Janet I. Tu
Seattle Times staff reporter

Consider this: On the one hand, two names that keep coming up as serious candidates for the U.S. presidency are former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., who last week created a federal political-action committee to raise money for a possible campaign. Both happen to be Mormon.

On the other hand, many comments posted by readers in response to Seattle Times articles about new University of Washington President Michael Young — who is also Mormon — were so against that faith that a TV station and newspaper in Salt Lake City took note.

"Michael Young is now the target of vicious anti-Mormon slurs in the state of Washington," said a newscast from the ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City, where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered.

The first example would seem to indicate how mainstream and widely accepted Mormons have become in America, while the second suggests a continuing wariness — even hostility — toward Latter-day Saints.

That these two contradictory phenomena are occurring at the same time is likely a consequence of the church's incredible growth.

In less than 70 years, the number of Mormons has grown from less than a million to more than 6 million in the U.S. and 14 million worldwide. Their visibility and influence at all levels and walks of life have increased accordingly.

At the same time, many Americans remain unfamiliar with the basic tenets of this relatively new religious tradition and don't personally know any Mormons.

This combination seems to "make many people uncomfortable with the Latter-day Saints," said Jan Shipps, a history professor and leading expert on the LDS church.

History of persecution

The church was founded in the early 1800s by Joseph Smith, who said an angel revealed a set of golden plates containing a record of ancient inhabitants of the Americas who had come from Jerusalem, and with whom the resurrected Christ visited.

In the 19th century, Mormons were persecuted for their beliefs and were regarded by most Americans as a fringe group, especially for their practice of polygamy. They fled to Utah to practice their faith in peace.

But beginning about 1890, when the church banned polygamy, attitudes toward Mormons began to soften. During the Great Depression, many Americans saw Mormons as self-sufficient, and in the 1960s, many liked their clean-cut image, said Shipps, professor emeritus of history and religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

In the late 1970s and into the 1990s, as "Mormons were making converts hand over fist," competition began with evangelical Christians, who also were making converts, Shipps said. Evangelical Christians raised a question that lingers to this day about whether Mormons are Christian.

Mormons say they are, but many Christians disagree, saying Latter-day Saints essentially tagged on a new book to the Bible, the Book of Mormon. Mormons also hold a different view of the Trinity than that taught in Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches.

Attitudes swung again toward the positive with the successful 2002 Winter Olympics, hosted in Salt Lake City. It made "a Mormon venue look like the perfect American venue: mama and apple pie," Shipps said.

Still, church spokespeople acknowledge stereotypes about Mormons persist, including that they're secretive, uniformly conservative, live in Utah and are all white — the latter perception stemming in part from the fact that blacks were barred from the Mormon priesthood until 1978.

In reality, more than half the church's members these days live outside the U.S., including millions of members in Latin America. The church is growing fastest in Africa.

Faith and politics

In recent years, the church's support of Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in California, has angered many on the left. So did the rise to prominence of provocateur Glenn Beck, a conservative commentator and a Mormon.

At the same time, many of the religious right still regard Mormons with suspicion.

Some say that perhaps there will be less questioning of Romney's — and Huntsman's — faith in this presidential campaign.

During Romney's last campaign, news commentators brought up his faith as his biggest challenge, said Shipps, the history professor. But this time they think he's most vulnerable on his record of health care in Massachusetts.

Certainly, it's not unusual for Mormons to hold high offices. There are more than a dozen Mormons — Republicans and Democrats — serving in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. A number of Washington state's lawmakers are Mormons.

Toby Nixon, a former state legislator, said the only time his religion came up during a campaign was when a former opponent made the incorrect assumption Nixon would be able to mobilize support from "armies of Mormon elders."

In reality, the church has a long-standing policy of neutrality on party politics (if not on political issues) and prohibits the use of church resources for or against any candidate.

Several local political consultants said being Mormon isn't an issue for political candidates here — and one consultant refused to even discuss the matter, saying, "It's the 21st century, woman!"

For University of Washington's Board of Regents, which named Young to the presidency April 25, his faith was of no concern.

"We had a candidate that was right for the job," Chairman Herb Simon said.

Polls show wariness

Still, church members expect the subject of faith to come up again in the U.S. presidential campaigns.

Polls show a fair number of Americans still are wary of Mormons.

Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed in an August 2010 Time magazine poll had a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Mormons. That's far higher than the 13 percent unfavorable ratings for Jews and Protestants, and 17 percent for Catholics.

Some Seattle Times commenters expressed that negative view in response to stories on Young's appointment.

"All Mormons support bigotry. Michael Young is a Mormon. So, Michael Young supports bigotry," one commenter said.

Church spokespeople said the comments were no more vitriolic than those responding to articles on, say, Muslims, Catholics, race or immigration.

"You do not get an accurate perception of anything by reading comments," said Michael Otterson, managing director of public affairs at the church's Salt Lake City headquarters. "I put those in the category of 'alien abductions' — they're so far out there."

He sees the increasing volume of such comments — as well as satires such as the Tony Award-nominated Broadway musical "The Book of Mormon" by the creators of "South Park" — as stemming in part from the growth in numbers of Latter-day Saints.

The church acknowledges there are many stereotypes or misperceptions about Mormons.

And while those views are generally fading, some Americans seem unsure exactly what to make of Mormons.

Church research shows only one of four Americans has met a Mormon.

That's why the church launched an ad campaign in nine test cities last year that likely will expand this year. Called "I am a Mormon," the TV, newspaper, billboard and social-media ads feature everyday Mormons, and they direct viewers to a website where people can get answers to frequently asked questions and connect directly with a Mormon.

The church is seizing on a moment when its growth and the public spotlight seem to be converging.

"A lot of people believe that it's all working together to create a sort of condition where conversations about Mormons are likely to happen," Otterson said. "In that sense, maybe we have arrived at a 'Mormon moment.' "

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014994784_mormon08m.html

Floating Gyroscopes Vindicate Einstein

2011-05-05T04:41:00.000-07:00

By Lisa Grossman Email Author
May 4, 2011 5:59 pm | Categories: Physics, Space

Four superconducting ping-pong balls floating in space have just confirmed two key predictions of Einstein’s general relativity, physicists announced in a press conference May 4.

“We have completed this landmark experiment testing Einstein’s universe, and Einstein survives,” said physicist Francis Everitt of Stanford University, the principal investigator on NASA’s Gravity Probe B mission.

The probe, which launched in 2004, was designed to test the effect Earth’s gravity has on the space-time around it. According to Einstein, the Earth warps its local space-time like a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline, a phenomenon called the geodetic effect. This effect means that a circle of fabric with the Earth’s circumference, about 24,900 miles, would be pulled into a shallow cone with a circumference 1.1 inches shorter.

The Earth also swirls the nearby space-time around with it as it rotates, like water spiraling around a drain, in an effect called frame-dragging.

“Picture the Earth immersed in honey, and you can imagine the honey would be dragged around with it,” Everitt said. “That’s what happens to space-time. Earth actually drags space and time around with it.”

Both effects are minuscule — Einstein himself wrote that “their magnitude is so small that confirmation of them by lab experiments is not to be thought of.” But Gravity Probe B measured them both. The results will be published in Physical Review Letters.

The spacecraft orbited the Earth for 17 months carrying four ping-pong ball sized gyroscopes. The gyroscopes were made of fused quartz spheres, which hold the Guinness Book record for “most spherical man-made object.” The spheres were covered in a soft metal called niobium and cooled to the temperature of liquid helium.

At that temperature, niobium becomes superconducting, which means that electrons can flow forever without losing energy. When the spheres are set spinning, the circling electrons give rise to a little magnetic pointer.

In Newton’s universe, that pointer would point in the same direction forever as the spacecraft circled the Earth. But in Einstein’s universe, where Earth twists and tugs the space-time around it, the gyroscopes’ pointer was sent atilt at a sliver-thin angle. The north-south tilt measured the geodetic effect, and the east-west tilt measured frame-dragging.

The pointer shifted by just 6,000 milliarcseconds — the width of a human hair as seen from 10 miles away — over the course of a year, Everitt said. Despite the difficulty in detecting such a small tilt, the physicists were able to confirm the geodetic effect to an accuracy of 0.28 percent, and frame-dragging to within 20 percent.

Because general relativity describes the large-scale structure of the universe, the Gravity Probe B results could help improve physicists’ understanding of cosmic phenomena from black holes to gamma-ray bursts, Everitt says.

Gravity Probe B is one of the longest-running NASA projects ever. It started in 1963, before men walked on the moon. It took five decades to develop the technologies to build gyroscopes sensitive enough to see gravitational effects. In the meantime, those technologies found homes in a host of other NASA Earth-observing satellites, plus the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, which measured the cosmic microwave background and provided Nobel Prize-winning evidence for the big bang.

Physicist Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis, head of the external review board for Gravity Probe B, called the research team’s efforts “heroic” and stressed the importance of testing fundamental theories of nature, not just taking them for granted.

“It is popular lore that Einstein was right, but no such book is ever completely closed in science,” he said. “While the result in this case does support Einstein, it didn’t have to.”

Image: An artist’s rendition of the way the Earth warps space-time, called the geodetic effect. NASA/Gravity Probe B

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/gravity-probe-b/

Toppenish teen fakes pregnancy as school project

2011-04-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

A Toppenish High School student faked her pregnancy for the past six months as a social experiment for her senior project.
The Associated Press

Toppenish High School senior Gaby Rodriguez talks about rumors and stereotypes at a school assembly in Toppenish, Wash., during which she revealed that for the bulk of her senior year the 17-year-old A-student faked her own pregnancy in order to test the reactions of her friends and family for a senior project.

YAKIMA, Wash. —

Gaby Rodriguez would worry whenever anyone asked to touch her baby bump.

It wasn't because she felt shy or embarrassed. It was because the bulge - fashioned from wire mesh and cotton quilt batting - didn't actually contain a baby.

For the past 6 1/2 months - the bulk of her senior year at Toppenish High School - the 17-year-old A-student faked her own pregnancy.

Only a handful of people - her mother, boyfriend and principal among them - knew Gaby was pretending to be pregnant for her senior project, a culminating assignment required for graduation.

Her teachers and fellow students, except for her best friend, didn't realize they were part of a social experiment.

Neither did six of her seven siblings, including four older brothers, her boyfriend's parents, and his five younger brothers and sisters.

"At times, I just wanted to take it off and be done," she says. "I didn't want to go through this anymore."

But Gaby didn't give up the charade until Wednesday morning, when she revealed her secret during an emotional, all-school assembly.

The topic of her presentation: "Stereotypes, rumors and statistics."

"Teenagers tend to live in the shadows of these elements," she says.

Before taking off her fake baby belly in front of the entire student body, Gaby told her audience, "Many things were said about me. Many things traveled all the way back to me."

Then, she asked several students and teachers to read statements from 3x5 cards, quotes people actually said about her during the course of her experiment.

Her best friend, Saida Cortes, a 17-year-old senior who was sitting in the front row, read card No. 3: "Her attitude is changing, and it might be because of the baby or she was always this annoying and I never realized it."

It grew quiet in the gym as more and more quotes were read aloud. Then Gaby dropped her bomb: "I'm fighting against those stereotypes and rumors because the reality is I'm not pregnant."

She had been nervous about how the crowd might react. After all, she had been lying to them since October.

"It `happened' at homecoming," says Principal Trevor Greene, making air quotes with his middle and index fingers at the word "happened."

"In essence, she gave up her senior year," he says. "She sacrificed her senior year to find out what it would be like to be a potential teen mom.

"I admire her courage. I admire her preparation. I give her mother a lot of credit for backing her up on this."

But, the principal continues, "I have a daughter that will be here next year, and I would not let her do it."

At first Gaby's mother wasn't sure what to make of the idea, either.

"I thought she was crazy," says 52-year-old Juana Rodriguez, adding it was difficult to lie to family members - "It didn't feel good" - but she felt she needed to support her daughter, who enlisted two mentors from Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital's Childbirth Education Program to help her with her project.

When Gaby approached Greene last spring, she says she worried he might say no. He says he was impressed with her determination. He also says he was "shocked."

"I heard her out," he says. "I listened to her presentation, her proposal. And then I went through all the difficulties I foresaw to making this happen."

People might talk about her behind her back. Her older brothers might want to beat up her boyfriend. And there might be backlash - even broken relationships - when students, teachers and family members learned the truth.

"None of that deterred her," Greene says, adding he felt he needed to get permission from the superintendent.

John Cerna signed off. In fact, he left the west side of the state -- where he had been attending a conference -- at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday in order to get to Gaby's 10:15 a.m. presentation.

"I wouldn't miss this," Cerna says, adding, "It's amazing that a young lady would take this challenge on. It was a well-kept secret."

Gaby began wearing her homemade, basketball-sized, prosthetic belly to school after spring break. Before that, she wore baggy sweaters and sweatshirts to conceal her faux pregnancy.

Her supposed due date was July 27, not quite two months after graduation.

Gaby and her boyfriend, 20-year-old Jorge Orozco, met at the homecoming game when she was a freshman and he was a senior. They started dating just over three years ago.

When Gaby told him her plan, "I thought she was nuts," the 2009 Toppenish High School graduate says. "I thought I was going to end up getting into problems with her brothers. I didn't really want to get into problems with anybody."

But "I was doing it for her," he says, adding, "My parents thought it was going to be a boy."

Gaby - who has a grade-point average of 3.8 and serves as president of her school's MEChA, or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de AztlÃƒÆ’Ã†'Ãƒâ€ 'ÃƒÆ’ââ‚¬Â 'ÂÂÂÂÂ¡n, Club - came up with the idea during her sophomore year Advanced Placement biology class with Shawn Myers. She's in his anatomy class this year.

"You saw the side comments and the looks at her stomach," says Myers, who says he wasn't disappointed - "just concerned" - when she told him she was pregnant.

He says he wondered: "How are we going to take all of the potential that's in this girl and make sure it manifests itself and not let this define who she is and let it be a roadblock to what she wants to accomplish?"

It's a question Hispanic teens are more likely to face than white teens, Gaby found in her research. Black and Hispanic teens continue to have higher pregnancy rates than white teens.

And most teens at Toppenish High School - about 85 percent - are Hispanic.

Gaby came clean to Myers and two other teachers, both women, Monday. The women, she says, seemed relieved.

Myers had a different reaction: "She kept talking, and it did not register. Then I just kind of leaned forward and said, `Are you serious?' I told her, `You've run a great value experiment. You couldn't tell anybody because you had to control the variables.'"

But, he says, "When you're running a social experiment, you're dealing with human emotions. The human person in me felt I had been lied to."

Wednesday, Gaby apologized to teachers and students for misleading them.

When she took off her baby belly, there were a few nervous giggles, and a loud, "Whaaaaat?!" from the audience.

Then, there was applause. And, at the end of the assembly, following a Q&A session, there was a standing ovation, the first one Greene says he remembers during his three-year tenure at Toppenish High School.

"She really fooled me. I never would've guessed it," says 17-year-old senior Vicente Villanueva. "I'm really surprised."

So was 19-year-old Angel Jalomo, a 2010 Davis High School graduate and Gaby's niece: "I didn't know what to say. I just started crying."

Gaby will present her research to a board of community members in May. It will include photos and video from Wednesday's assembly. And Gaby still needs to finish writing her report. But by revealing the project to students Wednesday, she can go on her English class trip to Ashland, Ore., on Friday without her baby belly.

Plus, she didn't want to be pregnant for prom. She already has her dress, a teal form-fitting mermaid gown with spaghetti straps.

Gaby plans to attend Columbia Basin College to study social work or sociology in the fall. And, she says, "I'm not planning to have a child until after I graduate."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014835260_apwafakepregnancy.html

torch bear
Seattle, WA
61 comments
April 21, 2011 at 2:27 PM
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brilliant social experiment. congrats to the young woman for having the vision and dedication to carry out the project.

shut_it
Seattle
109 comments
April 21, 2011 at 12:50 PM
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holy moly, that girl is BRAVE! if she wrote a book about this experience, I would read it!

sis2
CA
1 comments
April 21, 2011 at 9:02 AM
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Back in my day, pregnant girls weren't allowed to participate in the graduation ceremonies, even though you'd never know what was under the gown. Excellent project. I hope she got her point across!

bandwagonjumper
Royal City, WA
68 comments
April 21, 2011 at 2:10 PM
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I applaud Gaby and the Seattle Times for bringing awareness to teen pregnancy. It's an issue that affects many of the smaller rural communities. I would enjoy learning how everyone around changed because she was pregnant. I wish she could of gone further to also expose people to how having the responsibility of having a kid changes your life and how small your social network becomes. Pregnancy is only the first part, after you have the kid is when the real tragedy happens in why people treat you and what your life becomes. The only way we reduce teen pregnancy is through education of both the teens and the parents.

xantham
1952 comments
April 21, 2011 at 2:26 PM
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"How incredibly selfish and rude. I would never speak to her again if she were my "friend". Scheming and selfish do not begin to describe this person. I pity everyone who unknowingly became a lab rat in her little experiment."

There's just no pleasing some people.

Whole thing reminds a bit of the book Black Like Me.

tjw160
Seattle, WA
191 comments
April 21, 2011 at 2:29 PM
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"Instead of lauding her, her senior project should have been to try and start some kind of program where parents take a much bigger role and interest in their kids." -Peter St

Perhaps in this criticism you might want to provide some ideas as to how a high school senior might be able to act as a catalyst to this end when so many have tried and failed. I can't think of any off the top of my head.

And by the way, its bleeding heart liberal, not bleeding hard liberal. If you're going to try and insult her project, you could at least do it with "correct" terminology.

Prion
First Hill
138 comments
April 21, 2011 at 1:09 PM
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@sis2

That's awful, good thing times have changed!

It's amazing this girl pulled this off, I wish I could have been at that assembly and heard all the quotes.

Strohs
Seattle
726 comments
April 21, 2011 at 2:58 PM
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Please, we don't need any more liberal bleeding hard projects. If you don't want to be stereotyped, change your ways

Wow Pete, harsh. and seems to me she is trying to change her and others in her school's ways. I do not condone teen pregnancy in the least (I've threatened to seriously hurt either of my sons if they make a mistake)
but rude and hurtful behavior from other kids would make it even harder.

Kid did a great job, and has a birght future in front of her.

tjw160
Seattle, WA
191 comments
April 21, 2011 at 2:37 PM
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REALLY? How about NOT having a child until you are MARRIED and financially stable! Did she learn nothing from her own experiment? -graesan2002

Should she list everything that is a prerequisite for her family planning so you can pre-approve it?

BC18
Washington
42 comments
April 21, 2011 at 12:55 PM
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Simply amazing. I would love to read about her experiences, as well. As a 1979 graduate of Toppenish High School, all I can say is "BRAVO!!"

Tyrone Shoelaces
Seattle, WA
3868 comments
April 21, 2011 at 4:29 PM
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Her pregnancy was phony. Her maturity, insight, commitment and courage are the real thing.

sasi
WA
146 comments
April 21, 2011 at 2:54 PM
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@graesan2002:

You beat me to it! I admire this young lady for wanting to continue her education after high school. She is on her way to becoming a productive, self-supporting member of society and preparing herself to better raise a child. I also hope that somewhere between now and becoming a parent she is planning to marry the person with whom she would like to raise a family.

@tjw160:
No, she does not need anyone's permission to have a child out of wedlock, but is sure is a lot simpler to raise kids when one has a stable married homelife. She seems like she is bright enough to realize this.

Rainy Daze
Seattle
1993 comments
April 21, 2011 at 5:10 PM
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"Did she learn nothing from her own experiment?"

Perhaps she learned to not jump to conclusions.
Too bad you haven't.

habibi
Tacoma
1 comments
April 21, 2011 at 3:41 PM
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Way to go, Gaby!

This is really raising the bar on Senior Projects!!! So many kids just ignore and neglect their opportunity to learn, experience and make a difference with their senior assignments.

I hope this inspires more kids to be insightful, studious and driven with their case studies and community outreach!

fishy3333
edmonds, WA
1076 comments
April 21, 2011 at 4:19 PM
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Gaby's project must have taken a lot of planning and insight, since she was able to carry it off so effectively. She totally addressed an issue that has been at the forefront for years, and that is education on teen pregnancy.

For those of you that think she was wrong to do it in this manner, I'd bank you are the ones that would be gossiping about her like little minions behind her back.

I hope those who did talk about her derisively recognized clearly their own statements and condemnations, and end up feeling guilty about it the rest of their lives. Karma is a .... well, you know.

girl power
Washington
1753 comments
April 21, 2011 at 5:18 PM
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What would make an even better study, would be a study of all the psychological defense responses the other students express now that they know the truth.

sheck79
Bellevue, WA
103 comments
April 22, 2011 at 2:35 PM
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Zenons - I agree that she lied.

And her point was that pregnant teens were stereotyped - but isn't there some truth behind those stereotypes? A young woman made a bad decision (or failed to make a decision) and ended up with an unwanted pregnancy that will greatly effect at least two lives - the mother and the child.

I wonder how people would feel if she had pretended that she was mentally retarded instead - or dying of cancer.

I feel really bad for the boyfriend's parents - they thought they were going to be grandparents and it was ripped away.

Plus - I doubt the girl changed much at the school - people are still going to have the same attitude towards pregnant teens.

EveryNevers
Seattle, WA
1183 comments
April 21, 2011 at 5:17 PM
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Any idiot can get pregnant. What takes courage is being a responsible parent. Did she have health insurance for herself and her baby? Did she have a job? How was she going to support her baby? Was she getting prenatal care? Was she eating properly, getting rest, getting exercise? Was she getting support from her baby's father? ~ POKYHOMT

Really? Those are all questions you'd ask about someone who came clean about faking a pregnancy for a school project? I'm not gonna answer any of those questions, myself... I'm going to go read some other articles. Maybe someone else might try the same...

monica0408
Seattle, WA
9 comments
April 22, 2011 at 6:59 PM
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I would never have dared to get pregnant in high school because the social stigma was so great and I knew how completely crushed my parents would be. (Instead I went to Planned Parenthood.) Unfortunately, the social stigma has now loosened to the point where three of my nieces (children of white, middle-class, educated, still-married parents) had children too young and without being married....and they and their children are suffering the economic consequences.

Gossip and stigma are used to enforce social rules - for good and for bad. In the case of unwed pregnancies, the pendulum has swung too far in terms of acceptance because the acceptance is a big part of what keeps teens from being careful about pregnancy in the first place.

Girls, if you get pregnant too early, your chances of being poor go up dramatically. It doesn't matter whether you're white, black, brown, asian, or purple.

MaverickUW
Quincy, WA
292 comments
April 21, 2011 at 6:27 PM
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@wadical weft

You do realize the principal didn't have to lie at all in this? Under FERPA, he can't really talk about his students to outside sources, to other students, etc (many might, but they shouldn't). At most he'd be able to say "I can't talk about that" and get away with it.

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/reader_feedback/public/display.php?source_id=2014835260&source_name=mbase&offset=0&direction=DESC&column=rating

The double life of a popular UW lecturer

2011-03-24T22:31:00.000-07:00

By Katherine Long

Ali Tarhouni taught here since 1985.

A month ago, when professor Ali Tarhouni told his microeconomics class at the University of Washington that he had a death sentence on his head in his native Libya, but that he had decided to return home to help advise the rebel army on economic issues, his students were stunned by the news.

"It was kind of jaw-dropping," said student Sara Jones. "And then he clapped his hands and said, 'Back to class.' "

Tarhouni, 60, a lecturer at the UW since 1985 and a favorite among students for his engaging style and dry wit, left Seattle on Feb. 27 to join the rebels' shadow government in Libya and was appointed its finance minister this week.

Tarhouni is best known at the UW for making microeconomics theory easy to understand.

But few people in Seattle knew that the longtime business-school lecturer has led a kind of double life as an exiled leader of the Libyan rebel movement, said Ed Rice, associate professor of finance and business economics at the UW.

Tarhouni and other native Libyans who opposed Moammar Gadhafi have stayed in touch through meetings, and more recently, Skype conference calls during Gadhafi's 42-year reign, said Tarhouni's wife, Mary Li.

"There are many active members of the opposition all over the world and they've all gone back to Libya now," Li said. "The Libyan opposition has never not existed, so this is just kind of a natural progression."

Rice said he used to joke with Tarhouni that he would become prime minister of Libya one day. But in the past decade, Tarhouni seemed discouraged that Gadhafi remained in power and that the underground rebel movement had failed to oust him, Rice said.

And then, with the remarkable turn of events that started with the recent Tunisian uprising, Tarhouni was called to join the rebels in Libya.

"As most of you know, I spent the better part of my life fighting to bring democracy to Libya and just about everything that I attempted failed," Tarhouni wrote in an email he circulated to friends and former students on Feb. 27. "Out of nowhere a volcano erupted. These young people who are marching only with stones in their hands facing grenades and live bullets are writing a new chapter for Libya similar to their brethren in Tunisia and Egypt."

He went on to write, "I am not sure who is alive and who is dead but I feel that I need to go back to help as much as I can."

U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, got a call from Tarhouni in Libya about a week ago; the professor asked McDermott to support the no-fly zone — he does — and to encourage the U.S. to recognize the rebels' provisional government.

McDermott said he knows Tarhouni but didn't realize just how deeply involved he is in Libyan politics. "I think we have an international community in Seattle that's involved in lots of stuff, and you never know about it" until major international news puts those people in the spotlight, he said.

In his last class at the UW, Jones said, Tarhouni spent about 10 minutes describing how he had been a student activist in the 1970s, and was later kicked out of college for his part in a movement calling for democracy and greater freedoms.

He left Libya in 1973, and in the 1980s was put on a Libyan government hit list.

"He was so humble about it," she said. "He was so modest about everything."

Although Tarhouni's formal title is senior lecturer, his students call him Professor Tarhouni. Jones said he has a more informal style than many professors in the business school, often wearing jeans along with his blazer, and sitting on the edge of a desk while leading discussions.

Notably, Tarhouni doesn't use PowerPoint presentations as many professors do, and opens almost every class with a discussion of world events and their relevance to microeconomics, said Jones, who is also the assistant director for the technical management MBA program.

"He's a brilliant teacher," said former student Paul Zitarelli, who said Tarhouni could make microeconomics theory sing "for those who had never had a class on it at all to those who'd majored in it."

Zitarelli said he feels a "weird mix of pride and apprehension" about Tarhouni's role in Libya — apprehension, especially, about his safety.

Since he left, Jones has been searching for news of Tarhouni online. The lecturer's name often pops up in international posts, but since Wednesday, when he was named finance minister, he's been quoted frequently in mainstream U.S. publications and in radio interviews.

On Wednesday night, he briefed journalists in Libya on the situation, and "appeared to be one of the few rebel officials willing to speak plainly about the movement's shortcomings and challenges," according to a story in The New York Times.

Tarhouni's particular gift as a teacher is emphasizing the most important take-away points that students needed to grasp in order to understand business concepts. "He would stress those very basic things that provided students with key understandings," Rice said.

In the days to come, as finance minister for a rebel government, that skill may become one of Tarhouni's greatest contributions to the movement, Rice said.

Seattle Times staff reporter Jill Kimball contributed to this report.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014592498_tarhouni25m.html

Lessons From Chernobyl for Japan

2011-03-20T02:29:00.000-07:00

By ELLEN BARRY
Published: March 19, 2011

The abandoned Middle School No. 3 decays in Pripyat, Ukraine, part of the contaminated area surrounding Chernobyl.

Ghost Town Pripyat once had a population of about 50,000 people. They were given a few hours to evacuate in April 1986.

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — Twelve times a month — the maximum number of shifts the doctors will allow — Sergei A. Krasikov takes a train across the no man’s land and reports for work at a structure enclosing Reactor No. 4 known as “the sarcophagus.”

Among his tasks is to pump out radioactive liquid that has collected inside the burned-out reactor. This happens whenever it rains. The sarcophagus was built 25 years ago in a panic, as radiation streamed into populated areas after an explosion at the reactor, and now it is riddled with cracks.

Water cannot be allowed to touch the thing that is deep inside the reactor: about 200 tons of melted nuclear fuel and debris, which burned through the floor and hardened, in one spot, into the shape of an elephant’s foot. This mass remains so highly radioactive that scientists cannot approach it. But years ago, when they managed to place measurement instruments nearby, they got readings of 10,000 rem per hour, which is 2,000 times the yearly limit recommended for workers in the nuclear industry.

Mr. Krasikov, who has broad shoulders and a clear, blue-eyed gaze, has been baby-sitting this monster for eight years. He’ll stay until he is pensioned off and then leave his job to another man, who will stay until he is pensioned off. Asked how long this will continue, Mr. Krasikov shrugged.

“A hundred years?” he ventured. “Maybe in that time they will invent something.”

The death of a nuclear reactor has a beginning; the world is watching this unfold now on the coast of Japan. But it doesn’t have an end.

While some radioactive elements in nuclear fuel decay quickly, cesium’s half-life is 30 years and strontium’s is 29 years. Scientists estimate that it takes 10 to 13 half-lives before life and economic activity can return to an area. That means that the contaminated area — designated by Ukraine’s Parliament as 15,000 square miles, around the size of Switzerland — will be affected for more than 300 years. All last week, workers frantically tried to cool the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant 140 miles north of Tokyo. But one had to look at Ukraine to understand the sheer tedium and exhaustion of dealing with the aftermath of a meltdown. It is a problem that does not exist on a human time frame.

Volodymyr P. Udovychenko drove to Ukraine’s Parliament building on Tuesday, dressed in a shiny purple shirt and tie. He is the mayor of Slavutych, which is home to most of the 3,400 workers who are still employed at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station. Most of them have not received their full salaries since January, and the mayor was requesting $3.6 million to pay them. “The leadership turns away from this, they think that Chernobyl doesn’t exist,” he said. “Chernobyl does exist. And those 200 tons — they also exist.”

To visit Chernobyl today is to feel time passing.

In Pripyat, the plant workers’ former bedroom community, a little over a mile from the plant, where 50,000 people were given a few hours to evacuate, wallpaper has slipped down under its own weight and paint has peeled away from apartment walls in fat curls. Ice glazes the interiors. On a residential street, where Soviet housing blocks tower in every direction, it is quiet enough to hear the sound of individual leaves brushing against branches.

The wild world is gradually pressing its way in. Anton Yukhimenko, who leads tours of the dead zone, said that wild boars and foxes had begun to take shelter in the abandoned city, and that once, skirting a forest, he noticed a wolf soundlessly loping along beside him. Not long ago, one of the city’s major buildings, School No. 1, came crashing down, its supporting structures finally rotted out by 25 winters and summers.

“This is a city that has been captured by wilderness,” he said. “I think in 20 years it will be one big forest.”

The public is not allowed within 18 miles of Reactor No. 4, but a photographer and I made the journey last week with Chernobylinterinform, a division of Ukraine’s Emergency Ministry. At the checkpoint leading to the exclusion zone, there is a small statue of the Virgin Mary and a placard listing the amounts of cesium and strontium found in mushrooms, fish and wild game.

At the six-mile radius begins the zone of mandatory resettlement. A stand of scorched-looking trees marks the so-called Red Forest, after the color of dead pines that were bulldozed en masse and buried in trenches. As we approached the plant, the guides’ radiation detector suddenly registered 1,500 microrem — 50 times normal, they said, perhaps because we had been caught by a gust of wind.

At the center of it all is the sarcophagus, its sides uneven and streaked with rust.

Since the early 1990s, Ukrainian officials have been working on a plan to replace it, finally launching a project called the New Safe Confinement, a 300-foot steel arch that will enclose and seal off the reactor for the next 100 years. Its cost is estimated at $1.4 billion, to be paid largely by donor nations. The project, originally scheduled to be finished in 2005, has been beset by delays and financing shortfalls.

In the meantime, the winter’s snows are turning to rain, and rainwater leaking into the reactor could have unpredictable results, said Stephan G. Robinson, a nuclear physicist who works for Green Cross Switzerland, an environmental organization.

“In winter, it will freeze,” said Dr. Robinson, who was touring the site last week. “Water expands, and it breaks. Then maybe some of the inside collapses. A little cloud disappears through a crack. If there’s rain, it means there is a way in. And if there is a way in, there is also a way out.”

But even after the new arch is built, Mr. Krasikov doubts that it will be possible to end the long vigil over Reactor No. 4.

“Nobody knows what to do with what is inside,” he said. “There will be enough work for my children and my grandchildren.”

By evening, on our way out of the site, light is tilting through the pine forests, a peaceful enough scene except for the vivid yellow-and-orange triangles planted in the forest floor, warning of radiation. Workers stream out through a wall of man-sized Geiger counters, each one waiting for the machine to thunk and flash green before making his or her way out of the exclusion zone and down the battered highway.

Tomorrow, they will come back to Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station for another day of work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/weekinreview/20chernobyl.html

Greater Danger Lies in Spent Fuel Than in Reactors

2011-03-17T18:59:00.000-07:00

By KEITH BRADSHER and HIROKO TABUCHI

Years of procrastination in deciding on long-term disposal of highly radioactive fuel rods from nuclear reactors are now coming back to haunt Japanese authorities as they try to control fires and explosions at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants: Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while China sends them to a desert storage compound in the western province of Gansu. But Japan, like the United States, has kept ever-larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the plants.

Figures provided by Tokyo Electric Power on Thursday show that most of the dangerous uranium at the power plant is actually in the spent fuel rods, not the reactor cores themselves.

The electric utility said that a total of 11,125 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site. That is about four times as much radioactive material as in the reactor cores combined.

Now those temporary pools are proving the power plant’s Achilles’ heel, with the water in the pools either boiling away or leaking out of their containments, and efforts to add more water having gone awry. While spent fuel rods generate significantly less heat than newer ones do, there are strong indications that some fuel rods have begun to melt and release extremely high levels of radiation. Japanese workers struggled on Thursday to add more water to the storage pool at Reactor No. 3.

Helicopters dropped water, only to have it scattered by strong breezes. Water cannons mounted on police trucks — equipment designed to disperse rioters — were then deployed to spray water on the pools. It is unclear if that effort worked.

Richard T. Lahey Jr., a retired nuclear engineer who oversaw General Electric’s safety research in the early 1970s for the kind of nuclear reactors used in Fukushima, said that the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods could burst into flames if exposed to air for hours when a storage pool lost its water.

Zirconium, once ignited, burns extremely hot and is difficult to extinguish, added Mr. Lahey, who helped write a classified report for the United States government several years ago on the vulnerabilities of storage pools at American nuclear reactors.

Very high levels of radiation above the storage pools suggest that the water has drained in the 39-foot-deep pools to the point that the 13-foot-high fuel rod assemblies have been exposed to air for hours and are starting to melt, said Robert Albrecht, a longtime nuclear engineer who worked as a consultant to the Japanese nuclear reactor manufacturing industry in the 1980s. Under normal conditions, the rods are kept covered with 26 feet of water that is circulated to prevent it from growing too warm.

Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, made the startling assertion on Wednesday that there was little or no water left in another storage pool, the one on top of Reactor No. 4, and expressed grave concern about the radiation that would be released as a result.

The 1,479 spent fuel rod assemblies there include 548 that were removed from the reactor only in November and December to prepare the reactor for maintenance, and these may be emitting more heat than the older assemblies in other storage pools.

Even without recirculating water, it should take many days for the water in a storage pool to evaporate, nuclear engineers said. So the rapid evaporation and even boiling of water in the storage pools now is a mystery, raising the question of whether the pools may also be leaking.

Michael Friedlander, a former senior nuclear power plant operator who worked 13 years at three American reactors, said that storage pools typically had a liner of stainless steel three-eighths of an inch thick, and that they rested on reinforced concrete bases. So even if the liner ruptured, “unless the concrete was torn apart, there’s no place for the water to go,” he said.

Mr. Lahey said that much of the water may have sloshed out during the earthquake. Much smaller earthquakes in California have produced heavy water losses from sloshing at storage pools there, partly because the pools are located high in reactor buildings.

“It’s like being at the top of a flagpole, and once you start ground motion, you can easily slosh it,” he said.

When the water in a storage pool disappears, the fuel rods’ uranium continues to heat the rods’ zirconium cladding. This causes the zirconium to oxidize, or rust, and even catch fire. The spent fuel rods have little radioactive iodine, which has a half-life of eight days and has mostly disappeared through radioactive decay once fission stopped when the rods left the reactor cores. But the spent fuel rods are still loaded with cesium and strontium that can start to escape if the fuel rods burn.

One factor that might determine how serious the situation becomes is whether the uranium oxide pellets in the rods stay vertical even if the cladding burns off. This is possible because pellets sometimes become fused together while in the reactor. If the pellets stay standing up, then even with the water and zirconium gone, nuclear fission will not take place, Mr. Albrecht said.

But Tokyo Electric said this week that there was a chance of “recriticality” in the storage pools — that is, the uranium in the fuel rods could resume the fission that previously took place inside the reactor, spewing out radioactive byproducts.

Mr. Albrecht said this was very unlikely, but could happen if the stacks of pellets slumped over and became jumbled together on the floor of the storage pool.

Plant workers would then need to add water with lots of boron because the boron absorbs neutrons and interrupts nuclear chain reactions.

If a lot of fission occurs, which may happen only in an extreme case, the uranium would melt through anything underneath it. If it encounters water as it descends, a steam explosion could then scatter the molten uranium.

At Daiichi, each assembly has either 64 large fuel rods or 81 slightly smaller fuel rods. A typical fuel rod assembly has roughly 380 pounds of uranium.

One big worry for Japanese officials is that Reactor No. 3, the main target of the helicopters and water cannons on Thursday, uses a new and different fuel. It uses mixed oxides, or mox, which contains a mixture of uranium and plutonium, and can produce a more dangerous radioactive plume if scattered by fire or explosions. According to Tokyo Electric, 32 of the 514 fuel rod assemblies in the storage pond at Reactor No. 3 contain mox.

Japan had hoped to solve the spent fuel buildup with a large-scale plan to recycle the rods into fuel that would go back into its nuclear program. But even before Friday’s quake, that plan had hit setbacks.

Central to Japan’s plans is a $28 billion reprocessing facility in Rokkasho village, north of the quake zone, which would extract uranium and plutonium from the rods for use in making mox fuel. After countless construction delays, test runs began in 2006, and the plant’s operator, Japan Nuclear Fuel, said operations would begin in 2010. But in late 2010, its opening was delayed by two years.

To close the nuclear fuel recycling process, Japan also built the Monju, a fast breeder reactor, which started running in full in 1994. But a year later, a fire caused by a sodium leak shut down the plant.

Despite revelations that the operator, the quasi-governmental Japan Atomic Energy Agency, had covered up the seriousness of the accident, Monju again started operating at a reduced capacity.

Another nuclear reprocessing facility in Tokaimura has been shut down since 1999, when an accident at an experimental fast breeder showered hundreds in the vicinity with radiation, and two workers were killed.

Many of these facilities were hit by Friday’s earthquake. A spent fuel pool at Rokkasho spilled over, and power at the plant was lost, triggering backup generators, Japan Nuclear Fuel said.

According to the Citizens Nuclear Information Center, an anti-nuclear group, about 3,000 tons of fuel are stored at Rokkasho. But the plant, about 180 feet above sea level, escaped the tsunami. Grid power was restored on Monday, the company said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18spent.html

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

2011-02-12T14:10:00.000-08:00

By DAVID SEGAL
Published: February 12, 2011

PRETEND for a moment that you are Google’s search engine.

Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the very first result?

There are, of course, a lot of possibilities. Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia entry on the history of hemlines.

O.K., how about the word “bedding”? Bed Bath & Beyond seems a candidate. Or Wal-Mart, or perhaps the bedding section of Amazon.com.

“Area rugs”? Crate & Barrel is a possibility. Home Depot, too, and Sears, Pier 1 or any of those Web sites with “area rug” in the name, like arearugs.com.

You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:

J. C. Penney.

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in 2010, Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. But Google’s stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant Web sites.

Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases?

Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media examined J. C. Penney’s ranking on Google. His analysis suggested a world of intrigue in the search business.

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.

“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.”

TO understand the strategy that kept J. C. Penney in the pole position for so many searches, you need to know how Web sites rise to the top of Google’s results. We’re talking, to be clear, about the “organic” results — in other words, the ones that are not paid advertisements. In deriving organic results, Google’s algorithm takes into account dozens of criteria, many of which the company will not discuss.

But it has described one crucial factor in detail: links from one site to another.

If you own a Web site, for instance, about Chinese cooking, your site’s Google ranking will improve as other sites link to it. The more links to your site, especially those from other Chinese cooking-related sites, the higher your ranking. In a way, what Google is measuring is your site’s popularity by polling the best-informed online fans of Chinese cooking and counting their links to your site as votes of approval.

But even links that have nothing to do with Chinese cooking can bolster your profile if your site is barnacled with enough of them. And here’s where the strategy that aided Penney comes in. Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com.

Who is that someone? A spokeswoman for J. C. Penney, Darcie Brossart, says it was not Penney.

“J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links that you sent to us, as it is against our natural search policies,” Ms. Brossart wrote in an e-mail. She added, “We are working to have the links taken down.”

The links do not bear any fingerprints, but nothing else about them was particularly subtle. Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer, Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.

Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.

There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on.

Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie ever: “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”

When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.

Exploiting those hovels for links is a Google no-no. The company’s guidelines warn against using tricks to improve search engine rankings, including what it refers to as “link schemes.” The penalty for getting caught is a pair of virtual concrete shoes: the company sinks in Google’s results.

Often drastically. In 2006, Google announced that it had caught BMW using a black-hat strategy to bolster the company’s German Web site, BMW.de. That site was temporarily given what the BBC at the time called “the death penalty,” stating that it was “removed from search results.”

BMW acknowledged that it had set up “doorway pages,” which exist just to attract search engines and then redirect traffic to a different site. The company at the time said it had no intention of deceiving users, adding “if Google says all doorway pages are illegal, we have to take this into consideration.”

J. C. Penney, it seems, will not suffer the same fate. But starting Wednesday, it was the subject of what Google calls “corrective action.”

Last week, The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal encyclicals by players in the search engine world.

Google’s spam cop, Matt Cutts, was not pleased about a campaign to make JCPenney.com seem more popular.

“I can confirm that this violates our guidelines,” said Mr. Cutts during an hourlong interview on Wednesday, after looking at a list of paid links to JCPenney.com.

He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” — but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.

He and his team had missed this recent campaign of paid links, which he said had been up and running for the last three to four months.

“Do I wish our system had detected things sooner? I do,” he said. “But given the one billion queries that Google handles each day, I think we do an amazing job.”

Mr. Cutts sounded remarkably upbeat and unperturbed during this conversation, which was a surprise given that we were discussing a large, sustained effort to snooker his employer. Asked about his zenlike calm, he said the company strives not to act out of anger. You get the sense that Mr. Cutts and his colleagues are acutely aware of the singular power they wield as judge, jury and appeals panel, and they’re eager to project an air of maturity and judiciousness.

That said, he added, “I don’t think I could do my job well if in some sense I was not offended by things that were bad for Google users.”

“Am I happy this happened?” he later asked. “Absolutely not. Is Google going to take strong corrective action? We absolutely will.”

And the company did. On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.

At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.”

Two hours later, it was at No. 71.

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living room furniture.”

By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.

In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country.

The next it was essentially buried.

PENNEY reacted to this instant reversal of fortune by, among other things, firing its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex. Executives there did not return e-mail or phone calls.

Penney also issued a statement: “We are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings due to this matter,” Ms. Brossart wrote, “but we will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search position.”

She added that while the collection of links surely brought in additional revenue, it was hardly a bonanza. Just 7 percent of JCPenney.com’s traffic comes from clicks on organic search results, she wrote. A far bigger source of profits this holiday season, she stated, came from partnerships with companies like Yahoo and Time Warner, from new mobile applications and from in-store kiosks.

Search experts, however, say Penney likely reaped substantial rewards from the paid links. If you think of Google as the entrance to the planet’s largest shopping center, the links helped Penney appear as though it was the first and most inviting spot in the mall, to millions and millions of online shoppers.

How valuable was that? A study last May by Daniel Ruby of Chitika, an online advertising network of 100,000 sites, found that, on average, 34 percent of Google’s traffic went to the No. 1 result, about twice the percentage that went to No. 2.

The Keyword Estimator at Google puts the number of searches for “dresses” in the United States at 11.1 million a month, an average based on 12 months of data. So for “dresses” alone, Penney may have been attracting roughly 3.8 million visits every month it showed up as No. 1. Exactly how many of those visits translate into sales, and the size of each sale, only Penney would know.

But in January, the company was crowing about its online holiday sales. Kate Coultas, a company spokeswoman, wrote to a reporter in January, “Internet sales through jcp.com posted strong growth in December, with significant increases in traffic and orders for the key holiday shopping periods of the week after Thanksgiving and the week before Christmas.”

There was considerable pressure from investors for Penney to deliver strong holiday results. It has been struggling through one of the more trying times of its century of retailing. The $17.8 billion in revenue it reported last year is the exact same figure it reported in 2001. It announced in January that it would close a handful of underperforming stores, as well as two of its five call centers and 19 outlets that sell excess catalog merchandise.

Adding to the company’s woes is the demise of its catalog business. Penney has phased out what it called its Big Book and poured money into its Web site. But so far, the loss of the catalog has not been offset by the expansion of the Web site. At its peak, the catalog brought in about $4 billion in revenue. In 2009, the site brought in $1.5 billion.

“For the last 35 years, Penney has tried to be accepted as a department store, and during unusually good times, it does very well,” said Bernard Sosnick, an analyst at Gilford Securities. “But in bad times, it gets punished by shoppers who pull back after having spent aspirationally.”

MANY owners of Web sites with Penney links seem to relish their unreachability. But there were exceptions, and they included cocaman.ch. (“Geekness — closer to the world” is the cryptic header atop the site.) It turned out to be owned and run by Corsin Camichel, a chatty 25-year-old I.T. security analyst in Switzerland.

The word “dresses” appears in a small collection of links in the middle of a largely blank Cocaman page. Asked about that link, Mr. Camichel said his records show that it turned up on his site last April, though he said it might have been earlier than that.

The link came through a Web site, TNX.net, which pays Mr. Camichel with TNX points, which he then trades for links that drive traffic to his other sites, like cookingutensils.net. He earns money when people visit that site and click on the ads. He could also, he said, get cash from TNX. Currently, Cocaman is home to 403 links, all of them placed there by TNX on behalf of clients.

“You do pretty well,” he wrote, referring to income from his links trading. “The thing is, the more you invest (time and money) the better results you get. Right now I get enough to buy myself new test devices for my Android apps (like $150/month) with zero effort. I have to do nothing. Ads just sit there and if people click, I make money.”

Efforts to reach TNX itself last week via e-mail were not successful.

Interviewing a purveyor of black-hat services face-to-face was a considerable undertaking. They are a low-profile bunch. But a link-selling specialist named Mark Stevens — who says he had nothing to do with the Penney link effort — agreed to chat. He did so on the condition that his company not be named, a precaution he justified by recounting what happened when the company apparently angered Google a few months ago.

“It was my fault,” Mr. Stevens said. “I posted a job opening on a Stanford Engineering alumni mailing list, and mentioned the name of our company and a brief description of what we do. I think some Google employees saw it.”

In a matter of days, the company could not be found in a Google search.

“Literally, you typed the name of the company into the search box and we did not turn up. Anywhere. You’d find us if you knew our Web address. But in terms of search, we just disappeared.”

The company now operates under a new name and with a profile that is low even in the building where it claims to have an office. The landlord at the building, a gleaming, glassy midrise next to Route 101 in Redwood City, Calif., said she had never heard of the company.

Mr. Stevens agreed to meet in mid-January for a dinner paid for by The Times. Asked to pick a “fine restaurant” in his neighborhood, he rather cheekily selected a modern French bistro in Palo Alto offering an eight-course prix fixe meal for $118. Liquid nitrogen and “fairy tale pumpkin” were two of the featured ingredients.

Mr. Stevens turned out to be a boyish-looking 31-year-old native of Singapore. (Stevens is the name he uses for work; he says he has a Chinese last name, which he did not share.) He speaks with a slight accent and in an animated hush, like a man worried about eavesdroppers. He describes his works with the delighted, mischievous grin of a sophomore who just hid a stink bomb.

“The key is to roll the campaign out slowly,” he said as he nibbled at seared duck foie gras. “A lot of companies are in a rush. They want as many links as we can get them as fast as possible. But Google will spot that. It will flag a Web site that goes from zero links to a few hundred in a week.”

The hardest part about the link-selling business, he explained, is signing up deep-pocketed mainstream clients. Lots of them, it seems, are afraid they’ll get caught. Another difficulty is finding quality sites to post links. Whoever set up the JCPenney.com campaign, he said, relied on some really low-rent, spammy sites — the kind with low PageRanks, as Google calls its patented measure of a site’s quality. The higher the PageRank, the more “Google juice” a site offers others to which it is linked.

“The sites that TNX uses mostly have low PageRanks,” Mr. Stevens said.

Mr. Stevens said that Web site owners, or publishers, as he calls them, get a small fee for each link, and the transaction is handled entirely over the Web.

Publishers can reject certain keywords and links — Mr. Stevens said some balked at a lingerie link — but for the most part the system is on a kind of autopilot. A client pays Mr. Stevens and his colleagues for links, which are then farmed out to Web sites. Payment to publishers is handled via PayPal.

You might expect Mr. Stevens to have a certain amount of contempt for Google, given that he spends his professional life finding ways to subvert it. But through the evening he mentioned a few times that he’s in awe of the company, and the quality of its search engine.

So how does he justify all his efforts to undermine that engine?

“I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial,” he said. “If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.”

To Mr. Stevens, S.E.O. is a game, and if you’re not paying black hats, you are losing to rivals with fewer compunctions.

WHY did Google fail to catch a campaign that had been under way for months? One, no less, that benefited a company that Google had already taken action against three times? And one that relied on a collection of Web sites that were not exactly hiding their spamminess?

Mr. Cutts emphasized that there are 200 million domain names and a mere 24,000 employees at Google.

“Spammers never stop,” he said. Battling those spammers is a never-ending job, and one that he believes Google keeps getting better and better at.

Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

Investigators have been asking advertisers in Europe questions like this: “Please explain whether and, if yes, to what extent your advertising spending with Google has ever had an influence on your ranking in Google’s natural search.” And: “Has Google ever mentioned to you that increasing your advertising spending could improve your ranking in Google’s natural search?”

Asked if Penney received any breaks because of the money it has spent on ads, Mr. Cutts said, “I’ll give a categorical denial.” He then made an impassioned case for Google’s commitment to separating the money side of the business from the search side. The former has zero influence on the latter, he said.

“If you asked me for the names of five people in advertising engineering, I don’t think I could give you the names,” he said. “There is a very long history at Google of saying ‘We are not going to worry about short-term revenue.’ ” He added: “We rely on the trust of our users. We realize the responsibility that we have to our users.”

He noted, too, that before The Times presented evidence of the paid links to JCPenney.com, Google had just begun to roll out an algorithm change that had a negative effect on Penney’s search results. (The tweak affected “how we trust links,” Mr. Cutts said, declining to elaborate.)

True, JCPenney.com’s showing in Google searches had declined slightly by Feb. 8, as the algorithm change began to take effect. In “comforter sets,” Penney went from No. 1 to No. 7. In “sweater dresses,” from No. 1 to No. 10.

But the real damage to Penney’s results began when Google started that “manual action.” The decline can be charted: On Feb. 1, the average Penney position for 59 search terms was 1.3.

On Feb. 8, when the algorithm was changing, it was 4.

By Feb. 10, it was 52.

MR. CUTTS said he did not plan to write about Penney’s situation, as he did with BMW in 2006. Rarely, he explained, does he single out a company publicly, because Google’s goal is to preserve the integrity of results, not to embarrass people.

“But just because we don’t talk about it,” he said, “doesn’t mean we won’t take strong action.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html

Japan Debates Depictions of Young Girls in Comics

2011-02-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: February 9, 2011

Adult games and DVDs for sale in Tokyo. Some officials want to tighten restrictions on provocative depictions of young girls in magazines, DVDs and Web videos.

TOKYO — In a manga comic book that is well known here, “My Wife Is an Elementary School Student,” a 24-year-old teacher marries a 12-year-old girl as part of a top-secret social experiment.

There is no depiction of actual sex. But the teacher’s steamy fantasies fill the comic’s pages in graphic detail, including a little naked girl with sexually suggestive props. Meanwhile, in a widely available new DVD, a real-life Japanese model poses in a tiny white bikini. She makes popcorn in a maid’s costume. She plays with a beach ball while being hosed down with water.

The model, Akari Iinuma, is 13 years old.

Japan, which has long been relatively tolerant of the open sale and consumption of sexually oriented material, has developed a brisk trade in works that in many other countries might be considered child pornography. But now some public officials want to place tighter restrictions on the provocative depictions of young girls — referred to as “junior idols”— that are prevalent in magazines, DVDs and Web videos.

One particularly big target is manga comic books that depict pubescent girls in sexual acts. They are a lucrative segment of the ¥450 billion, or $5.5 billion, industry for manga, illustrated books drawn in a characteristic Japanese comic-book style.

An ordinance newly revised by Tokyo’s metropolitan government to restrict the sale of such material has prompted a national debate between its publishers and critics inside and outside Japan, who say the fare exploits children and may even encourage pedophilia. Other local and regional governments, including the prefecture of Osaka, are considering similar restrictions.

“These are for abnormal people, for perverts,” said Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, angrily throwing two comic books to the floor during an interview. Mr. Ishihara spearheaded the ordinance changes, which take effect in July.

While the revised law applies to an area containing only about a tenth of Japan’s population, Tokyo is the nation’s media capital and a de facto arbiter of the country’s pop culture boundaries. “There’s no other country in the world that lets such crude works exist,” Mr. Ishihara said.

To protest the ordinance, 10 of the country’s biggest publishers have said they will boycott the Tokyo International Anime Fair next month, Japan’s premier event for manga and animated films.

The law specifically bars only the sale of the restricted comics and videos to minors. But industry executives say it would essentially end publication of the material by discouraging risk-averse publishers and booksellers from handling it at all.

“There are no victims in manga — we should be free to write what we want,” said Yasumasa Shimizu, vice president at Kodansha, Japan’s largest publishing company by revenue, which is participating in the boycott. “Creativity in Japanese manga thrives on an ‘anything goes’ mentality.”

Manga taps into a history of erotica that dates at least as far back as the ukiyo-e prints of 17th- to 19th-century Japan, including Hokusai’s famous portrayal of a fisherwoman and octopuses in a salacious encounter. But it was as recently as the 1980s that comic magazines like Lemon People introduced a wider audience to sexual manga featuring young girls.

“There is a culture, an industry that worships youth and innocence,” said Mariko Katsuki, who published a book last year chronicling adults who are attracted to small children. “Much of the attraction is nonsexual, but sometimes it becomes a dangerous obsession.”

The Tokyo law, which applies to anyone younger than 18, bans the sale of comics and other works — including novels, DVDs and video games — that depict sexual or violent acts that would violate Japan’s national penal code, as well as sex involving anyone under age 18. The ordinance also requires guardians to prevent children younger than 13 from posing for magazines or videos that depict them in sexually suggestive ways.

Legal experts say that Japanese laws against child pornography are lax by international standards. Japan has banned the production or distribution of any sexually explicit, nude images of minors since 1999, when Parliament passed a child pornography law in response to international criticism of the wide availability of such works in the country. But even now, unlike the United States and most European countries, Japan does not ban the possession of child pornography.

The authorities in the United States and Sweden have recently made arrests over manga books imported from Japan depicting sexual abuse of children. A U.S. manga collector, Christopher Handley, pleaded guilty in 2009 to violating the 2003 Protect Act, which outlawed cartoons or drawings that depict minors in sexually explicit ways.

Japan’s 1999 law has also helped stamp out a formerly popular genre of photo books depicting nude underage girls. One of the genre’s best-selling books, published in 1991, featured nude photos of the actress Rie Miyazawa, who was not yet 18 at the time the pictures were taken.

But in the last five or six years, books and videos have emerged that sidestep the law by featuring girls, some as young as age 6, posing in swimsuits that stop short of full nudity. The models, who are paid about ¥200,000 a shoot, often dream of careers in acting or music, industry insiders said.

Junior idol photo books and DVDs are widely available on Web sites like Amazon.co.jp and in specialized bookstores. There are at least eight magazines devoted to such photos, including Sho-Bo, which features girls of elementary school age.

“I loved the white bikini,” Ms. Iinuma, the 13-year-old model, told the adult male fans who turned out at the Sofmap electronics store in Tokyo for an event to promote the release of her second DVD, “Developing Now.” It is a plotless 70 minutes of Ms. Iinuma in various costumes and poses.

At the gathering, Ms. Iinuma performed a short dance, spoke about the video shoot, then posed as men approached her to snap photos, while her mother looked on from the back of the room.

Hiromasa Nakai, a spokesman for the Japan Committee for Unicef, said the abundance of child pornography in Japan made it even easier for those who would normally not be considered to have clinical pedophilia, a psychiatric disorder characterized by a sexual obsession with young children, to develop a sexual interest in children.

“To a degree, it has become socially accepted to lust over young girls in Japan,” Mr. Nakai said. “Condoning these works has meant more people have access to them and develop an interest in young girls.”

There have been earlier moves to regulate pedophilic material in Japan, especially after the killings of four young girls in 1988-89 by a man the police described as a pedophile. The case spurred local governments across Japan to adopt ordinances setting some limits to sales of pedophilic works, including a loose ratings system for explicit manga books imposed by the publishers themselves, and also set the stage for the 1999 child pornography law.

The Tokyo government already checks for “unwholesome” manga titles and can order publishers to label the titles as for adults only. But supporters of more regulation say those efforts have been sporadic.

“We believe that when the rights of adults or businesses violate children’s rights, children must come first,” said Tamae Shintani, head of the parent-teacher association for Tokyo’s elementary schools. “But we also respect free speech, so the least we can ask is people keep their fetishes under wraps.”

The industry’s defenders say comparing manga to pedophilia involving real children is absurd. “Depicting a crime and committing one are two different things. It’s like convicting a mystery writer for murder,” said Takashi Yamaguchi, a Tokyo lawyer and manga expert.

Mr. Yamaguchi and others also contend that the Tokyo government pushed through the new regulations without adequate debate. Some also worry that stronger regulations will harm an industry that has already seen its fortunes decline in recent years; sales of comic magazines, in particular, have fallen by a third during the last decade, to $24.3 million in 2008.

The manga artist Takeshi Nogami, whose best-known work features high school girls riding military tanks, said he sensed a disdain among policy makers toward manga itself. “They think reading manga makes you dumb,” he said.

In late December at the Comic Market, a fair for self-published comic books that is held twice a year in Tokyo and attended by more than 500,000 people, manga titles depicting adults having sex with minors were on open display. And they were readily available to fans like Koki Yoshida, 17.

“I don’t even think about how old these girls are,” Mr. Yoshida said. “It’s a completely imaginary world, separate from real life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/business/global/10manga.html

Google Finds It Hard to Reinvent Philanthropy

2011-01-31T00:18:00.000-08:00

By STEPHANIE STROM and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: January 29, 2011

JUST before Google first sold its shares to the public in 2004, Larry Page, one of its founders, excited the nonprofit world with a bold commitment to philanthropy.

Earth Engine is an example of a Google.org tool that built on Google’s existing products. It helped create this map of forest cover and water in southern Mexico.
Noah Berger for The New York Times

Megan Smith, a business development executive at Google, also runs a philanthropic arm.
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Google

Resource Finder mapped health facilities after Pakistan’s floods.
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Noah Berger for The New York Times

Larry Brilliant in 2008, when he was the executive director of Google.org, which was intended to take an unconventional approach to philanthropy.

He vowed to dedicate about 1 percent of Google’s profits, 1 percent of its equity and a significant amount of its employees’ time to the effort, which became known as Google.org, or simply DotOrg. “We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems,” Mr. Page wrote in a letter to potential investors.

Although Google intended to tackle major problems like climate change, global poverty and the spread of pandemic diseases, it declared that DotOrg would not be “conventional” — a four-letter word in Google-speak. For starters, the organization would operate in part as a business, thus freeing itself from various constraints placed on nonprofit groups.

Google hired Larry Brilliant, a public health expert and Silicon Valley entrepreneur with no experience running a major philanthropy, to lead DotOrg, which was set up as a business unit within the company. It then poached prominent experts in development, energy and public health from prestigious institutions like the Aga Khan Foundation, Goldman Sachs and the International Water Management Institute.

“Google.org can play the entire keyboard,” Dr. Brilliant said in an interview with The New York Times shortly after his appointment. “It can start companies, build industries, pay consultants, lobby, give money to individuals and make a profit.”

Nearly five years later, however, the hyperbole looks more like hubris. DotOrg has narrowed to just one octave on the piano: engineering-related projects that often are the outgrowth of existing Google products. Dr. Brilliant was sidelined in early 2009 after his loose management style created much disenchantment in DotOrg’s ranks.

The company’s top executives rarely mention DotOrg, which is now run by Megan Smith, a business development executive who devotes only part of her time to the organization.

Although Google gives tens of millions of dollars to charity each year and says the overall company is meeting its 1 percent giving goal, DotOrg itself is no longer making grants to nonprofit groups or financing new companies. Instead, it focuses on projects like using Google Earth to track environmental changes and monitoring Web searches to detect flu outbreaks. Most of the experts it initially hired have left, and Google, a company obsessed with numbers and metrics, struggles to measure DotOrg’s accomplishments.

Google says it has changed its approach to philanthropy, but not its scope or ambition. Ms. Smith readily acknowledges that the organization has yet to prove itself, but she says it has already had a positive impact in various areas, such as public health and the environment.

“We are a start-up,” Ms. Smith said in a recent interview. “The aspirational goals in the founding of DotOrg are long term. Our hope is to get to that point where we could have the impact that our founders hoped.”

In the philanthropy world, many people have a more skeptical view of Google’s experiment.

“I think there were from the beginning two competing ideas about what DotOrg would be,” said Joshua Cohen, a professor of law, politics and philosophy at Stanford who, after DotOrg was formed, was hired to create seminars to educate Googlers on issues bedeviling developing countries. “The first was a Googley idea that DotOrg would completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find.”

The second idea, Professor Cohen said, was more modest: “that DotOrg could make some headway, maybe a little, maybe a lot, in addressing these really big problems by doing what Google as a company is really good at doing, which is to say, aggregating information.”

“The second idea,” he continued, “won out.”

NOTHING illustrates DotOrg’s approach better than Google Flu Trends, an innovative tool that uses data collected from searches about flu symptoms to predict the location of flu outbreaks. In April 2009, Dr. Brilliant said it epitomized the power of Google’s vaunted engineering prowess to make the world a better place, and he predicted that it would save untold numbers of lives.

Public health officials say the tool is undoubtedly useful.

But “on an individual basis, does Flu Trends save lives? No,” said Ashley LaMonte-Fowlkes, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped Google test and develop it.

Instead, she described it as “a really nice adjunct” to other tools that the agency uses to understand the spread of flu. One major shortcoming of Flu Trends is that in poor regions of the developing world, where devastating pandemics are most likely to start, computers are not widely available, so Google has little data to feed into the tool. Even in the United States, during the swine flu outbreak of 2009, Flu Trends had difficulty detecting the relatively small number of H1N1 infections.

Some veterans of DotOrg say Flu Trends is an example of how Google’s engineering-centric approach frustrated and limited them.

“We concentrated on complicated engineering problems rather than large development challenges,” said a former executive of DotOrg, who left the organization after a couple of years and requested anonymity because he did not want to damage the relationship between his current employer and Google. “That meant we were creating solutions that were looking for problems rather than the other way around.”

Those solutions also had to be something that Google engineers, who represent the cream of the world’s elite universities, believed that only they could create.

For instance, in early 2008, some DotOrg staff members with traditional nonprofit backgrounds proposed a system to track drugs for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis through the supply chain, in order to combat drug counterfeiting and theft. Fake drugs, which can be toxic, are an enormous problem: the World Health Organization has estimated that more than 30 percent of drugs sold in developing countries in Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America can be counterfeit.

The team’s idea was to engineer a FedEx-type system, relying in part on text-messaging, that would track drugs from the moment they left a manufacturer’s control until they reached a patient.

The plan never went anywhere, however, because text-messaging was not sophisticated enough to challenge Google’s engineers, several former DotOrg executives said. The culture clash between the engineers — caustically referred to by former DotOrg executives as “the Brahmin” — and those from development organizations was exacerbated by DotOrg’s leader, Dr. Brilliant, according to a dozen former employees of DotOrg.

Even Dr. Brilliant’s fans — and they are legion in Silicon Valley and the global health arena — say he lacks management skills. A spokesman for Dr. Brilliant’s current employer, the Skoll Global Threats Fund, said last week that he was unavailable for an interview because of a death in his immediate family. Dr. Brilliant did respond to some questions by e-mail, though he did not reply to a question about his management.

He was hired on a whim after he won the coveted TED Prize, awarded annually to someone with a world-changing “wish,” in 2006 for his idea to build a global early-response system to identify new diseases and disasters as soon as they emerge, thus heading off pandemics. Dr. Brilliant was invited to speak to Google employees about his idea, and Mr. Page and his Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, happened to attend.

They were smitten, and Dr. Brilliant was hired almost immediately. It took DotOrg almost two years to define the five areas in which it would work, and they were announced with much fanfare in January 2008: predicting and preventing diseases; growing small and midsize businesses; increasing access to information and public services; developing renewable energy; and helping to commercialize plug-in hybrids. Google.org vowed to spend $175 million in those areas over the next three years.

It troubled several DotOrg executives that the largest grant announced that day, accounting for 20 percent of the $25 million committed at the time, went to InStedd, the organization that Dr. Brilliant had founded with his TED prize money.

“No one seemed to understand that this looked like a tremendous conflict of interest,” said one former DotOrg employee who oversaw programs and asked for anonymity because Google’s severance contract included a confidentiality clause.

During Dr. Brilliant’s tenure as executive director of DotOrg, InStedd received $11 million from the institution, while the Seva Foundation, another nonprofit that he had co-founded, received $2.5 million.

In an e-mail, Dr. Brilliant said the grant to Seva illustrated Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra: Mr. Brin ordered it up to make Seva whole after Google hired Dr. Brilliant away.

As for the grants made to InStedd, Dr. Brilliant wrote that “the quest for an early-warning system or systems to predict and prevent pandemics, whether done inside DotOrg or through creating another organization to do the work, like InStedd, didn’t represent a conflict of interest.” He added that “it was one of the reasons Google hired me.”

Dr. Brilliant also had to deal with other issues. On a personal level, he was distracted during part of his time at DotOrg because two family members were critically ill.

It didn’t help that Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who was the architect of DotOrg as it was first conceived, left to join Facebook in early 2008. Ms. Sandberg’s first job out of college was with the World Bank in India, and many DotOrg executives considered her their champion.

When she left, DotOrg became isolated. It operated out of San Francisco, rather than from Google’s campus in Mountain View, Calif. And with its executives spending most of their time in the developing world and thus unable to cultivate allies at the company, DotOrg all but ground to a halt.

Dr. Brilliant lacked Ms. Sandberg’s access to the Executive Management Group, which comprises about a dozen senior Google executives close to Mr. Page, Mr. Brin and Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s longtime chief executive, who is moving to a new role as executive chairman in April. (Mr. Page, meanwhile, will become C.E.O.) Members of this group were usually too busy to attend meetings where grants were presented for approval, so Dr. Brilliant worked out a system of e-mailing the proposals to Mr. Page and Mr. Brin. If they did not respond within 48 hours, he made the decision himself.

“Larry and Sergey treated DotOrg like any other part of Google,” said a former senior Google executive who was involved in a later review of DotOrg and asked for anonymity to avoid endangering his relationships with the company. “It is always hard to get their attention. When it was about reviewing grants, they were not so excited.”

LAURENCE SIMON, a professor at Brandeis University and a friend of Dr. Brilliant’s who took a sabbatical to work at DotOrg in 2007, said that in his view, Google’s top executives grew frustrated with DotOrg when they were not being presented with clearly defined problems and solutions.

“I think they expected there would be the same kind of ‘launch early and often’ approach demanded on the business side, but that’s not the way development works,” Mr. Simon said.

When the Google founders did attend a meeting about DotOrg, they spent most of their time fiddling with their BlackBerrys. At one meeting, former DotOrg executives said, they were stunned when Mr. Brin dropped to the floor and started doing push-ups.

“DotOrg was like quicksand — every time you thought you’d found your footing, a sinkhole opened,” the former Google.org program officer said.

Jacquelline Fuller, a spokeswoman for DotOrg, said Mr. Brin, Mr. Page and Mr. Schmidt were not available to discuss the organization.

By the end of 2008, many of the DotOrg executives hired from the outside had left in frustration, and morale ratings were among the lowest in the company, according to an employee survey. Mr. Schmidt was prodded by other Google executives to review and restructure the operation.

After the review, Google suspended all grants that were not quite final. Grants were canceled to institutions like Harvard and Stanford for research projects in Africa even though Google’s senior management had approved them and they lacked only a final signature on the contracts.

“That may be the way things are done in business, but it’s not how grants are made in the nonprofit world,” said the former Google.org executive. “It was embarrassing.”

Mr. Schmidt moved DotOrg to the Mountain View campus in early 2009. That February, Dr. Brilliant was given the title “chief philanthropic evangelist,” and left the organization soon after to join the Skoll Global Threats Fund. Ms. Smith took over DotOrg.

Engineers from outside DotOrg were assigned to review all of the grants it had made. Not surprisingly, they wanted to know why there wasn’t more engineering in, say, a grant made to assess the quality of basic education in Tanzania’s schools. They also wanted to know why DotOrg wasn’t working more to “scale” up small projects to have a broader impact.

“They never understood that technology is a means to an end, and that in the developing world, sometimes basic technology, like the collection and compilation of data, can have enormous impact,” said another DotOrg program officer, who resigned after the reorganization.

In the end, many grants were labeled “legacy” and discontinued when they expired.

“I believe DotOrg was under pressure to come up with what was called game-changing strategies,” said Professor Simon, who also serves as director of Brandeis’s sustainable international development programs. “They were looking for something like a new algorithm — but there isn’t any algorithm that’s going to eradicate guinea worm.”

Ms. Sandberg said DotOrg got off to a good start. “Problems like global poverty, climate change and global health don’t get solved overnight,” she said. “There is no way to know what its strategy would have accomplished over time because the strategy was changed.”

IN devising what DotOrg would become after Dr. Brilliant, the company went back to the Flu Trends model. It has developed a series of tools based on existing Google technologies, including PowerMeter, which lets people track their home energy use in real time, and Earth Engine, which uses Google Earth and satellite imagery to monitor aspects of the earth’s environment, including deforestation.

So far, PowerMeter has failed to gain widespread adoption, in part because there are a number of competing products and many utilities did not get behind the idea.

Earth Engine, which Google released last month, offers more promise. It includes years of satellite imagery of the planet, and lets scientists use Google’s cloud-computing infrastructure to analyze it.

“You are going to see global-scale, timely information on the way our earth is being modified in a way that we haven’t seen before,” said Matthew C. Hansen, a professor of geography at South Dakota State University, who worked with DotOrg to demonstrate how the tool could be used. “It’s a quantum leap forward.”

DotOrg’s projects related to green energy have received more attention from Google’s top brass, since they are pet projects of the founders and fit with the company’s broader, for-profit investments in clean energy technologies.

The organization’s engineers are working on technology that would make solar energy less expensive and more efficient as part of an initiative to develop renewable energy cheaper than coal. Another effort, to accelerate the development of plug-in cars, has its roots in the original DotOrg. The company worked to modify a fleet of hybrids to draw power from the grid and set up charging stations on its campus.

Google says it cannot easily separate the impact it has had in bringing plug-in hybrids closer to reality from that of others, like General Motors and Toyota, that are also promoting the technology. “Google was one of the entities helping to create the meme that plug-in hybrids are coming,” Ms. Smith said.

DotOrg has also developed tools to respond to disasters, such as a database to track missing people after the earthquake in Haiti. There is also Resource Finder, a map-based tool set up after Pakistan’s floods that helps relief workers locate available hospital beds.

Just as important as the projects themselves, Ms. Smith said, is the formal process for reviewing DotOrg proposals. The ideas, which can now be proposed by any Google employee, are handled very much the way Google handles any idea from its staff — with a rigorous product review. The process lays the foundation for many more projects in coming years, she said.

Google says that when considering all grants and charitable activities by the company, it is meeting the goal set by Mr. Page of devoting 1 percent of the company’s equity at the time of the initial public offering, 1 percent of annual profit and 1 percent of employee time to philanthropy, though Google officials emphasized that the formula was a flexible guideline to be averaged out over the two decades after the I.P.O. (For those interested in the math, Google says it set aside three million shares at the I.P.O. for philanthropic endeavors and spends roughly 1/20th of the current value of those shares every year, along with 1 percent of the previous year’s net income. Employee time is harder to measure, officials say.)

Google puts its overall giving last year at $184 million, including in-kind contributions. Roughly half that amount went to nonprofit groups as cash. An additional 20 percent went to universities under a program that also gives the company an inside track on promising young engineers and research. Just 15 percent went to DotOrg projects.

“We have ramped up our charitable giving, but it is now being done outside of DotOrg by other teams, which has allowed DotOrg to focus on developing engineering solutions,” said Ms. Fuller, the DotOrg spokeswoman who was recently named Google’s director of charitable giving, in an e-mail.

THE reorganization has made it hard to assess whether Google is living up to its original promise. Many of the grants Google makes to organizations like Citizen Schools, Landesa, Ashoka and Unicef seem more like conventional corporate philanthropy than the revolutionary social innovation that Mr. Page pledged.

Indeed, Ms. Fuller measures the philanthropic success of Google by comparing its giving with that of other companies. “I think the big picture is that relative to its peers, Google has been generous with its time and resources,” she wrote.

Yet for now, the high bar set by Mr. Page remains little more than a tantalizing target for DotOrg. “It is a pretty tall order to try to exceed the impact of Google,” Ms. Smith said. “But we are going to try.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/business/30charity.html

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

2011-01-23T00:51:00.000-08:00

Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?

By AMY CHUA

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.
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All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.

When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success - or so the stereotype goes. WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children.
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Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.

From Ms. Chua's album: 'Mean me with Lulu in hotel room... with score taped to TV!'

As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)

Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.

Newborn Amy Chua in her mother's arms, a year after her parents arrived in the U.S.

First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

Sophia playing at Carnegie Hall in 2007.

Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.

Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.

Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.

Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.

"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.

"You can't make me."

"Oh yes, I can."

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?

"You just don't believe in her," I accused.

"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."

"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."

"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.

"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.

Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.

Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.

"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."

Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html

Facebook Wins Relatively Few Friends in Japan

2011-01-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

Facebook Wins Relatively Few Friends in Japan
By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: January 9, 2011

TOKYO — Mark Zuckerberg. Who?

Yuriko Nakao/Reuters
Kenji Kasahara, the chief executive of Mixi, one of Japan’s most popular social networking sites.

Mr. Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old Facebook chief executive and co-founder, may be the man of the moment in the United States and much of the rest of the online world. But here in Japan, one of the globe’s most wired nations, few people have heard of him.

And relatively few Japanese use Facebook, the global social-networking phenomenon based in Palo Alto, Calif., that recently added its 583 millionth member worldwide.

Facebook users in Japan number fewer than two million, or less than 2 percent of the country’s online population. That is in sharp contrast to the United States, where 60 percent of Internet users are on Facebook, according to the analytics site Socialbakers.

So even as Goldman Sachs pours $450 million into the company, Japan, with a large and growing online advertising market, is a big hole in Facebook’s global fabric.

Japanese, until now, have flocked to various well-entrenched social networking sites and game portals — like Mixi, Gree and Mobage-town. Each has more than 20 million users, and each offers its own approach to connecting people online.

One trait those sites have in common is crucial to Japan’s fiercely private Internet users. The Japanese sites let members mask their identities, in distinct contrast to the real-name, oversharing hypothetical user on which Facebook’s business model is based.

Japanese Web users, even popular bloggers, typically hide behind pseudonyms or nicknames.

“Facebook does face a challenge in Japan,” said Shigenori Suzuki, a Tokyo-based analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings. “There are powerful rivals, and then there’s the question of Japanese Web culture.”

Taro Kodama, Facebook’s manager for Japan, referred questions to the United States, where a spokeswoman, Kumiko Hidaka, did not respond to requests for comment.

One key to the growth that might help justify the $50 billion valuation that Goldman’s planned investment placed on Facebook would be to expand its presence in Japan. The overall online advertising market in the country had sales of 706.9 billion yen ($8.5 billion) in 2009. (Someday China could present another big growth opportunity. But, for now, government censors there block access to Facebook.)

Mr. Zuckerberg has promised to address the Japan gap. But it will not be easy.

To begin with, each of Japan’s own social networking sites, though no longer growing at the breakneck pace of the past few years, has at least 10 times as many users as Facebook, which was introduced in Japanese in mid-2008.

Most similar to Facebook is Mixi, started in 2004. Users post photographs, share comments and links, and interact on community pages that have become huge forums based on themes as diverse as recipe-sharing and Michael Jackson. Mixi has more than 21.6 million members.

Fast-growing Gree, which overtook Mixi this year with nearly 22.5 million registered users, has expanded by buttressing a popular game platform for mobile phones that offers free games, which users play with manga-style avatars; fancy outfits or tools for games are available for a fee.

Mobage-town, which has almost 21.7 million users, offers a similar combination of avatars, games and accessories. It also lets users earn virtual gaming money by clicking on advertisers’ Web sites.

Now, all three sites are starting to incorporate elements of Facebook — like allowing third-party developers to make apps for the sites — giving Japanese users little reason to switch.

Mixi, meanwhile, has been adapting some techniques of other popular Silicon Valley start-ups. Since late 2009, for example, Mixi users have been able to send short, real-time messages with a maximum of 150 characters, akin to Twitter, the popular microblogging service.

Such flourishes have not kept many Japanese consumers from taking to Twitter, which is catching on here at a speed Facebook may envy. A partnership with Digital Garage, a local Internet and mobile services company, has touched off a surge in Twitter users, who numbered about 10 million in Japan in July, according to Nielsen Online NetView. But Twitter does not require users to reveal their identities.

Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg are about to get a blast of publicity in Japan, although perhaps not of the most positive sort. “The Social Network,” the movie that presents a less-than-flattering portrayal of Mr. Zuckerberg, opens in Japan this week.

Facebook has stepped up efforts to tailor its service to Japan. A Japanese version of the site, translated free by volunteers, was introduced a few years ago, but the company opened a Tokyo office in February to customize the site for Japan. (Facebook’s Japanese site, for example, allows users to display their blood types, considered an important personality trait here.)

Some users complain that Facebook’s Japanese-language site is awkward to use.

People like Maiko Ueda, 26, a Mixi devotee, see little reason to switch. Ms. Ueda, who works at a stationer based in Osaka, logs into Mixi at least once a day to read other users’ “diaries,” which resemble status updates on Facebook, albeit in longer form. She uploads pictures of her American shorthair cat, and sometimes writes about her day in her own posts.

But most people on Mixi do not know her real name, nor have they seen what she looks like. In her five years on Mixi, she has never uploaded a photo of herself.

She has heard of Facebook but says she is suspicious of “how open it seems.”

“I don’t want to give it my real name,” Ms. Ueda said. “What if strangers find out who you are? Or someone from your company?” She spoke on the condition that her Mixi user name would not be revealed.

In a survey of 2,130 Japanese mobile Web users by the Tokyo-based MMD Laboratory, 89 percent of respondents said they were reluctant to disclose their real names on the Web. Specialists say that while Facebook users in the United States tend to recreate real-life social relationships online, many Japanese use Web anonymity to express themselves, free from the pressures to fit into a conformist workplace.

In a 2010 survey by Microsoft of social network use among 3,000 people in 11 Asia-Pacific countries and regions, respondents on average said that only about one-quarter of their friends on social networking sites were close friends. In Japan, more than half of all respondents said that not one of their acquaintances on social networks was a close friend.

Mixi has grown by letting users sign up with pseudonyms, and gives its subscribers fine-tune controls over who sees posts and other uploads. Mixi also lets users closely monitor who has viewed their profiles with a function known as “footprints.”

In contrast, Facebook has insisted that Japanese users adhere to its real-name policy. “Facebook values real-life connections,” warns a message that pops up when a Japanese user withholds information, like the traditional characters used in names. “Please use your real name,” it reads.

“I think there has to be an event, a celebrity signing up for Facebook, or something else that teaches Japanese users that identifying themselves online isn’t scary and can be useful,” said Toshihiko Michibata, an e-commerce and social media consultant in Japan.

Japan could be an extreme case of the privacy issues that Facebook is tackling elsewhere. Facebook introduced stronger privacy controls in May after groups complained that it shared too much personal data.

“The dangers of too little privacy may be lost in the global Facebook fad, but it’s likely to become a growing problem elsewhere,” said a popular blogger known online as Akky Akimoto, who does not reveal his real name and refuses to be photographed in public. “I’d hate it if people on the street recognize me, without me knowing.”

Still, Facebook may have a powerful force on its side: Japanese consumers’ penchant for all things new.

With Mixi in its seventh year, it is starting “to feel old,” said Mitsuyo Nakata, a Web designer. Its growth has slowed, as have advertising revenue and investor confidence. Profits have fallen at Mixi for three of the last four quarters, and its stock price has slumped 70 percent since its initial public offering in 2006.

In an interview with the Nippon Television Network in November, Mr. Kodama, the Facebook manager for Japan, said he was confident that users would start warming to Facebook’s real-name policy once they discovered the usefulness of finding old classmates online.

“The Internet in Japan has not been so closely connected with real society,” he said. “Those other community sites can keep offering the joys of staying remote from real life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/technology/10facebook.html

Winner of Beijing’s Peace Award Is Also Absent

2010-12-10T07:08:00.000-08:00

Winner of Beijing’s Peace Award Is Also Absent
By BENJAMIN HAAS and EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — The Confucius Peace Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize have an obvious theme in common: Both promote peace. The two prizes also share something else: Winners absent from the award ceremonies this week.

Yang Disheng, a member of the Confucius prize jury, carried a young girl who accepted the prize for Lien Chan in Beijing.

A young girl with no apparent connection to former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan accepted on his behalf the certificate for the Confucius Prize on Thursday in Beijing.

The Confucius prize was conceived in recent weeks by a group of patriotic Chinese as an answer to the Nobel Peace Prize, which will be officially granted to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident serving an 11-year prison sentence, in a ceremony in Oslo on Friday.

But the ceremony for the Confucius prize, which took place Thursday afternoon, was a bare-bones affair. The winner, Lien Chan, a Taiwanese politician friendly to the Chinese Communist Party, did not show up at the conference room in downtown Beijing where the prize committee had gathered. Nor has he expressed any intention of accepting the prize, which comes with a $15,000 award.

That presented the committee with a problem: Who would collect the prize?

In a room packed with mostly foreign reporters, a young girl who apparently had no connection to Mr. Lien accepted a 10-inch circle-shaped statuette. There was little fanfare — the prize committee uttered just a single line announcing the winner, then took questions.

At that point, the committee was peppered with inquiries about its views on the Nobel Peace Prize and Mr. Liu.

Tan Changliu, chairman of the committee, made every attempt to steer the conversation away from that subject. In a page seemingly taken from the Harry Potter books, he tried to avoid referring to Mr. Liu by name, instead calling him the man “with the three-character name.”

Mr. Tan said the prize was meant to give “a Chinese perspective on peace.” When pressed on its relation to the Norwegian prize, he said that China had had a longer history with peace. He added, “Did the Nobel Peace Prize influence Confucius, or did Confucius influence the Nobel Peace Prize?”

The panel distributed a booklet that opened with a paragraph saying that China, with its 1.3 billion people, “should have a greater voice on the issue of world peace” and that “Norway is only a small country with scarce land area and population.”

The booklet had brief profiles of the eight candidates the committee had considered for the prize — including three mainland Chinese and two Americans, Bill Gates and Jimmy Carter — and the five Chinese judges, all middle-age men with ties to famous universities in Beijing. Mr. Tan has said that the group was not a government organization, though it works closely with the Ministry of Culture.

Worn down by so many questions, Zhao Zhenjiang, one of the judges, went on a tirade against the United States and wondered aloud why President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize last year when he is staging military exercises with South Korea in the Yellow Sea.

Finally, after more than a half-hour of back-to-back questions about the dissident who must not be named, Mr. Tan relented. “If you really want to talk about Liu Xiaobo,” he said, “in 500 years you will see history is on our side.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/world/asia/10confucius.html

Can China Discover the Urge to Splurge?

2010-11-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: November 24, 2010

Thousands of Chinese flock to the enormous Ikea in Beijing every weekend, some to shop but many just to relax.

When the Wuqi International Hotel was completed this spring, it immediately dominated the modest skyline of Wuqi, a small city in north central China. The hotel stands 21 stories tall and is wrapped in gleaming gray metal, with two glass elevators running up the outside. On a recent stay there, I had a clear view of the nearby mountains from my 19th-floor room.

By pushing consumption, as at Gome Electrical Appliances, some Chinese leaders hope to map a transition to a stronger economy.

To maintain economic growth, China has invested more and more in highways and in the workers who build them.

In the small city of Wuqi, a modest food stand sits in the shadow of the gleaming new Wuqi International Hotel.

Wuqi has oil, and local leaders decided to spend money from it on education, to the benefit of a new preschool and its napping students.

Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times

The hotel is part of an effort by local officials to reshape their city in ways that many economists, both inside and outside China, have been recommending for the country as a whole. The government of Wuqi (pronounced, roughly, Wu-tzi) offers more generous health insurance to its citizens than many places. Its schools are free all the way through high school, rather than through only ninth grade, as is usual in China, and have been the subject of admiring stories in the Chinese media. Over the last decade, the city has embarked on an ambitious tree-planting program that has brought green to the yellow-brown hills of the Loess Plateau, where Wuqi is located. The Communists ended their Long March in those hills in 1935, and the Wuqi International Hotel is meant to host tourists who come for this history.

The larger idea is to build a more sustainable economy, or what Chinese leaders have called a balanced and harmonious society. In that economy, families would not have to save 20 percent of their income in order to pay for schooling and medical care, as many do now. They would instead be able to afford more of the comforts of modern life — better housing, clothing, transportation and communication. In time, China would become the world’s next great consumer society.

That term may have negative connotations in the United States, particularly after the last decade of debt excess. But the term means something very different for China. A Chinese consumer society would improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The benefits of the industrial boom that began in the 1980s would spread more rapidly beyond the country’s eastern coast. The service sector would grow, and the economy would no longer be quite so dependent on smoke-spewing factories.

For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack. Millions of Americans — yes, millions — could end up with jobs that exist, at least in part, to design, make or sell goods and services to China. This possibility helps explain why Democrats, Republicans, economists, business consultants, corporate executives and labor leaders all devote so much time to urging China to consume more. One subtext of the recent G-20 meeting in Seoul was the encouragement of Chinese consumption.

What’s striking about Wuqi is just how serious its officials are about making this transition happen — and yet how difficult it nonetheless will be. The Wuqi International Hotel was as comfortable as most Marriotts or Hiltons in the United States, but the surrounding streets had the dusty feel of a backwater. The hardware, liquor and food stores down the block were each the size of a storage closet and about as well lighted. In the evenings, when Wuqi residents gathered in a public square to talk or perform exercises together, many of the stores were closed. The parents I met were thrilled that high school was free but were still saving an enormous portion of their modest incomes to pay for college or a new home. Those savings create a self-reinforcing cycle, in which stores don’t flourish because people don’t shop much and people don’t shop much partly because there aren’t many good stores. As Feng Zhendong, Wuqi’s reform-minded Communist Party secretary, says, “There’s only so much to spend on.”

Then there was the hotel itself. During my first night there, I don’t think I saw a single other guest — in the lobby, the restaurant, the elevator or on the 19th floor. After I used the hotel gym, the front desk called to ask if I would be using it the next morning as well. In that case, someone would make sure it was unlocked.

No one believes the Chinese economy will transform itself overnight. But how long will it take and how difficult will it be? Preoccupied with our own economic insecurity, Americans may well be underestimating the challenges — and fears — of their new rival.

The rise of China can often seem inevitable. It is the world’s most populous country, now reclaiming its long-lost power. Its economy recently passed Japan’s as the second-biggest in the world, leaving economists to debate whether China was on pace to overtake the United States by the year 2025 or 2030. Yet China’s rise has been anything but inevitable. Consider other poor countries — in South America, Africa and even Asia — with vast pools of cheap labor, which nonetheless have not been able to grow rapidly. Or consider other once-socialist countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, still suffering from a post-Soviet hangover. Even look at India, which is often paired with China as the great growth story of modern times. As recently as 1990, India had a comparable per-capita income to China. Today, China’s is more than twice as high. So having a lot of cheap labor or moving toward a market system, or even both, does not guarantee the phenomenal growth China has experienced.

That growth — among the most rapid in human history — has been a result of strategy and good fortune. The Maoist period was brutal and repressive, but despite the terrible famines and the Cultural Revolution’s assault on education, China did emerge with an unusually literate and healthy population for a poor country. Toward the end of that period, even before the one-child policy, a baby boom ended, creating a relatively small group of children and elderly to be supported by a large group of able workers. Into this fertile economic ground, Deng Xiaoping and his fellow reformers planted the seeds of a market evolution. Workers gained an incentive to succeed, while central planners, unconstrained by democracy, made the investments to turn China into the world’s factory.

This model is part of something that has been called the Beijing Consensus, and it is understandably appealing to other poor countries. Yet in many respects it is not new. Politics aside, China’s story is the classic one of economic development: investments in physical capital and education make a society more productive and are combined with a huge shift of people from farms to factories. England, Germany, the United States, Japan and South Korea have all followed the model over the last 250 years. The economist Gregory Clark, author of “A Farewell to Alms,” calls it the only story of economic development.

And this same story explains why China’s continued rise is no more inevitable than its recent rise. From far away, China may look like an unstoppable colossus. From the inside, it looks more vulnerable. Indeed, Chinese economists, business executives and Communist Party officials are debating, sometimes passionately, just how vulnerable it is. “In the short and medium term, there should be no problem,” says Yu Yongding, a prominent economist. Among other things, the government has built up enough savings to spend its way out of most problems over the next several years. “But there are fundamental contradictions in the Chinese economy. We can waste our strengths in one or two decades. If we exhaust these strengths, then we’ll be in a big trouble.”

To continue growing rapidly, China needs to make the next transition, from sweatshop economy to innovation economy. This transition is the one that has often proved difficult elsewhere. Once a country has turned itself into an export factory, it cannot keep growing by repeating the exercise. It can’t move a worker from an inefficient farm to a modern factory more than once. It cannot even retain its industrial might forever. As a country industrializes, workers will demand their share of the bounty, as has started happening in China, and some factories will start moving to poorer countries. Eventually, a rising economy needs to take two crucial steps: manufacture goods that aren’t just cheaper than the competition, but better; and create a thriving domestic market, so that its own consumers can pick up the slack when exports inevitably slow. These steps go hand in hand. Big consumer markets become laboratories where companies know that innovations will be tested and the successful ones richly rewarded. Those products can then expand into countries with less mature consumer markets. Look at the telephone, the personal computer and the iPhone and iPad, all of which were designed in the United States and are now sold around the world.

Today’s China cannot claim any such achievement, a fact that weighs on Chinese policymakers. They worry about the country’s ability to innovate and, in particular, about the quality of its education system. When I met with Guo Shuqing, a party official and the chairman of China Construction Bank, in his office high above Beijing’s financial district, he mentioned that a recent ranking of the world’s top 100 universities included 53 from the United States but just three from mainland China. Even those numbers, Guo said, probably overstated the strengths of China’s universities: “In terms of innovation — really original, creative ideas — they’re very weak,” he told me. By contrast, the American education system helped make possible Google and other companies.

Clearly, many of China’s weaknesses can be ascribed to its stage of development. Yet there is no iron law that it will reach the next stage. Japan and the Soviet Union, in different ways, both failed to make the transition to an innovation economy. While they may seem like unimpressive comparisons today, they once occupied a position much like China’s. They were rising powers that appeared to have found a new model for growth. In a 1994 essay in Foreign Affairs, Paul Krugman, the economist who is now a New York Times columnist, pointed out that Americans were then talking about Japan and the so-called East Asian tigers in ways remarkably similar to how they had talked about the Soviet bloc in the 1960s. “Once upon a time,” he wrote, “Western opinion leaders found themselves both impressed and frightened by the extraordinary growth rates achieved by a set of Eastern economies.”

The Soviet Union, of course, utterly failed to take the next steps. Japan did nurture some of the world’s most successful exporters, like Sony and Toyota, and developed just-in-time manufacturing processes that were widely copied. But its domestic market remains sheltered and inefficient, especially in the service sector, which has held back growth and innovation. Japan has not merely slowed down, as is inevitable when countries get richer; it has become a global symbol of economic mismanagement. These troubles seem directly relevant to China, given that China, too, has protected much of its domestic economy from competition.

The United States, for all of our current problems, is still easily the world’s largest economy, which is partly because we made the transition from an industrial economy to a consumer economy. Income in the United States remains about 30 percent higher than in Germany or England on a per-capita basis, 40 percent higher than in Japan and more than six times as high as in China.

China does have advantages that other countries did not, starting with its size. But it still will not find the transition easy. A consumer economy revolves around individual choice, and Beijing’s authoritarian government is often hostile to the idea of choice. The government is also filled with many officials who have known only industrial-led growth — and have benefited from it — and who are at least as influential as the economic reformers preaching the virtues of domestic consumption. These reformers will have to persuade their colleagues to step back from the most aggressive industrialization any country has ever undertaken. China now spends about 50 percent of its gross domestic product on a broad category economists call investment — roads, bridges, trains, ports, technology, factories and office buildings. That is the highest share in recorded history. During their great booms in the 1960s and ’70s, Japan and South Korea never topped 40 percent. China itself was spending 35 percent only a decade ago.

Already, there are signs that China is bumping up against the limits of its industrial revolution. Other countries are frustrated with its growing share of exports and are pressing China to raise the value of its currency, the renminbi. And the demographic wind that has been at China’s back is on the verge of switching direction, leaving the country with fewer workers and more retirees. Without a seemingly endless supply of cheap labor, companies will have to raise wages, which — like a higher renminbi — would make Chinese exports less competitive. Even before the demographic trends put pressure on pay, this year’s strikes at a Honda plant in Guangdong Province, among other factories, led some companies to lift wages more than 20 percent. Twenty-eight provincial governments increased their minimum wage between 12 percent and 32 percent.

Perhaps the most telling sign that China’s economic model is reaching its limits is a decline in its efficiency. To maintain 10 percent annual economic growth, it has had to invest more and more in roads, buildings and the like. In other words, the return on its investments has begun to fall, which is never a good sign. “We’ve got a problem,” Guo, the bank chairman, told me. “We realize this kind of growth is not sustainable. It’s not the kind of problem like a financial crisis. But if such inefficiencies accumulate for quite a long time, you reach the point where, suddenly, maybe things burst.”

During my recent stay in China, I came away, as many Westerners do, awed by the country’s accomplishments. Cities have sprouted from nothing, allowing peasants to leap a century of economic history in a decade. Rural areas have highways that are smoother than in many major American cities. One bullet train I took could cover the distance between New York and Washington in an hour. The United States is on course to have such a train approximately never.

But once you start to notice the signs of unsustainability, you start seeing them everywhere. Some highways are strangely empty. So are some buildings. When I tagged along with a group of American businessmen on a tour of what we thought was a new energy-efficient office building in Hangzhou, a coastal city a couple of hours south of Shanghai, we soon realized that it was — hard as such a thing may be to imagine — a sample office building. It had been built to show potential investors what their business might look like if it moved to Hangzhou.

This unsustainability is especially pronounced in the current real estate mania. Housing prices have been soaring, despite government efforts to cool the market. Relative to rents, housing prices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou are higher than they were in most any American city at the peak of our housing bubble. In Beijing or Shanghai, four or five different real estate agencies might open on a single block. Other agents simply set up shop on the sidewalk, with a table and brochures. At traffic lights in Beijing, young men walk among the idling cars and hand out brochures for newly built apartments.

It is true that an economy growing as rapidly as China’s can catch up to many of its excesses. But it will probably need to change to do so. Wages will have to rise faster, and people will have to spend more of their income. Otherwise, many infrastructure projects will end up resembling make-work, and house prices will fall. Banks and the government will then be saddled with bad loans, exhausting the fiscal strength that Yu and other economists see as China’s biggest advantage.

None of this means China is on the verge of running out of steam. It probably has at least 5 or 10 years of rapid growth ahead, even if it simply doubles down on its current growth strategy, because it can still take more industrial market share from other countries. In a way, though, the country’s short-term strengths in manufacturing and exporting may be another reason to wonder what the future holds. Those strengths will make it harder for China to summon the urgency to remake itself.

The debate over economic policy in China feels different from other political debates. People who will not mention the words “Tibet,” “Falun Gong” or “1989” in polite conversation talk openly and critically about the state of the economy. The criticism serves party leaders’ purposes in some ways, because it tends to underscore that China remains a poor country, unable — in their telling — to reduce pollution or raise the value of the renminbi without causing economic misery for its citizens. The closest thing to a loyalty test in the public discussion of the economy is the renminbi. Chinese economists often harshly criticize the United States for putting pressure on China to appreciate its currency, even if they eventually get around to mentioning that they, too, think it should rise.

Yu, the economist who worries that China has only a decade or two to avoid trouble, qualifies as a moderate reformer. Sixty-two years old, with a mop of graying hair and long, loose sideburns, he is part of the generation that has lived through nearly all of the Communists’ time in power. His great-grandparents immigrated to the United States as laborers in the 19th century, but the family eventually returned to China. His father was a journalist, and Yu himself was going to college in Beijing when the Cultural Revolution began in the mid-1960s. Branded an intellectual, he spent 10 years working as a semiskilled laborer at the Beijing Heavy Machinery Factory. “If you were lucky, you went to a factory,” he told me. The unlucky students were sent to remote provinces or worse. Still, he refers to his time in the factory as hard labor.

When not on the job, he read voraciously and realized he wanted to become an economist. He is not great at any one thing, he says, but is interested in many, including history and math. Economics seemed like the ideal profession. In 1979, he joined the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a research group founded as part of Deng’s economic reforms. Except for the six years he spent at Oxford earning his doctorate, he has been at the academy ever since. Stephen Green, a Shanghai-based economist with Standard Chartered, the British bank, calls Yu one of the pioneers who brought statistically rigorous methods to Chinese economics and was willing to follow the evidence wherever it led. This doesn’t make Yu a dissident, however. He calls himself quite conservative. “I believe in gradualism,” he told me.

China’s gradualist approach to economic policy has been a big part of its success. The country avoided the turmoil that some of Eastern Europe experienced when it switched almost overnight to a market system. China has also escaped the fate of old-style centrally planned economies like Cuba’s, because Deng and his followers were more pragmatic than ideological. If something worked — if it led to growth and jobs — they usually favored it. As Yu says: “Growth has been the single-most-important objective of Chinese policies for decades. Without growth, there are not enough jobs, and there is instability.” To create these jobs, the party has heavily subsidized companies, especially manufacturers that export goods. Some of these subsidies are direct and obvious, like those now benefiting China’s clean-energy industry. But most are subtler. Yu ticked off a few:

The government holds down the price of coal, oil and other natural resources, hurting interior provinces that produce these resources to the benefit of coastal exporters that use them. Beijing also sets a ceiling on interest rates, which harms households trying to build a nest egg and helps capital-intensive businesses that borrow to expand. The price of labor is indirectly suppressed, too. Independent unions are illegal, and a household-registration system called hukou has long treated many migrants who move from distant provinces to cities to work as if they were illegal immigrants. Basic benefits — free schooling, pension, health insurance — are often unavailable to people who work outside their native regions.

The renminbi falls into the same category. By buying large amounts of United States Treasury bonds (and, to a lesser extent, Japanese and European bonds), China has kept its currency artificially low. The renminbi has roughly the same value today as it did in 1990, relative to a basket of other currencies, which is remarkable considering how much faster China’s economy has grown than the world economy. The low renminbi holds down the price of Chinese-made goods in other countries, increasing exports. But it also means that foreign-made products are more expensive within China than they would otherwise be. In effect, China’s government is deliberately reducing the buying power of its own consumers to subsidize its exporters.

On the currency, Yu takes the typical stance for a reform-oriented economist. “For the sake of China, I am a strong supporter of renminbi appreciation,” he told me. On the other hand, he is angered by Americans who argue that the exchange rate damages the United States. “That’s total rubbish,” he says. “The problem is not between China and the United States. The problem is between American companies that invest in China and American workers within the United States.” This analysis may overstate the case; because exports are a larger part of China’s economy than imports, it does seem to benefit on net from the low renminbi. But Yu is certainly correct that Western companies with a large presence inside China — a long and influential list — also benefit from the low renminbi. American workers who have lost their jobs to outsourcing do not.

On a September afternoon, Yu and I were sitting in the living room of a hotel suite on the outskirts of Beijing. He lives in the city with his wife, but he was staying at the hotel for a few nights to attend a conference for American and Chinese economists called the Summer Palace Dialogue. The Summer Palace was the emperor’s country retreat, and the resort where the economists were staying tried to combine ancient grandeur with five-star amenities. “I don’t like this,” Yu said, gesturing around the room with its finely appointed furniture. “It is too much. It is not necessary.” Such excess, he noted, “is a problem with China’s political system.”

The subsidies that China showers on its corporate sector have been crucial to building an industrial economy. But they have also led to a severe concentration of income. Some of it takes a form Americans are used to: the rich receive a much larger share of the national income than they did a few decades ago. Forbes reported early this year that mainland China and Hong Kong had 89 billionaires. Japan, with an economy almost as large as China’s and per-capita income several times higher, had just 22. Shanghai now has three of its own Louis Vuitton stores.

In addition to the high degree of income concentration, China has another kind of inequality. All the corporate subsidies have allowed companies to accumulate enormous profits, and a corporation’s gains and losses ultimately flow to individuals. In China, today’s huge profits mostly benefit the well-off, be they executives, investors or party officials. The well-off not only have much higher take-home pay than the rank-and-file but also tend to be the ones who have access to the benefits of hoarded corporate cash. Many of the new Audi and Buick sedans on the streets — China’s versions of the Lincoln Town Car — are company cars, and many of the guests at the Summer Palace resort are on expense accounts. State-owned companies have done especially well, even in resource industries where the price of their products is kept artificially low. Huang Yiping, an economist who previously worked at Citigroup, points out that state-owned banks tend to have much grander office buildings than their private, generally foreign rivals. In Wuqi, the only building that compares with the new hotel is another hotel owned by the local oil company.

Yet despite the long boom, most Chinese citizens remain fairly poor. Per-capita G.D.P. is about $7,000, and consumption makes up only 35 percent of the economy, thanks to the high levels of savings and corporate profits. So per-capita consumption — the amount of money the average person spends — is only about $2,500 a year. In the United States, by comparison, it is about $30,000. In Brazil, where per-capita G.D.P. is one and a half times that of China’s, consumption is more than two and a half times as high, or about $7,000.

Of course, anyone who has lived through the global bubble and bust of the last few years may wonder what’s so great about a consumer society. In the United States, the idea that we have reoriented our economy toward consumption and don’t make things anymore has become a standard lament, not a sign of progress. But China is a long way from consuming too much. Saying that China does not have a big-enough consumer economy is really another way of saying that not enough of its resources reach the broad mass of its people. If they had more resources, they would surely spend more. This is why the recent labor strikes, and the pay increases that followed, were so important. They were a sign that Chinese households might start to enjoy more of the fruits of the long boom.

In coming years, the pressure to raise wages will increase. The size of China’s labor force, relative to the rest of its population, will peak in the next few years, if it hasn’t already. The country is still a long way from facing labor shortages, but the flow of young workers from the countryside will slow. Companies will probably have to respond by raising wages of their existing workers or by moving inland, where wages are lower, and paying workers there what they once paid workers on the coast. Either way, the effect will be to raise the average wage nationwide. Foxconn, which employs 920,000 people making iPhones and other technology products, is opening new factories in Chongqing, a large city 1,000 miles inland.

Given that China is not exactly a free-market economy, the extent to which wages rise will depend in no small part on government policy. Party officials are themselves torn over what to do. One businessman told me he knew that most outsiders thought of China as a top-down, centralized country. “But China is a collection of special interests,” he said, “like the U.S.” Leaders understand that suppressing labor unrest may help economic growth in the short term by holding down wages and thus the price of exports. But many also know that economic discontent risks political instability of the kind that in the last century alone toppled an emperor and Chiang Kai-shek, led to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and threatened the current regime in Tiananmen Square.

Yu finds the allocation of resources to be perhaps the most frustrating aspect of today’s economy. Even as companies and the largest cities are prospering, many parts of society are starved of resources. Last year, Yu’s wife spent part of the summer tutoring the daughter of the woman who cleans their building. The girl was moving from her hometown to live with her mother in Beijing and needed to learn English to keep up with her new classmates. The rural school she came from did not teach English. (Her family also had to pay tuition, because the hukou household-registration system denied them free education outside their home province.) In some rural areas, the teachers themselves have not graduated from high school. As part of a lecture he recently gave, Yu included some photographs among the usual economic charts and graphs. One showed students at their desks in a rural classroom, surrounded by muddy puddles on a dirt floor. Others showed the spectacular new Beijing Opera House, a bullet train and a series of gaudy provincial government buildings.

It is worth pausing for a minute on this contrast. In the big cities of the coast, the creation of a Chinese consumer society is proceeding apace. Sometimes, it can even seem a step ahead of the United States. On the tunnel walls between some stops of the Beijing subway, video advertisements move at the same speed as the train, vying for riders’ attention with televisions, also showing ads, inside the subway cars. Modern Chinese society hardly seems hostile to the idea of consumption. The problem is how little money so many people have.

Wuqi has been able to try a different economic model because it is neither too rich nor too poor. Located in Shaanxi Province, about a third of the way west from Beijing toward Tibet, it is too remote to be a factory boomtown. Indeed, it can feel more like part of China’s past than its future. The billboards lining the mountain roads into Wuqi display Communist Party sayings like “Support the military, and the military should love the people.” The older homes in the area are the same kind as those in which Mao and his comrades lived during their Shaanxi exile: mountainside caves, fronted by a stone archway and facade. But Wuqi also has oil. Feng, the party secretary, has decided to spend a large portion of the oil money on education.

Growing up in a farmer’s family in Shaanxi, Feng was the sixth child of seven, and the only one to go to college. When I asked him why, he said his family could not afford to send more than one child and decided he was the most clever. Most of his siblings are now farmers or laborers. Feng became a hydro-engineer at a state-owned company until the party told him to go into government. Today, at 44, he travels around Wuqi in a government-issued white Toyota Land Cruiser, frequently checking e-mail on his Coolpad smartphone.

Many of the teachers Feng had growing up were unqualified. As party secretary, he has closed more than 100 village schools and built new, centralized ones. Students as young as 6 spend Sunday through Thursday nights in brightly colored dormitory rooms that, like many newer local houses, have archways evoking the caves. Wuqi has also raided other cities to hire well-regarded teachers, sometimes offering annual salaries equivalent to $30,000, which is several times what a locally hired teacher makes.

In some ways, Wuqi’s schools are impressive. Feng made sure a new preschool was built in advance of a neighboring low-income apartment complex, so that children who moved in would immediately be able to enroll. The steps of an elementary school I visited were painted with American sayings to help students learn (like “That’s all!” and, oddly, “I’m on a diet”). A middle school had a 2,500-seat sports stadium. At one Wuqi high school, uniformed students walked down a hallway beneath photographs of Amherst College and N.Y.U. In other ways, though, the schools have a long way to go. Every high-school class I saw, for instance, had more than 50 students. The fairest conclusion seemed to be that Wuqi’s schools were improving and that local party leaders were serious about continuing to improve them.

Education has already played an underappreciated role in China’s rise. For decades, Chinese children have spent more years in school than their peers in other countries; among the world’s many cheap laborers, China’s have been uncommonly skilled. As Arthur Kroeber, editor of the China Economic Quarterly, says, “You can have a lot of cheap labor, but if that cheap labor can’t read, can’t follow instructions and is sick all the time, it doesn’t help you.”

The next step is to educate people not just for factory work but for the white-collar work that would be a growing part of a consumer economy. Much of that work requires a full high-school education, if not college too. Today 55 percent of China’s adult population has graduated from high school (compared with less than 10 percent in India). But only about 5 percent of Chinese adults have a college degree of some kind.

The uneven quality of China’s colleges presents one problem. A recent book coined the term “ant tribe” to describe the many struggling recent graduates, particularly of second- and third-tier colleges. Over the long term, the bigger problem is that education beyond junior high school is financially out of reach to many families. In most parts of China, tuition starts when children are about 14. In a recent poll, Chinese families cited education as the main reason that they save money.

Even in Wuqi, many parents, thinking ahead to college, worry about being able to afford their children’s education. On a drizzly Tuesday in September, just before the start of the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, I talked with a woman named Guo Xiuqin while she and her twin 4-year-old daughters waited outside a preschool for another child they were taking home. Guo, wearing a simple leather jacket, described how Wuqi had changed in recent years. “The new houses are so different, with tiles and bricks and new colors,” she said. Farmers are no longer tied to their land, thanks in part to a local program that gives them money to plant trees on it instead. Her husband spends most of his time on the road, running a small transportation business. In all, the family makes about $8,000 a year, and the free preschool has allowed them to increase savings. Guo guessed they now saved about half their income. “College will cost a lot of money,” she said, and she wants her daughters to go as far in school as they are able.

The rest of their income pays for food and clothing and to take care of elderly parents. I asked if there was anything Guo, who is 30, hoped to be able to buy in the future. “I don’t want anything,” she said. What about an apartment in the village, closer to the school, rather than in the countryside? “Of course,” she replied, smiling, “but how could I possibly dream of that?”

If China does ultimately build a consumer economy, it will probably depend more on Guo’s daughters than on Guo herself. Today’s teenagers were born after the Tiananmen massacre and have known nothing but boom times, and they may have a different attitude toward spending than their parents. For one thing, teenagers are surprisingly heavy users of technology, given China’s income level. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group found that people in China spent more time online and were more likely to buy goods online than people in any other large developing country, even richer ones, like Brazil and Russia. The study also found that in rural China, nearly half of all Internet users were under 20. Nearly 80 percent were under 30.

In Wuqi, Internet service works quite well, and personal computers have become common in the last few years. “All my colleagues shop online,” says Ma Jingye, 24, who works for the county government. She was using the Internet regularly while she was going to college in Beijing, and when she returned to Wuqi this summer, she was surprised to find it had caught on there, too. Ma said she spent about 200 to 300 renminbi a month, which translates into roughly $30 to $45, shopping on Taobao, China’s version of Amazon.

Taobao makes for a nice example of the symbiotic relationship between consumption and innovation. Its parent company, Alibaba, which is based in Hangzhou, has grown to be one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies, as have two other Chinese companies — Tencent, an instant-messaging service, and Baidu, a search engine. They have been able to grow so large because of China’s high Internet usage and because the industry, unlike many others in the service sector, is not dominated by powerful state-owned firms. Internet companies succeed by providing good service at a reasonable price.

But Chinese Internet companies are still a long way from being as innovative as American or European ones. Taobao, Tencent and Baidu do little that Western companies do not. The Chinese companies have succeeded by copying innovations from elsewhere and then executing them well in their home market. Many of today’s start-ups are trying to follow the same business strategy. At Innovation Works, an incubator in Beijing founded by Lee Kai-Fu, the former head of Google’s China division, fresh-faced entrepreneurs work long hours in adjoining cubicles trying to create the next Taobao. They are charmingly honest about the fact that they are not on the cutting edge. One engineer at Innovation Works explained to me that success didn’t yet require innovation. The Chinese market is still hungry for the basics.

The dynamic is at work in industry after industry. One of the nicer stores in Wuqi is a small one run by Li Ning, a top Chinese sneaker and sporting- goods company. It resembles the kind of small sneaker store you might find in a low-end American mall. Even Li Ning’s logo, on its products and on the front of the store, is familiar. It is a modified Nike swoosh.

In addition to the immature consumer market, China’s education system also holds back innovation. Party leaders, from Feng to the highest levels in Beijing, worry that schools have not yet figured out how to create entrepreneurs who can build great businesses. “The traditional education produces a problem,” Feng said, “in which people can do well in exams but don’t have very innovative skills.” To address the problem, Wuqi has added more art and music to the curriculum, on top of the usual math, Chinese and English. The high school with the Amherst and N.Y.U. photos on the wall has created clubs for handicrafts, physics, chemistry and singing. Feng admits he does not yet know how well the efforts are working.

Still, you can see how China’s new entrepreneurs might begin to emerge. If schools began producing more innovation-minded students, they could feed off an increase in consumer spending to create products that really were different. If the government opened up more industries — airlines, banking, telecommunications, retail — to greater competition, the fight for customers would encourage innovation there, too. Eventually, ideas for new products might originate in Beijing or Hangzhou or even Wuqi. That would benefit the whole world, just as the world now benefits from American and European innovations. Imagine, say, if China developed a cheap form of clean energy. Above all, innovation would benefit China. Rather than merely having workers making $1 an hour to put together iPhones, it could also have software developers making $20 or $50 an hour to design the next iPhone.

After a Sichuan dinner in Wuqi one night — complete with raw hot peppers, dipped in salt, a local way of eating them — Feng asked if I wanted to climb the city’s almost-finished monument to the Long March. The monument starts as a grand outdoor staircase and then becomes a paved path into the mountains, ascending about 1,000 feet over two miles, with scattered statues celebrating workers, peasants and soldiers. From the clearings, I could look down on Wuqi and imagine whether it might conceivably change as much over the next decade as coastal China changed over the last. Would tourists and business executives ultimately fill the new hotel? Would new industries come and stores open? I told Feng that, as impressive as Wuqi’s efforts were, it was hard to see exactly how the city would build a self-sustaining economy in place of one that depended so much on hopeful construction. He did not exactly disagree. “We can’t tell what will be here in 10 years,” he said. “All I can do right now is build up Wuqi’s environment and infrastructure and talent pool, for when the opportunity comes. We can only lay the foundation. It won’t necessarily go as I plan.”

Feng, of course, is not a typical local leader. In many other cities and provinces, the party has pursued short-term growth regardless of the long-term consequences. The party evaluates and promotes officials in large measure based on G.D.P. statistics and not on measures of education, employment or living standards. No wonder, then, that despite all the reform talk from Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao, consumption has continued to be a smaller part of the economy, and investment a larger one, since they took office in 2003.

Nonetheless, there are reasons to believe that China is starting to change and that today’s reformers will ultimately win out, just as Deng did in his time. Economic growth in poorer provinces like Shaanxi has been somewhat faster over the last three years than in the richest areas, like Beijing and Shanghai, according to the University of Michigan’s China Data Center. For many years, the reverse was true, and the gap was widening. Many provinces are also relaxing the hukou household-registration system. Looking ahead, party officials have indicated that their next five-year plan, China’s 12th, to be released in March, will focus on the quality of economic growth — how it affects people’s lives — rather than the quantity. China watchers inside and outside the country are now trying to figure out how much Xi Jinping, who is likely to become president in 2013, truly supports reform.

The centerpiece of the government’s recent efforts to transform China’s economy was the stimulus program announced in 2008. Relative to the size of the economy, the stimulus was more than twice as large as America’s. It focused on infrastructure, mostly highways, trains and housing. Infrastructure spending is heavy-duty investment that plays off China’s existing strengths. When tens of millions of workers were losing their factory jobs at the depths of the global recession, the government was able to put many of them back to work quickly on construction projects. (In an authoritarian state that does not have to worry much about property rights or environmental laws, shovel-ready projects are easy enough to find.) “The government does not have as strong instruments to influence consumption,” as Yu says. “Investment is easier.” That is especially true in a consumer economy as immature as China’s.

But infrastructure can also help to foster a consumer economy. The new apartment buildings going up in hundreds of cities will employ workers now and will later become homes for rural migrants. Once in the cities, those migrants will be able to earn more and spend more. The new train lines and highways will reduce commutes and help stitch together China’s domestic economy, much as the Interstate System of highways did in the United States. While I was in Hangzhou, officials there were getting ready to open a new train line that would cut travel time to Shanghai, which is 120 miles away, to less than an hour. “When it opens,” Tu Dongdong, a deputy mayor, said, “Hangzhou will become part of Shanghai.” Some of the new highways may be empty, but Kroeber, the editor of the China Economic Quarterly, said the high-speed trains are mostly full.

Pessimists argue that China has only a few years to start making major changes. According to this line of thinking, the recent splurge on infrastructure will lead mostly to empty buildings and unrecoverable loans, and the weak global economy will soon cause other countries to put up trade barriers unless China raises the value of the renminbi. Optimists reply that China remains a poor country and still has a couple of decades to switch from a factory economy to a consumer economy. Guo, the party leader and bank chairman, said that he did not think change had come quickly enough in recent years. But, he added, “I think we have plenty of time, plenty of tools and plenty of instruments to make a soft landing and a smooth transformation.” Arthur Kroeber, who agrees, points out that China’s per-capita income is still only where Japan’s was in the mid-1960s.

One reason for optimism is that a version of the current strategy, what Guo calls “build first,” has worked before. Deng and the other post-Mao leaders built the coastal cities before they had been established as manufacturing hubs. They plowed ahead, and China’s natural advantages — size, location, literate population and, hard as it may be to quantify, Confucian work ethic — allowed the strategy to pay off. If that happens again, not all of today’s buildings and roads will be filled, but enough of them will be.

Kroeber first visited China in 1985 during the early stages of both Deng’s reforms and the boom that has continued almost without interruption since. Even then, Kroeber said, he had a hard time imagining that China would find a way to make use of all of its new construction. During that visit, he would sometimes get around Beijing by biking on the recently built Second Ring Road, which encircled downtown. The road was big and wide, with few cars on it, and Kroeber remembers thinking it absurd that the city had spent the money to build it. Today, however, Second Ring Road is clogged with cars day and night. The subway is usually a faster way to travel. Third and Fourth Ring Roads are clogged, too. Fifth Ring Road, completed in 2003, and Sixth Ring Road, completed last year, are less congested. But you would not want to ride your bike on them.

In China’s halting efforts to build a new economy today, there is an intriguing parallel to the United States: Both the world’s largest economy and its latest challenger need to remake themselves. As Guo bluntly told me, “You are facing transformation, too.” The United States needs to shift away from debt-financed consumption with little long-term benefit and toward investments that can create good-paying jobs, like education, infrastructure, energy and scientific research. China needs to invest less and consume more — to keep growing rapidly and, in the process, to stimulate economic growth around the world. In both countries, significant changes are necessary to create more sustainable growth. And in both countries, they inspire fierce internal opposition.

We tend to think of the United States and China as rivals, and they will continue to compete in coming years, over which will build the industries of the future and which will be the dominant power in Asia and the world. But our problems are also linked, just as the Chinese export boom and the American consumption boom depended on each other and, together, helped create the financial crisis. The worst outcome now, for both countries, might well be economic stagnation in China. That would slow U.S. growth and could lead to political chaos in China. The best outcome would be for both countries to reshape their economies gradually, benefiting both. In neither country will it be easy.

David Leonhardt is an economics columnist for The Times and a staff writer for the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magazine/28China-t.html

Doing It Again - PAUL KRUGMAN

2010-11-08T00:53:00.000-08:00

Op-Ed Columnist
Doing It Again
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 7, 2010

Eight years ago Ben Bernanke, already a governor at the Federal Reserve although not yet chairman, spoke at a conference honoring Milton Friedman. He closed his talk by addressing Friedman’s famous claim that the Fed was responsible for the Great Depression, because it failed to do what was necessary to save the economy.

Paul Krugman
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“You’re right,” said Mr. Bernanke, “we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

Famous last words. For we are, in fact, doing it again.

It’s true that things aren’t as bad as they were during the worst of the Depression. But that’s not saying much. And as in the 1930s, every proposal to do something to improve the situation is met with a firestorm of opposition and criticism. As a result, by the time the actual policy emerges, it’s watered down to such an extent that it’s almost guaranteed to fail.

We’ve already seen this happen with fiscal policy: fearing opposition in Congress, the Obama administration offered an inadequate plan, only to see the plan weakened further in the Senate. In the end, the small rise in federal spending was effectively offset by cuts at the state and local level, so that there was no real stimulus to the economy.

Now the same thing is happening to monetary policy.

The case for a more expansionary policy by the Fed is overwhelming. Unemployment is disastrously high, while U.S. inflation data over the past few years almost perfectly match the early stages of Japan’s relentless slide into corrosive deflation.

Unfortunately, conventional monetary policy is no longer available: the short-term interest rates the Fed normally targets are already close to zero. So the Fed is shifting from its usual policy of buying only short-term debt, and is now buying long-term debt — a policy generally referred to as “quantitative easing.” (Why? Don’t ask.)

There’s nothing outlandish about this action. As Mr. Bernanke tried to explain Saturday, “This is just monetary policy,” adding, “It will work or not work in much the same way that ordinary, more conventional, familiar monetary policy works.”

Yet the Pain Caucus — my term for those who have opposed every effort to break out of our economic trap — is going wild.

This time, much of the noise is coming from foreign governments, many of which are complaining vociferously that the Fed’s actions have weakened the dollar. All I can say about this line of criticism is that the hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

After all, you have China, which is engaged in currency manipulation on a scale unprecedented in world history — and hurting the rest of the world by doing so — attacking America for trying to put its own house in order. You have Germany, whose economy is kept afloat by a huge trade surplus, criticizing America for running trade deficits — then lashing out at a policy that might, by weakening the dollar, actually do something to reduce those deficits.

As a practical matter, however, this foreign criticism doesn’t matter much. The real damage is being done by our domestic inflationistas — the people who have spent every step of our march toward Japan-style deflation warning about runaway inflation just around the corner. They’re doing it again — and they may already have succeeded in emasculating the Fed’s new policy.

For the big concern about quantitative easing isn’t that it will do too much; it is that it will accomplish too little. Reasonable estimates suggest that the Fed’s new policy is unlikely to reduce interest rates enough to make more than a modest dent in unemployment. The only way the Fed might accomplish more is by changing expectations — specifically, by leading people to believe that we will have somewhat above-normal inflation over the next few years, which would reduce the incentive to sit on cash.

The idea that higher inflation might help isn’t outlandish; it has been raised by many economists, some regional Fed presidents and the International Monetary Fund. But in the same remarks in which he defended his new policy, Mr. Bernanke — clearly trying to appease the inflationistas — vowed not to change the Fed’s price target: “I have rejected any notion that we are going to try to raise inflation to a super-normal level in order to have effects on the economy.”

And there goes the best hope that the Fed’s plan might actually work.

Think of it this way: Mr. Bernanke is getting the Obama treatment, and making the Obama response. He’s facing intense, knee-jerk opposition to his efforts to rescue the economy. In an effort to mute that criticism, he’s scaling back his plans in such a way as to guarantee that they’ll fail.

And the almost 15 million unemployed American workers, half of whom have been jobless for 21 weeks or more, will pay the price, as the slump goes on and on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/opinion/08krugman.html

Driver thanks man who hit him on purpose

2010-10-27T01:01:00.000-07:00

A Boeing manager and engineer by training, Duane Innes of Kent is credited with saving the life of a driver who'd lost consciousness on Highway 167. Innes pulled his minivan in front of the runaway truck before it slammed into other vehicles.

By Sean Collins Walsh
Seattle Times staff reporter

Bill Pace, left, meets Duane Innes for a thank-you dinner at a Bellevue restaurant Monday. On July 23, Pace slumped over the wheel of his truck and Innes engineered a crash to stop the truck.
JIM BATES / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Driving to a Mariners game, Duane Innes saw a pickup ahead of him drift across lanes of traffic, sideswipe a concrete barrier and continue forward on the inside shoulder at about 40 mph.

A manager of Boeing's F22 fighter-jet program, Innes dodged the truck, then looked back to see that the driver was slumped over the wheel. He knew a busy intersection was just ahead, and he had to act fast. Without consulting the passengers in his minivan — "there was no time to take a vote" — Innes kicked into engineer mode.

"Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together," Innes explained.

So he pulled in front of the pickup, allowed it to rear-end his minivan and brought both vehicles safely to a stop in the pull-off lane.

Some might say the driver of the truck, 80-year-old Bill Pace, of Bellevue, and anyone Pace's truck might have slammed into had luck on their side that day. A retiree who volunteers for Special Olympics and organizes food drives, Pace didn't know it at the time, but he'd had a minor heart attack two days earlier and his circulation was so poor he passed out at the wheel with his foot resting on the accelerator.

But those who know Pace best don't see his rescue as luck so much as an example of "what goes around comes around." And Innes, who met Pace for the first time since the incident over dinner with their wives Monday night at a Bellevue restaurant, believes that, too.

"For all the good that he's done, he's probably deserving of a few extra lives," said Innes, who talked for hours with Pace about their shared interest in aviation and their family ties to Yakima Valley.

State Farm, Pace's insurance company, covered the roughly $3,500 in damage to Innes' car, and a claim representative sent Innes a letter of appreciation this summer.

"We wish to thank you for the actions you took to save Bill's life," State Farm's Clayton Ande wrote. "State Farm and the Pace family consider you to be a hero. I wish there were more people like you in the world."

Problem and solution

Innes, a 48-year-old Boston native who has lived in Kent for 25 years, was driving his grown children and some family friends to the Mariners-Red Sox game on July 23.

At about 5:15 p.m., he had just passed Valley Medical Center and was planning to merge from Highway 167 onto Interstate 405. Traffic was building so he decided to get into the carpool lane on his left.

As he changed lanes, he noticed the white pickup ahead of him move from the far-right lane to the center lane without signaling.

No big deal, Innes thought. Just a careless driver.

But then the pickup continued to move left and almost struck Innes' minivan. Innes swerved into the emergency pull-off lane, sped past the pickup and got back into the carpool lane.

In his rearview mirror, he saw Pace slumped over the wheel of the pickup, which sideswiped the concrete barrier.

"We realized he wasn't slowing down, and if he hit someone at full speed, it would've been a very bad scene," Innes said. The intersection with Southwest Grady Way was a few hundred yards away. "He could've very easily unknowingly taken out a whole row of traffic."

Instinctively, Innes applied his 25 years of experience at Boeing, where he is a manager for the F22 fighter-jet program.

"The best-case scenario is I need to match his speed, get in front of him and let him hit me," Innes remembers thinking.

Innes didn't consult his passengers but did announce his plan before he executed it.

No one responded.

"I don't know if they were all in shock or thinking, 'What crazy thing is my dad doing?' " he said.

Crazy or not, the plan worked.

Pace's pickup hit the minivan, and Innes held onto the brakes to halt both vehicles. When they stopped, he knocked on the pickup's window to alert Pace, who was by then semiconscious, and got him to unlock the door.

Pace, who would spend the next six days in a hospital for his heart problems, still had his foot on the accelerator when Innes got to him.

"Most people wouldn't have done nothing," Pace said. "They'd be cussing at me, giving me the finger. But not him."

"He saved my life, really — and God knows who else."

Talking for hours

On Monday night, Innes, Pace and their wives talked about what happened that afternoon. They talked about the Air Force — Pace served four years and Innes has worked on several military projects at Boeing. They talked about Yakima Valley — Pace and Carmen Innes both attended Wapato High School.

And they talked about Pace. Although he retired from working every day at his Bellevue store, Bill Pace Fruit and Produce, he is busier than ever.

He manages harvesting and marketing for the Mercer Slough Blueberry Farm, which is run by the city of Bellevue, and he fills the rest of his schedule volunteering for Special Olympics events, teaching for the Kiwanis Educated Youth Club and organizing donation drives from local grocery stores.

"What a local icon — how much volunteering he does. Boy, he's just amazing," Innes said. "If there's someone out there that can hear a story like this and say, 'Hey, it pays to do something good,' then it's all worth it."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2013215629_hero21m.html

Undocumented language found hidden in India

2010-10-07T18:58:00.000-07:00

Undocumented language found hidden in India

Kachim, Gregory Anderson AP – This undated handout photo provided by National Geographic shows Kachim, a speaker of the hidden language …

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer Randolph E. Schmid, Ap Science Writer – Tue Oct 5, 7:06 pm ET

WASHINGTON – A "hidden" language spoken by only about 1,000 people has been discovered in the remote northeast corner of India by researchers who at first thought they were documenting a dialect of the Aka culture, a tribal community that subsists on farming and hunting.

They found an entirely different vocabulary and linguistic structure.

Even the speakers of the tongue, called Koro, did not realize they had a distinct language, linguist K. David Harrison said Tuesday.

Culturally, the Koro speakers are part of the Aka community in India's Arunachal Pradesh state, and Harrison, associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said both groups merely considered Koro a dialect of the Aka language.

But researchers studying the groups found they used different words for body parts, numbers and other concepts, establishing Koro as a separate language, Harrison said.

"Koro is quite distinct from the Aka language," said Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. "When we went there we were told it was a dialect of Aka, but it is a distant sister language."

People of the Aka culture live in small villages near the borders of China, Tibet and Burma (also known as Myanmar). They practice subsistence hunting, farming and gathering firewood in the forest and tend to wear ornate clothing of hand-woven cloth, favoring red garments. Their languages are not well known, though they were first noted in the 19th century.

The region where they live in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains requires a special permit to enter. There, the researchers crossed a mountain river on a bamboo raft and climbed steep hillsides to to reach the remote villages, going door-to-door among the bamboo houses that sit on stilts.

Harrison and Anderson spoke at a news conference organized by the National Geographic Society, which supported their work.

The northeast corner of India is known as a hotspot of language diversity and researchers were documenting some of the unwritten tongues when they came across Koro in research started in 2008.

The timing of their discovery was important.

"We were finding something that was making its exit, was on its way out. And if we had waited 10 years to make the trip, we might not have come across close to the number of speakers we found," said Anderson.

Previously undocumented languages are "noticed from time to time" Harrison said, so such a discovery is not rare. But at the same time linguists estimate that a language "dies" about every two weeks with the loss of its last speakers.

Counting Koro there are 6,910 documented languages in the world, Harrison said. But he added that is really just a best estimate that can change regularly.

Many languages around the world are considered endangered, including Koro, he explained, because younger people tend to shift to the more dominant language in a region.

Unusually, Koro has been maintained within the Aka community, the researchers said, even though there is intermarriage and the groups share villages, traditions, festivals and food. In addition to the estimated 800 to 1,200 Koro speakers, the West Kameng and East Kameng districts of Arunachal Pradesh contain 4,000 to 6,000 Aka speakers.

The Koro speakers "consider themselves to be Aka tribally, though linguistically they are Koro. It's an unusual condition, such arrangement doesn't usually allow for maintenance of the minor language," Anderson said.

The threat, however, is from the spread of Hindi, a dominant language in India, and many youngsters go to boarding schools where they learn Hindi or English.

The researchers said they hope to figure out how the Koro language managed to survive within the Aka community.

They said Koro is a member of the Tibeto-Burman language family, a group of some 400 languages that includes Tibetan and Burmese. While Koro differs from Aka, it does share some things with another language, Tani, which is spoken farther to the east.

The research was started in 2008 to document two little known languages, Aka and Miji, and the third language, Koro, was discovered in that process.

"We didn't have to get far on our word list to realize it was extremely different in every possible way," Harrison said.

They said Koro's inventory of sounds was completely different, and so was the way sounds combine to form words. Words also are built differently in Koro, as are sentences.

The Aka word for "mountain" is "phu," while the Koro word is "nggo." Aka speakers call a pig a "vo" while to Koro speakers, a pig is a "lele."

"Koro could hardly sound more different from Aka," reported Harrison, author of a new book "The Last Speakers," about vanishing languages. Joining the two was linguist Ganesh Murmu of Ranchi University in India.

The researchers detail Koro in a scientific paper to be published in the journal Indian Linguistics.

___

Online:

Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages: http://www.livingtongues.org/

National Geographic Enduring Voices: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices/

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/news/culture-places-news/enduring-voices-koro-vin.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101005/ap_on_sc/us_sci_new_language

At 103, a Judge Has One Caveat: No Lengthy Trials

2010-09-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

At 103, a Judge Has One Caveat: No Lengthy Trials
Larry Smith for The New York Times

Judge Wesley E. Brown of Wichita, Kan., still hears cases but no longer takes the stairs.
By A. G. SULZBERGER
Published: September 16, 2010

WICHITA, Kan. — Judge Wesley E. Brown’s mere presence in his courtroom is seen as something of a daily miracle. His diminished frame is nearly lost behind the bench. A tube under his nose feeds him oxygen during hearings. And he warns lawyers preparing for lengthy court battles that he may not live to see the cases to completion, adding the old saying, “At this age, I’m not even buying green bananas.”

At 103, Judge Brown, of the United States District Court here, is old enough to have been unusually old when he enlisted during World War II. He is old enough to have witnessed a former law clerk’s appointment to serve beside him as a district judge — and, almost two decades later, the former clerk’s move to senior status. Judge Brown is so old, in fact, that in less than a year, should he survive, he will become the oldest practicing federal judge in the history of the United States.

Upon learning of the remarkable longevity of the man who was likely to sentence him to prison, Randy Hicks, like many defendants, became nervous. He worried whether Judge Brown was of sound enough mind to understand the legal issues of a complex wire fraud case and healthy enough to make it through what turned out to be two years of hearings. “And then,” he said, “I realized that people were probably thinking the same thing 20 years ago.”

“He might be up there another 20 years,” added Mr. Hicks, 40, who recently completed a 30-month sentence and calls himself an admirer of Judge Brown. “And I hope he is.”

The Constitution grants federal judges an almost-unparalleled option to keep working “during good behavior,” which, in practice, has meant as long as they want. But since that language was written, average life expectancy has more than doubled, to almost 80, and the number of people who live beyond 100 is rapidly growing. (Of the 10 oldest practicing federal judges on record, all but one served in the last 15 years.)

The judiciary has grown increasingly reliant on semiretired senior judges — who now shoulder about a fifth of the workload of federal courts. But recently, some courts have also started taking steps that critics call long overdue to address the challenges that accompany jurists working to an advanced age.

“Attention to this area is growing in the judiciary,” said Judge Philip M. Pro, a district court judge in Las Vegas. Judge Pro leads the Ninth Circuit Wellness Committee in California, which focuses on age- and health-related issues facing judges. A similar committee is being established in the 10th Circuit, which includes Kansas.

“Most judges take pride in their work,” Judge Pro said. “They certainly want to be remembered at the top of their game. But a lot of time you’re not the best arbiter of that — it’s hard to see it in yourself if you’re having difficulties.”

Lawyers and colleagues who work with him say that is certainly not the case with Judge Brown.

True, the legal community here has grown protective of him over the years. In his younger days, he was so well known for his temper — lateness, casual dress and the unacceptably imprecise word “indicate” would all set him off — that before hearings one prominent defense lawyer used to take a Valium, which he called “the Judge Brown pill.”

Now, lawyers use words like “mellowed,” “sweet” and “inspirational” to describe him, and one longtime prosecutor began to cry while talking about his penchant for gallows humor. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just I can’t imagine practicing without him.”

A few years ago, when they noticed that while speaking in court Judge Brown would occasionally pause, sometimes for what seemed like minutes, lawyers, clerks and fellow judges worried that they were witnessing the beginning of a decline that would make him incapable of doing his job. But he began using an oxygen tube in the courtroom, and the pauses disappeared. (During an hourlong interview in his chambers, he paused briefly just once while trying to recall the last name of Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the United States, but he was without his oxygen tank.)

The consensus is that Judge Brown is still sharp and capable, though colleagues acknowledge that his appearance can be startling. “Physically he’s changed a lot, but mentally I haven’t noticed any diminution of his ability,” said Judge Monti L. Belot, the former law clerk who now has his own courtroom in the same building, “Which has to be pretty unique.”

Nevertheless, Judge Brown has begun making a few concessions to his age. He still hears a full load of criminal cases, but now he takes fewer civil cases, and he no longer handles any that may result in lengthy trials. He spreads his hearings throughout the week to keep his strength up, and he no longer takes the stairs to his fourth-floor chambers.

Though most federal judges could resign outright and continue to receive their full salary once they reach 65, a majority — like Judge Brown — elect to move to senior status, a type of semiretirement that allows them to continue to work at a full or reduced level. The courts have become deeply reliant on such judges to handle the caseload, but they have also struggled with how to ease out judges whose desire to keep working no longer matches their ability.

In rare circumstances, a panel of judges can vote to remove another judge because of disability, which has happened only 10 times — most recently in 1999. Or, the chief judge of the court can stop assigning the cases to the judge. More often, a trusted colleague will be enlisted to suggest retirement or reassignment to ceremonial duties, said Judge Marcia S. Krieger, a district court judge in Denver who has been surveying judges in the 10th Circuit about aging issues.

Judge Brown has taken the step of asking a few trusted colleagues, including his longtime law clerk Mike Lahey, to tell him when they believe he is no longer capable of performing his job. “And,” the judge said, “I hope when that day comes I go out feet first.”

Born on June 22, 1907, in Hutchinson, Kan., Judge Brown, who had become a prominent local Democrat, first sought appointment by President Harry S. Truman to the federal bench while serving as a lieutenant in the Navy during World War II (at 37, he was the oldest man in his unit). He failed, but in 1962, after a stint as a bankruptcy judge, he was appointed to the district court by President John F. Kennedy. He earned a reputation as a pragmatic jurist whose middle-of-the-road rulings reflect a desire to apply rather than make the law.

Judge Brown is one of four Kennedy appointees still on the bench and the oldest federal judge in the country by six years, according to the Federal Judicial History Office. The only judge to serve at a later age was Joseph W. Woodrough, who was on the Eighth Circuit until 1977, when he died at 104.

For his part, Judge Brown is dismissive of talk of his place in the record books and tired of all the fuss over his birthdays. “I’m not interested in how old I am,” he said. “I’m interested in how good a job I can do.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17judge.html

A Sikh Temple Where All May Eat, and Pitch In

2010-08-30T04:07:00.000-07:00

AMRITSAR JOURNAL

A Sikh Temple Where All May Eat, and Pitch In

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

All faiths are welcome to eat a free lunch daily at the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine for Sikhs, in Amritsar, India.
By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: August 29, 2010

AMRITSAR, India — The groaning, clattering machines never stop, transforming 12 tons of whole wheat flour every day into nearly a quarter-million discs of flatbread called roti. These purpose-built contraptions, each 20 feet long, extrude the dough, roll it flat, then send it down a gas-fired conveyor belt, spitting out a never-ending stream of hot, floppy, perfectly round bread.

Soupy lentils, three and a third tons of them, bubble away in vast cauldrons, stirred by bearded, barefoot men wielding wooden spoons the size of canoe paddles. The pungent, savory bite wafting through the air comes from 1,700 pounds of onions and 132 pounds of garlic, sprinkled with 330 pounds of fiery red chilies.

It is lunchtime at what may be the world’s largest free eatery, the langar, or community kitchen at this city’s glimmering Golden Temple, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion. Everything is ready for the big rush. Thousands of volunteers have scrubbed the floors, chopped onions, shelled peas and peeled garlic. At least 40,000 metal plates, bowls and spoons have been washed, stacked and are ready to go.

Anyone can eat for free here, and many, many people do. On a weekday, about 80,000 come. On weekends, almost twice as many people visit. Each visitor gets a wholesome vegetarian meal, served by volunteers who embody India’s religious and ethnic mosaic.

“This is our tradition,” said Harpinder Singh, the 45-year-old manager of this huge operation. “Anyone who wants can come and eat.”

India is not only the world’s largest democracy, it also is one of the most spiritually diverse nations. It was born in a horrific spasm of religious bloodshed when British India was torn in two to create a Muslim homeland in Pakistan. Yet from the moment of its independence, India has been a resolutely secular nation and has managed to accommodate an extraordinary range of views on such fundamental questions as the nature of humanity, the existence of God and the quality of the soul.

Indeed, few places in India demonstrate so clearly the country’s genius for diversity and tolerance, the twin reasons that India — despite its fractures and fissures — has remained one nation.

Sikhism, which emerged in the Punjab region of India in the 15th century, strongly rejects the notion of caste, which lies at the core of Hinduism.

The Golden Temple, a giant complex of marble and glittering gold that sits at the heart of this sprawling, hectic city near the border with Pakistan, seeks to embody this principle. Nowhere is it more evident than in the community kitchen, where everyone, no matter his religion, wealth or social status, is considered equal.

Guru Amar Das created the community kitchen during his time as the third Sikh guru in the 16th century. Its purpose, he said, was to place all of humanity on the same plane. At the temple’s museum, one painting shows the wife of one of the gurus serving common people, “working day and night in the kitchen like an ordinary worker,” the caption says.

Volunteerism and community support are other central tenets of Sikhism expressed in the langar. When the Mughal emperor Akbar tried to give Guru Amar Das a platter of gold coins to support the kitchen, he refused to accept them, saying the kitchen “is always run with the blessings of the Almighty.”

Ashok Kumar, a Hindu with a scraggly beard, has been coming to the kitchen for the past five years — all day, almost every day — to work as a volunteer. “It is my service,” he explained, after reluctantly taking a very brief break from his syncopated tray sorting.

A white rag covered his head, and his hands were bound like a boxer’s. His job is to man the heavy bucket that receives the dirty plates and bowls. He is the last man on a highly organized line that begins with collecting the spoons, dumping out any leftover food, then loading giant tubs of dirty dishes bound for the washing troughs.

Plates and bowls fly at him, but he never misses a beat, using a metal plate in each hand to deflect the traffic into the tub. Plates go around the rim, while bowls get stacked in the middle.

Mr. Kumar used to be a bookbinder.

“I feel happy here,” he said when asked why he had given up his old life.

Indians of all faiths come here to find a measure of peace largely unavailable in the cacophony of the nation’s 1.2 billion people. Like the thousands of pairs of shoes left at the temple gates, the chaos and filth of urban life are left behind at the marble entrances.

The temple is a world of cleanliness and order — where the wail of the harmonium and the shuffling of bare feet are the only sounds, and every square inch is scrubbed many times a day.

It has not always been a peaceful place. A Sikh insurgency, which sought a separate homeland for Sikhs in Punjab, tore at India’s heart in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1984, Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister, ordered a bloody raid on the temple. Hundreds of militants were hiding there, and many were killed. The temple was also damaged. Sikh bodyguards later assassinated Mrs. Gandhi to avenge the attack on the temple.

Despite this history, Sikhs remain resolutely a part of India’s mainstream, holding leading positions in the arts, government and business. India’s current prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is a Sikh.

Pankaj Ahuja, who owns a medical supply shop in Rajasthan, was visiting the temple for the third time, this time bringing his wife and son, who had never been before. They took the Golden Temple Express train, and were sleeping in the pilgrims’ dormitories, which are also free. The family is Hindu, but the temple has a special significance for them nonetheless.

“You have lots of religious places in this country,” said Mr. Ahuja’s wife, Nikita. “But the kind of peace and cleanliness you find here you won’t find anywhere else.”

Back home, cleaning floors would be considered degrading for someone of her status — people of low caste usually do such work. But here, Mrs. Ahuja happily scrubs floors.

“In normal life, I would ask, ‘Why should I do this?’ It is shameful to clean floors,” she said. “But here, it is different.”

Indeed, she never gives a moment’s thought to who prepared the food in the kitchen, even though in India’s highly stratified caste traditions such matters are vital.

“It is more than food,” she said of the meals that she had eaten at the community kitchen. “Once you eat it, you forget who is cooking, who is serving it, who is sitting next to you.”

Anil Kumar, a 32-year-old Hindu, was up to his elbows in soapy water at one of the washing troughs.

“At home, I would never do this,” he said with a laugh. “It is my wife’s work.”

But he said he tried to come for at least an hour every day to wash dishes. “It is not a question of religion,” he added. “It is a question of faith. Here I feel a feeling of peace.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 29, 2010

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated in which century Guru Amar Das was the third Sikh guru. It was in the 16th century, not the 15th.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/world/asia/30india.htm

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

2010-08-30T04:05:00.000-07:00

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Horacio Salinas for The New York Times
By GUY DEUTSCHER
Published: August 26, 2010

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?

SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.

The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.

We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.

But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”

When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.

So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.

In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.

How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west” or “east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is.

But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films.

Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms.

It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation — whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.

IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study.

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month by Metropolitan Books.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html

孔誥烽﹕民主黨日後可以怎樣叫價？

2010-07-22T22:50:00.000-07:00

(明報)2010年7月23日星期五 05:10

我不知有多少人像我一樣，對政改通過後所謂溫和與激進民主派之間的爭論，開始感到不耐煩。激進派批判區議會改良方案，卻沒有解釋為何他們不早點批評方案，到最近才發難。妥協派更離譜，一直牛頭不搭馬嘴，在口德問題上糾纏。我真的很想問：如果在整個爭論過程中，從沒有人講粗口和出言不遜，民主黨是否便會投反對票？如果不是的話，便請你們回歸正題。若你們真的很重視口德，大可找謝志峰辦一節城市論壇，討論一下「市民應否講粗口」，益智又健康，但拜託不要再跟政改爭論綑綁了。

大家都知道最重要的，是區議會改良方案對我們繼續爭取真普選，是有利還是有害？支持者指方案能造成「路徑依賴」，增加立法會民主派議席的比例，讓民主派在下次政改立法中享有更大否決權和議價能力。因此改良方案的一小步，幫我們打通了一條通往真普選的路徑。

路徑依賴理論有不同版本，其中一派強調微小改變能引起連鎖反應，造成不可逆轉大變的機制，通常在強勢體制消失的混沌時期（如東歐共產政權剛倒下的頭幾年）才能生效，應用在今日香港，頗為牽強。其他主流的路徑依賴論，則主要是指在一個階段內的路徑選擇，會影響下一階段制度變化的軌迹。但影響下一階段變化，有別於啓動變化。例如有學者研究不同拉美國家當年在西班牙帝國內部的經濟定位與制度變遷，怎樣導致這些國家在非殖化後發展路徑的差異。但拉美的非殖化，乃源自一時的世界大氣候與各國內部的政治力量對比，與殖民時期的制度選擇無關。

北京擔心群眾力量進一步壯大

回到政改。若民主派能在改良方案下擴大立會版圖，鞏固否決權，真能一步一步將我們引向真普選嗎？回顧這次政改歷程，最初不少人都研判北京對方案通過與否無所謂，後來也得到一些消息人士證實。最後北京卻表現出希望方案獲通過，並作出讓步。這個改變，肯定不是因為民主派由始至終都擁有的否決權，而是因為北京擔心由反高鐵到公投累積起來的群眾力量會進一步壯大。

增加下屆立法會的民主派議席，不會讓通向真普選之路更平坦。但民主黨放棄要求真普選與廢除功能組別承諾，以交換中央接受區議會改良方案，卻為將來北京一旦決定在港履行普選承諾時，準備好一條由現存功能組別提名，再由全民直選的「民主化」路徑。這才是改良方案的路徑依賴效果。這更與中央只提選舉權而不提提名、參選權的最新普選定義，及不斷有人重申普選與功能組別沒有衝突的論調，十分脗合。

放棄底線下一次怎樣叫價？

最大問題是，民主黨這次忽然放棄「退無可退、缺一不可」的底線，在下一次政改談判時，他們還可以怎樣叫價？跟對手說他們這次是真的堅持真普選廢除功能組別，然後說「這是真的退無可退的底線，缺一不可」嗎？不是不可以說，但我真的很擔心，談判的另一方會有人忍不住當場笑出來。如果對方還價，說北京唯一可作的讓步，是一次過讓所有現存功能組別提名候選人供市民直選，民主黨可以怎樣招架？說他們會為了堅守原則而不收貨嗎？既然今天可以為了增加少許「民主成分」而放棄原則底線，到時為何又可以為了同樣的原則底線，放棄看起來更大幅度的「民主成分」增長？

當然，區議會改良方案的確比區議員互選的原方案好，起碼增加了全港選民的參與。不少人認為「有著數要放咗落袋先」，因此民主黨接受方案可以理解。我也同意這種觀點，所以認為通過方案比不通過好。但通過方案，也有很多不同方式。

如果你追求富家女被其家人反對，家丁拿出5萬元打發你走，要你以後不要再來，你可以很社民連地拒絕拿錢，然後把那家丁罵個狗血淋頭，鬧到被人抬走。你也可以恭恭敬敬地接過5萬元，然後感激涕零，爬著離開。雖然你還可以到處跟人說，富家女家人賞你5萬大元，是階段性勝利，但你已經尊嚴掃地，以後也再沒顏面繼續追富家女了。

但我相信不少港式蠱惑仔，都不會選擇以上兩途，而會帶著一個很周星馳的不屑眼神，從家丁手上把錢搶過來，然後往地上吐一口痰，大搖大擺地離開，臨出門還回頭拋下一句：「咪以為你口地有錢好巴閉，你口地睇住嚟啦！」最後錢照袋，富家女照追，也沒喪失尊嚴。

民主黨接受5萬元並沒有錯，錯就錯在接受得難看、後患無窮。得知阿爺可以讓步同意改良方案時，民主黨大可提出要拿到他們全部9票，除改良方案外還要加上在法案引言寫明2017/2020真普選承諾。後者絕非天馬行空，而是曾有建制派大老提出的北京可行妥協方式。阿爺答應當然最好，如果不答應，民主黨則可讓黨團自由投票，給他三幾票勉強通過方案便夠了。夠膽的話還可以在投票前夕跳草裙舞，作勢反覆，然後打電話給中間人，說是做戲而已，不用當真。民主黨又何必老老實實地奉上九（八）票，讓法案無驚無險、風風光光地閃電通過呢？

美國的民主、共和兩黨，在重大議案如醫療改革的表決中，也會容許黨員不跟大隊投票。若這次民主黨只鬆動三幾票讓方案僅僅通過，他們便可以既享用方案的好處，又可以讓投反對票的黨員繼續在道德高地（至少在山腰）爭取真普選和廢除功能組別，不用像現在一樣，全黨綑綁在一起，從高地向神秘的深淵一躍而下。

露盡目中無群眾老底

民主黨或者擔心跟阿爺玩口野，可能會破壞以後的溝通。但北京願意跟民主黨溝通，最後肯讓半步，是因為欣賞在密室裏的民主黨夠理性、務實、乖巧，抑或是因為害怕密室外的公投派與80後聲勢日壯？大家應該心裏有數。只要群眾力量繼續增長，又何懼溝通無門？

天要下雨，娘要嫁人，一台政改好戲，讓一些黨派露盡戇直和目中無群眾的老底。群眾看在眼裏，以後總算可以帶眼投票。雖然有人平白浪費了大好形勢，將好事變壞事，但這次政改，還是再次證明了群眾力量的確可以帶來改變，迫使北京作出當初所有人都認為沒可能的讓步。

■延伸閱讀

作者：James Mahoney

書名：Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective

作者：Michel Dobry

書名：Democratic and Capitalist Transitions in Eastern Europe: Lessons for the Social Sciences.

作者是美國印第安那大學布魯明頓校區社會學系助理教授、中國政治與商務研究中心副主任

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/100722/4/jav0.html

They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)

2010-07-04T12:53:00.001-07:00

They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)

Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times

Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart at Ms. Reinhart’s Washington home. They started their book around 2003, years before the economy began to crumble.

By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: July 2, 2010

THE advertisement warns of speculative financial bubbles. It mocks a group of gullible Frenchmen seduced into a silly, 18th-century investment scheme, noting that the modern shareholder, armed with superior information, can avoid the pitfalls of the past. “How different the position of the investor today!” the ad enthuses.

It ran in The Saturday Evening Post on Sept. 14, 1929. A month later, the stock market crashed.

“Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors,” says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “They’re wrong. And we can prove it.”

Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen.

Their handiwork is contained in their recent best seller, “This Time Is Different,” a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions. It is a panoramic opus, both geographically and temporally, covering crises from 66 countries over the last 800 years.

The book, and Ms. Reinhart’s and Mr. Rogoff’s own professional journeys as economists, zero in on some of the broader shortcomings of their trade — thrown into harsh relief by economists’ widespread failure to anticipate or address the financial crisis that began in 2007.

“The mainstream of academic research in macroeconomics puts theoretical coherence and elegance first, and investigating the data second,” says Mr. Rogoff. For that reason, he says, much of the profession’s celebrated work “was not terribly useful in either predicting the financial crisis, or in assessing how it would it play out once it happened.”

“People almost pride themselves on not paying attention to current events,” he says.

In the past, other economists often took the same empirical approach as the Reinhart-Rogoff team. But this approach fell into disfavor over the last few decades as economists glorified financial papers that were theory-rich and data-poor.

Much of that theory-driven work, critics say, is built on the same disassembled and reassembled sets of data points — generally from just the last 25 years or so and from the same handful of rich countries — that quants have whisked into ever more dazzling and complicated mathematical formations.

But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists — like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor — have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record.

“There is so much inbredness in this profession,” says Ms. Reinhart. “They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.”

ONE of Ken Rogoff’s favorite economics jokes — yes, there are economics jokes — is “the one about the lamppost”: A drunk on his way home from a bar one night realizes that he has dropped his keys. He gets down on his hands and knees and starts groping around beneath a lamppost. A policeman asks what he’s doing.

“I lost my keys in the park,” says the drunk.

“Then why are you looking for them under the lamppost?” asks the puzzled cop.

“Because,” says the drunk, “that’s where the light is.”

Mr. Rogoff, 57, has spent a lifetime exploring places and ideas off the beaten track. Tall, thin and bespectacled, he grew up in Rochester. There, he attended a “tough inner-city school,” where his “true liberal parents” — a radiologist and a librarian — sent him so he would be exposed to students from a variety of social and economic classes.

He received a chess set for his 13th birthday, and he quickly discovered that he was something of a prodigy, a fact he decided to hide so he wouldn’t get beaten up in the lunchroom.

“I think chess may be a relatively cool thing for kids to do now, on par with soccer or other sports,” he says. “It really wasn’t then.”

Soon, he began traveling alone to competitions around the United States, paying his way with his prize winnings. He earned the rank of American “master” by the age of 14, was a New York State Open champion and soon became a “senior master,” the highest national title.

When he was 16, he left home against his parents’ wishes to become a professional chess player in Europe. He enrolled fleetingly in high schools in London and Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, but rarely attended. “I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be doing,” he recalls.

He spent the next 18 months or so wandering to competitions around Europe, supporting himself with winnings and by participating in exhibitions in which he played dozens of opponents simultaneously, sometimes while wearing a blindfold.

Occasionally, he slept in five-star hotels, but other nights, when his prize winnings thinned, he crashed in grimy train stations. He had few friends, and spent most of his time alone, studying chess and analyzing previous games. Clean-cut and favoring a coat and tie these days, he described himself as a ragged “hippie” during his time in Europe. He also found life in Eastern Europe friendly but strained, he says, throttled by black markets, scarcity and unmet government promises.

After much hand-wringing, he decided to return to the United States to attend Yale, which overlooked his threadbare high school transcript. He considered majoring in Russian until Jeremy Bulow, a classmate who is now an economics professor at Stanford, began evangelizing about economics.

Mr. Rogoff took an econometrics course, reveling in its precision and rigor, and went on to focus on comparative economic systems. He interrupted a brief stint in a graduate program in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to prepare for the world chess championships, which were held only every three years.

After becoming an “international grandmaster,” the highest title awarded in chess, when he was 25, he decided to quit chess entirely and to return to M.I.T. He did so because he had snared the grandmaster title and because he realized that he would probably never be ranked No. 1.

He says it took him a long time to get over the game, and the euphoric, almost omnipotent highs of his past victories.

“To this day I get letters, maybe every two years, from top players asking me: ‘How do I quit? I want to quit like you did, and I can’t figure out how to do it,’ ” he says. “I tell them that it’s hard to go from being at the top of a field, because you really feel that way when you’re playing chess and winning, to being at the bottom — and they need to prepare themselves for that.”

He returned to M.I.T., rushed through what he acknowledges was a mediocre doctoral dissertation, and then became a researcher at the Federal Reserve — where he said he had good role models who taught him how to be, at last, “professional” and “serious.”

Teaching stints followed, before the International Monetary Fund chose him as its chief economist in 2001. It was at the I.M.F. that he began collaborating with a relatively unfamiliar economist named Carmen Reinhart, whom he appointed as his deputy after admiring her work from afar.

MS. REINHART, 54, is hardly a household name. And, unlike Mr. Rogoff, she has never been hired by an Ivy League school. But measured by how often her work is cited by colleagues and others, this woman whom several colleagues describe as a “firecracker” is, by a long shot, the most influential female economist in the world.

Like Mr. Rogoff, she took a circuitous route to her present position.

Born in Havana as Carmen Castellanos, she is quick-witted and favors bright, boldly printed blouses and blazers. As a girl, she memorized the lore of pirates and their trade routes, which she says was her first exposure to the idea that economic fortunes — and state revenue in particular — “can suddenly disappear without warning.”

She also lived with more personal financial and social instability. After her family fled Havana for the United States with just three suitcases when she was 10, her father traded a comfortable living as an accountant for long, less lucrative hours as a carpenter. Her mother, who had never worked outside the home before, became a seamstress.

“Most kids don’t grow up with that kind of real economic shock,” she says. “But I learned the value of scarcity, and even the sort of tensions between East and West. And at a very early age that had an imprint on me.”

With a passion for art and literature — even today, her academic papers pun on the writings of Gabriel García Márquez — she enrolled in a two-year college in Miami, intending to study fashion merchandising. Then, on a whim, she took an economics course and got hooked.

When she went to Florida International University to study economics, she met Peter Montiel, an M.I.T. graduate who was teaching there. Recognizing her talent, he helped her apply to a top-tier graduate program in economics, at Columbia University.

At Columbia, she met her future husband, Vincent Reinhart, who is now an occasional co-author with her. They married while in graduate school, and she quit school before writing her dissertation to try to make some money on Wall Street.

“We were newlyweds, and neither of us had a penny to our name,” she says. She left school so that they “could have nice things and a house, the kind of things I imagined a family should have.”

She spent a few years at Bear Stearns, including one as chief economist, before deciding to finish her graduate work at Columbia and return to her true love: data mining. “I have a talent for rounding up data like cattle, all over the plain,” she says.

After earning her doctorate in 1988, Ms. Reinhart started work at the I.M.F.

“Carmen in many ways pioneered a bigger segment in economics, this push to look at history more,” says Mr. Rogoff, explaining why he chose her. “She was just so ahead of the curve.”

She honed her knack for economic archaeology at the I.M.F., spending several years performing “checkups” on member countries to make sure they were in good economic health.

While at the fund, she teamed up with Graciela Kaminsky, another member of that exceptionally rare species — the female economist — to write their seminal paper, “The Twin Crises.”

The article looked at the interaction between banking and currency crises, and why contemporary theory couldn’t explain why those ugly events usually happened together. The paper bore one of Ms. Reinhart’s hallmarks: a vast web of data, compiled from 20 countries over several decades.

In digging through old records and piecing together a vast puzzle of disconnected data points, her ultimate goal, in that paper and others, has always been “to see the forest,” she says, “and explain it.”

Ms. Reinhart has bounced back and forth across the Beltway: she left the I.M.F. in Washington and began teaching in 1996 at the University of Maryland, from which Mr. Rogoff recruited her when he needed a deputy at the I.M.F. in 2001. When she left that post, she returned to the university.

Despite the large following that her work has drawn, she says she feels that the heavyweights of her profession have looked down upon her research as useful but too simplistic.

“You know, everything is simple when it’s clearly explained,” she contends. “It’s like with Sherlock Holmes. He goes through this incredible deductive process from Point A to Point B, and by the time he explains everything, it makes so much sense that it sounds obvious and simple. It doesn’t sound clever anymore.”

But, she says, “economists love being clever.”

“THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT” was published last September, just as the nation was coming to grips with a financial crisis that had nearly spiraled out of control and a job market that lay in tatters. Despite bailout after bailout, stimulus after stimulus, economic armageddon still seemed nigh.

Given this backdrop, it’s perhaps not surprising that a book arguing that the crisis was a rerun, and not a wholly novel catastrophe, managed to become a best seller. So far, nearly 100,000 copies have been sold, according to its publisher, the Princeton University Press.

Still, its authors laugh when asked about the book’s opportune timing.

“We didn’t start the book thinking that, ‘Oh, in exactly seven years there will be a housing bust leading to a global financial crisis that will be the perfect environment in which to sell this giant book,’ ” says Mr. Rogoff. “But I suppose the way things work, we expected that whenever the book came out there would probably be some crisis or other to peg it to.”

They began the book around 2003, not long after Mr. Rogoff lured Ms. Reinhart back to the I.M.F. to serve as his deputy. The pair had already been collaborating fruitfully, finding that her dogged pursuit of data and his more theoretical public policy eye were well matched.

Although their book is studiously nonideological, and is more focused on patterns than on policy recommendations, it has become fodder for the highly charged debate over the recent growth in government debt.

To bolster their calls for tightened government spending, budget hawks have cited the book’s warnings about the perils of escalating public and private debt. Left-leaning analysts have been quick to take issue with that argument, saying that fiscal austerity perpetuates joblessness, and have been attacking economists associated with it.

Mr. Rogoff, because of his time at the I.M.F., has also come under fire.

In the years before and during Mr. Rogoff’s tenure, critics including the prominent economist Joseph Stiglitz accused the I.M.F. of having a cold-hearted, doctrinaire approach to its work in poorer countries. Some of that criticism still clings to Mr. Rogoff. For his part, he contends that the I.M.F. did what it could for countries with intractable problems, and that the critics’ approaches would have made troubled economies even weaker.

Perhaps because “This Time Is Different” is empirical rather than proscriptive, it has defied categorization.

The New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks, for example, praised the book as “the best explanation of the crisis” but referred to it as a history book, rather than a work of economic analysis, since it is “almost entirely devoid of theory.” (The implication being, of course, that genuine “economic analysis” must be hypertheoretical.)

Of course, it’s not as if history is an entirely new ingredient in economic study. There have been other vibrant historical recountings of financial crises, including “Manias, Panics and Crashes,” the 1978 book by Charles Kindleberger. Such books have typically been narrative, though, unlike the data-intensive “This Time Is Different.”

But even in its quantitative perspective and breadth, the book still stands on the shoulders of an economic classic, “A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960,” written by another great male-and-female pair of economists, Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz.

“What Friedman and Schwartz did for the U.S. was heroic,” says Ms. Reinhart. “Ken and I have benefited from the use of the Internet to track down books, sources and experts to help us with our work. Friedman and Schwartz did not.”

While Professors Reinhart and Rogoff may have had technological advantages in their research, they weren’t able to outsource much of the number-crunching to graduate students — in part because they wanted to be able to stay close to the data themselves, but also because few students are interested in or trained for that kind of work.

The economics profession generally began turning away from empirical work in the early 1970s. Around that time, economists fell in love with theoretical constructs, a shift that has no single explanation. Some analysts say it may reflect economists’ desire to be seen as scientists who describe and discover universal laws of nature.

“Economists have physics envy,” says Richard Sylla, a financial historian at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He argues that Paul Samuelson, the Nobel laureate whom many credit with endowing economists with a mathematical tool kit, “showed that a lot of physical theories and concepts had economic analogs.”

Since that time, he says, “economists like to think that there is some physical, stable state of the world if they get the model right.” But, he adds, “there is really no such thing as a stable state for the economy.”

Others suggest that incentives for young economists to publish in journals and gain tenure predispose them to pursue technical wizardry over deep empirical research and to choose narrow slices of topics. Historians, on the other hand, are more likely to focus on more comprehensive subjects — that is, the material for books — that reflect a deeply experienced, broadly informed sense of judgment.

“They say historians peak in their 50s, once they’ve accumulated enough knowledge and wisdom to know what to look for,” says Mr. Rogoff. “By contrast, economists seem to peak much earlier. It’s hard to find an important paper written by an economist after 40.”

MICROECONOMICS — the field that focuses on smaller units like households and workers, as opposed to big-picture questions about how national economies function — has embraced real-world data-mining. (Think “Freakonomics.”)

Macroeconomics has been slower to change, but the popular success of “This Time Is Different” and related work seems to be changing how macro practitioners approach their craft.

It has also changed how policy makers think about their own mission.

Mr. Rogoff says a senior official in the Japanese finance ministry was offended at the suggestion in “This Time Is Different” that Japan had once defaulted on its debt and sent him an angry letter demanding a retraction.

Mr. Rogoff sent him a 1942 front-page article in The Times documenting the forgotten default. “Thank you,” the official wrote in apology, “for teaching the Japanese something about our own country.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html

North Korea TV viewers see World Cup loss

2010-06-22T09:50:00.001-07:00

North Korea TV viewers see World Cup loss
Page last updated at 21:24 GMT, Monday, 21 June 2010 22:24 UK
By John Sudworth
BBC News, Seoul

North Korean players may face "re-education" on their return home, exiles suggest
North Korean football fans - at least, those with both a TV set and a reliable electricity supply - were allowed to see their team's first World Cup game against Brazil.

But the broadcast gave new meaning to the term "action replay", making it onto the airwaves of the country's single, government-run channel more than 12 hours after the final whistle.

That, though, is far from unusual.

North Korean players were given a footballing lesson on the pitch
In fact, the latest match against Portugal is reported to be the first time a North Korean game played on foreign soil has been broadcast live back home.

It was a risky decision for two reasons.

Firstly, it was an open invitation for anyone who wanted to protest against North Korea's human rights record to have their messages beamed directly into Pyongyang living rooms.

And secondly, there was always the chance that the country's sporting heroes would get roundly and humiliatingly thrashed.

"I think because they played so well against Brazil in the last game, no-one in North Korea would have imagined that they'd lose so big this time," Kim Young-il tells me while watching the game in his Seoul apartment.

Continue reading the main story
I'm sure the players will have to go though extreme re-education and self-criticism

Mr Kim, 32, is a North Korean defector, who fled to the South in 1996 and he has mixed emotions about the 7-0 drubbing.

"On the one hand I feel proud when the team does well," he says.

"But on the other, I don't want them to do too well. Unlike in other countries it wouldn't be the star players who reap the rewards of the success, but [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-il himself."

'Weak minds'

It's hard to know how much credence to give to the claims from the North Korean Football Association that the country's leader has been giving the team personal guidance and help with tactics.

North Koreans living in the South say the players might find going home hard
But true or not, North Korea wouldn't be alone, of course, in wanting to exploit sporting success for political ends.

So what about a defeat?

Mr Kim shakes his head when he thinks of the fate that might await his former countrymen.

"The result will be blamed on their weak minds," he tells me.

"I'm sure the players will have to go though extreme re-education and self-criticism."

In the end, North Korea can be pleased about one thing.

There were no protests, not a single anti-North Korean placard in sight.

It's interesting to ponder why this might be.

Imagine the scenes that would have greeted the Burmese team had it qualified for this competition, or remember the scenes that greeted the Olympic torch as it made its way around the world en route to Beijing.

North Korea is a country with a human rights record that would give both Burma and China a run for their money.

It allows no opposition, no free media and no religious freedom, and it keeps thousands of political opponents, and their families, in large forced labour camps.

Apart from Amnesty International, which used North Korea's opening game to highlight its concerns, there has been barely a peep about it.

Perhaps those who claim that sporting events of this kind can break down barriers and cultural divides have a point.

Elimination

At the very least, for the duration of 90 minutes, information-starved North Koreans got a rare reality check about the limits of their nation's powers on the international stage.

Many in South Korea support the North Korean side too
There is certainly no sign of any opposition to North Korea's participation here in the South.

At bars in central Seoul you can find groups of South Koreans cheering the North as loudly as their own team.

"Our enemy is the leader of North Korea, not the people," one fan, Baek Kwang-gu, tells me.

"I always support our brothers when they're playing other countries."

But the opportunity for praise and protest alike are coming to an end.

North Korea's defeat at the hands of Portugal now means certain elimination.

Perhaps it will also spell the end for its brief experiment in live football broadcasting and its people will slip back once more behind a sporting iron curtain.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia_pacific/10371350.stm

North Korea’s Wayne Rooney

2010-06-15T15:14:00.001-07:00

North Korea’s Wayne Rooney
By ANDREW KEH

Jong Tae-Se is a promising striker for one of the top clubs in Japan, the country where he was born and has lived his entire life.

He is known to possess a soft spot for South Korean television shows, and in a karaoke bar, he can recite lyrics to South Korean pop songs by heart.

And when he publishes the minutiae of his personal life online — as people his age are wont to do — he does so on a personal blog whose title, translated into English, reads, “I am North Korea’s Striker.”

This summer in South Africa, Jong, 25, will serve as the offensive focal point of a North Korean national team making its first World Cup appearance since 1966.

Born in Nagoya, Japan, to ethnic Korean parents, Jong possessed hereditary South Korean citizenship from birth. His mother, however, identified herself as North Korean and sent her son to one of the many schools run by the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon), an organization closely tied to North Korean interests. After honing his soccer talents at Korea University in Japan, he joined the J-League team Kawasaki Frontale.

Jong’s circumstances made him eligible to represent Japan or either of the Koreas in international competition. His final decision made him an unlikely point of convergence for some of the multitude of nuanced, and often unspoken, cultural tensions that exist among the three nations.

“He never talks about political matters,” said Kim Du Yong, a journalist who covers soccer for Hankook Ilbo, a Korean daily, in an e-mail message this week. “But he is a young man who knows exactly why he chose North Korea, and he is clearly proud of his decision.”

Jong captured the full attention of the South Korean public during the 2008 East Asian Cup in Chongqing, China.

North Korea finished last in the four-team round-robin tournament, which included China, Japan and South Korea. But Jong’s stirring individual performances drew the praise of soccer observers across the continent.

Jong scored the opening goal of North Korea’s first game, a 1-1 draw against Japan, after a skillful dribbling move and clinical finish. Against South Korea, another 1-1 draw, Jong scored a late equalizing goal on a play that displayed his best qualities: in a flash, he beat a pair of defenders to a ball chipped into open space, used his body as a shield to maintain possession, and, while still in rapid motion, lashed a shot beyond the outstretched arms of the diving goalkeeper and into the net off the left post.

His bulldozing performances as North Korea’s lone striker earned him the nickname North Korean Rooney, in reference to Wayne Rooney, the ferocious English forward.

“He is very direct, quick and strong,” said John Duerden, who is based in Seoul as the Asia editor for Goal.com in an e-mail message. “Unlike many East Asian strikers, he is quite greedy and, when he gets the ball, is single minded in that he just wants to score.”

South Koreans regard their northern neighbors with complex and ever-changing emotions that are further shaped by generational divides and political leanings. The nations’ frustrating relationship oscillates endlessly between hints of conciliation and overt displays of brinkmanship.

But Jong has largely endeared himself to the South Korean public with a uniformly bright demeanor and disarming persona.

“In Japan, he is pretty much just seen as a very good football player,” Duerden said of Jong. “In South Korea he is more of a star.”

In an interview with Fifa.com in April 2008, he revealed that he had been receiving media requests every day — 90 percent of which he said were from South Korean journalists — as well as multiple offers for documentaries to be made about his life.

In a radio interview later that year, Jong gamely sang a few lines of a popular Korean song about a long disputed territory in the Japanese Sea, to the delight of many South Koreans. The song, “Dokdo is Our Land,” refers to a tiny islet (called Takeshima in Japanese or, in English, the Liancourt Rocks) that Korea and Japan have feuded over for centuries. The conflict, insignificant in the larger scheme of things, is perhaps symbolic of how the two nations can turn even small disputes into bitter points of rivalry.

Jong has even featured in television commercials alongside Park Ji-Sung of Manchester United, the most popular and accomplished of South Koreas current players.

His dream, he said in his interview with Fifa.com, to play like Park in the English Premier League. “I’d like to see what I could achieve under that kind of pressure,” he said.

But first, he will face the pressure of the World Cup’s Group G, an unforgiving draw for his country. Against Brazil, The Ivory Coast, and Portugal, North Korea may struggle to score a single goal.

North Korea’s lone advantage, as a relative unknown on the international stage, may be the element of surprise. The team is known to favor a counterattacking style of play.

Kim said it would be tough to use Jong, the country’s most visible player, to gain insight into North Korea’s enigmatic team and hidden society.

“I don’t think he is representative of the rest of the North Korean team,” Kim said. “He is a person with North Korean citizenship. His character is not North Korean.”

Jong, who has been photographed with tears streaming down his face during pre-match performances of the North Korean national anthem, might dispute that.

http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/north-koreas-wayne-rooney/

那些洗不干净的葱们 - 韩寒

2010-05-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

(2010-05-14 22:51:09)

最近，福建有了高教十条。其中最让人瞩目的是第二条——在教育教学工作中散布违反党的路线方针政策、党的基本理论、国家法律法规等错误言论，对学生确立正确理想信念和政治信仰造成不良影响的，实行“一票否决”，违者将被解聘。

让人宽慰的是，看到上文，我本以为要实行“一枪枪毙”，但这仅仅是“一票否决”，比毛泽东那会儿进步多了。至于一票什么样的人能投出这一票，我并不关心，我关心的是这个方针政策和基本理论实在很难把握，当权者在要求我们统一思想的时候，自己经常统一不了思想，在我幼小的记忆中，我隐约记得我的高中课本里讲到三权分立，政治课本和政治老师都说，三权分立是个好东西，但最近我一直看到官方的文章和讲话，说三权分立是错误思想。你知道我是一个只有高中文凭的人，我的政治课学到这里就退学了，我只觉得很困惑，我为那些散布过这个错误思想的政治老师和教材编委的命运感到担忧。他们一直在念着领导给的稿子，弄不好还要还给领导办了，原因是那稿子是领导昨天晚上的想法，今天领导起床以后想法变了。

对于这种感受，我看到过一个精确的评价，大意是……他上了车，马上打开右转向灯，往前开了一米，结果他左转了，左转也就算了，没想到他居然调了一个头。
所以，被这样的司机撞死只能自认倒霉。

新闻记者追寻真相，历史老师讲述历史，作家文人写点真话，电影导演拍摄现实，轻则犯下了思想的错误，重则走向了犯罪的道路。而一旦有人这么做，很多人会纷纷猜测，这个人被喝咖啡了，这个人被封杀了，这个人被逮捕了，结果这个人往往最后还没大事，最多就是被消灭了犯罪证据，但人们也不觉得宽松，反而更为自己担忧，觉得可能是因为人家有点名气，政府有顾虑，政府搞我是不是就没有顾虑……这是一个什么样根深蒂固的形象啊，这要多少时间的浇灌才能巩固成这样啊。

任何年代，就算像洗菜一样洗脑，总有那么几颗葱是洗不干净的，以前，有人要把这些葱割干净，但是随着时代的变迁，那些人只要求这几根葱自顾自的长着就行，但是如果你试图告诉其他的葱，他们马上会被装蒜的压扁。

很多人认为福建教育部门下的文是最近有一些历史老师和大学教授的嘴巴比较大，当然，我也看到今天的新闻，据说历史老师袁腾飞被查办了，同天被查办的还有天上人间夜总会。但是我认为不是这些原因，在敏感院还没有表态的时候，政府哪有反应这么神速，各部门配合的这么好的时候。这只是一个巧合，是一个教育部门的常规规定。这一条，在各行各业中都有，说法不同而已。就好比所有的抽奖活动中都有一条，解释权都归活动举办方所有。而我不想去探讨什么谁有评判另外一个人的思想是正确和错误的权力等话题，这个话题没有意义，因为答案很明显，谁有这个权力？当然有权力的人有这个权力。一切有利于他的利益和权力的，当然就正确的，一切不利于他的利益和权力的，当然就是错误的，你只要掌握了这个规律，你就不用沉溺和揪心于什么错误和正确的判断了。

至于大部分的历史老师，语文老师和政治老师们，你们觉得在未来的历史，语文和政治教材中，你们将会得到什么样的一个评价，扮演什么样的一个角色？也许你是一颗身不由己的植物，但是你的每一个学生都是你的种子。尝试着真正的做一个教师吧，教给你的学生常识和思考，独立与正义，为了年老时向你子孙提起你曾经担当的这个职业的时候心存骄傲，而不是满怀羞愧。

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4701280b0100insm.html

把酒言欢言无不尽 - 韩寒

2010-05-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

(2010-05-07 18:38:57)

我接受过一些采访，外媒和内媒是不一样的，虽然他们有的时候可能会问出一样的问题，我给出一样的答案，但是最后见报的内容也是不一样的。相对来说，外媒的问题更加的直接、有些问题直接到你没有办法回答，因为你如果回答了一次，那估计你以后只能永远接受外媒的提问了。我会诚实的告诉他，这个问题我不能回答你，不是我不愿，是我不能，回答这个问题需要付出太大的代价，而且暂时是无谓的代价。但我又不愿意说假话，所以我选择闭嘴，但你可以保留我的问题，我觉得这是个好问题，你就说，被采访者他不敢说。
请原谅我的懦弱。

说实话，在回答一些内媒问题的时候，我反而会说更多，因为我知道，无论我说多少，就是我和记者本人在聊天，经过了自我审查，最后见报的内容一定是能见报的。面对外媒，我反而会表述更多的希望。刚刚回答了一个加拿大媒体的采访，觉得还挺有意思和代表性，所以摘了几个问题，有一些改动。

问：你怀念谷歌么？为什么？
答：事实上，我一点都不怀念谷歌。谷歌就像一个姑娘，有一天她跑过来说，我要离开你。我说，不要这样亲爱的。让人伤心的是，最后她还是离开了。但是我发现，其实当我想上她的时候，我还是随时能上她。唯一的不同就是以前我上她的时候能从她身上搜出胡萝卜，但是现在，我问她，胡萝卜呢，她就嗖一下不见了。

问：如果你有机会定居海外，比如加拿大，你会不会去，为什么？
答：如果是旅游休息或者比赛办事，相信我会很乐意，但是如果是定居，我不会愿意的。加拿大是一个很美丽的地方，生活舒适，生态平衡，人均GDP很高。虽然我的国家总GDP很高，但是人均GDP还是很低，而且我们为此付出了很多代价，我的家乡很多地方污染严重，腐败官僚，有的时候他进一步，有的时候他退两步，但是我始终想留在我的家乡，看着他或者帮助他多进两步，毕竟那里是我的家乡，就像你们再美好，你们也无法翻译和理解我上一个问题的答案一样。
还有一个原因是在我的祖国，我的身边是中国贪官，如果换了一个国家，发现身边还是不少中国贪官，我肯定崩溃了。

问：其他国家包括加拿大，应该如何看待中国的强大和他在国际上发挥的作用。
答：这个问题我觉得你们应该去问我们的官员和领导，但是我也可以告诉你们，你们只需要参考他们对其他国家关于这个问题的回答，然后改一个国家名字就行了。你可以用所有已有的答案去套所有现有的提问。

问：你如何评价中国的极端敏感？
答：这个过敏，我实在不能评价。我只能说到这儿，司法独立才是真的，但是我们国家，司法是不能独立的，因为司法独立不符合国情，什么是国情，国情就是只管赚钱，靠什么最容易赚钱，靠权力，司法独立会制约权力，你制约了权力，你让那些有权力的人以及其家属怎么赚钱啊，所以，司法独立不符合中国国情。

你希望你的国家是什么样子的（这是一个日本媒体的提问）。
答：不通过房地产或者卖地，不通过低端的加工业，一样有高GDP，而且是人均。好人不翻墙，坏人进监狱，有影响世界的文化，有别国模仿的文艺，一样干净的环境，一样自由的空气，看着被关进笼子的权力，把酒言欢，言无不尽。

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4701280b0100igbb.html

孩子们，你们扫了爷爷的兴 - 韩寒

2010-05-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

2010-05-01

泰兴幼儿园中的小孩也被人砍了，32人受伤，死亡情况不明。这个新闻因为离开上一次南平幼儿园袭击的新闻太近，我甚至一度误以为是同一个幼儿园。

　　在最近的变态凶手杀人事件中，他们都选择了幼儿园和小学，相信在很多想报复社会的人心中，去幼儿园小学杀人成为了一种时尚，因为在杀人过程中，你将遇到最少的抵抗，杀掉最多的人，造成民间最大的痛苦的恐慌，是最有效的报复社会手段。除了杨佳以外，几乎所有杀手都挑选了向弱者下手。这个社会没有出口，杀害更弱者成了他们唯一的出口。我建议把全国地方政府门卫间里的保安们抽调去保护幼儿园，孩子都保护不了的政府不需要那么多人保护。

　　这些杀人事件的产生很大原因是这个社会不公正，不公平。是的，让公平正义比太阳还要有光辉。但太阳不是每天都出。我们的阴天和黑夜是否稍微太多了一些？所以，提出让公平正义比太阳还要有光辉并不伟大，做到让太阳分分钟都挂在你头顶上才伟大。
韩寒
　　在泰州幼儿园杀人事件中，新闻被控制了，这些孩子们生不逢时，死更不逢时。在相关部门的认识里，在这喜庆的气氛里，这事当属杂音。我们只知道，泰州幼儿园杀人事件中，受伤32人，政府和医院一再强调，无一死亡，但是坊间又传说，死了多个孩子。你说我应该相信谁呢？相信政府吧，那为什么他们禁止家长见到孩子呢？至今还封锁着医院和新闻，没有孩子的照片和视频，况且一个杀人用刀劈了32个人，结果一个没死，那他到底是在杀人还是在做手术呢，也太小心了。相信传闻吧，毕竟传闻都是喜欢往夸张了传的，我们无图无真相，也不能相信。于是我一搜索泰州，出现的新闻居然是——《泰州近日三喜临门》，日期是4月30日。

　　我只是非常的诧异，泰州政府通过了封锁消息，封锁医院，控制媒体，禁止探望，转移视线，等手段，居然成功的将人们对于杀手的愤怒转移到了自己身上，这是何苦。你以为他有什么目的，其实不是的，除了要配合世博会《和谐欢歌》以外，这只是惯性，是政府处理类似事件的习惯，是七步曲：吃饭喝酒到一半，出事了——隐瞒，隔离，撤媒体，发禁令，发通稿，赔钱，火化——继续吃饭喝酒。他们处理问题的手段不比凶手高尚多少，也难怪在网上看到有幼儿园挂出横幅——冤有头债有主，出门左转是政府。

　　短短的一个多月内，五起校园凶杀案件，短短的一周以内，就发生了两起，4月29日，泰州，4月30日，潍坊。我不想去探讨其中的社会原因，只想告诉大家，也就在这里，一个人冲进幼儿园砍了32个小孩是不能上社会新闻的，32个加起来才超过一百岁的孩子，你们被砍了，连个报纸都不给你上，因为在几百公里以外，召开了一个盛会，那里光烟花就放了上亿，同时在你们的家乡泰州，要召开国际旅游节，经贸洽谈会和华侨城开业典礼，正三喜临门。

　　也许在那些爷爷们眼里，你们，是扫兴的。

　　但是，我们可怜的孩子们，奶粉毒害的是你们，疫苗伤害的是你们，地震压死的是你们，被火烧死的是你们。就算是成人们的规则出了问题，被成人用刀报复的也是你们。我愿望真的像泰州政府说的一样，你们全部都只是受伤，无一死亡。年长者失职了，愿你们长大以后，不光要庇护你们自己的孩子，还要让这个社会庇护所有人的孩子。

Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish

2010-05-03T00:12:00.001-07:00

Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish

Jackson Lowen for The New York Times
Shanghai has been trying to harness English translations that sometimes wander, like “cash recyling machine.”

By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: May 2, 2010

SHANGHAI — For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”

A Sampling of Chinglish

Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.

Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.

Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.

Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.

The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing’s herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital — now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.

“The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,” said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States who, as director general of the capital’s Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.

But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.

Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world’s foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.

“If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,” said Mr. Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.

Lest anyone think it is all about laughs, Mr. Radtke is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of Heidelberg.

Still, the enemies of Chinglish say the laughter it elicits is humiliating. Wang Xiaoming, an English scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, painfully recalls the guffaws that erupted among her foreign-born colleagues as they flipped through a photographic collection of poorly written signs. “They didn’t mean to insult me but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Wang, who has since become one of Beijing’s leading Chinglish slayers.

Those who study the roots of Chinglish say many examples can be traced to laziness and a flawed but wildly popular translation software. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, said the computerized dictionary, Jingshan Ciba, had led to sexually oriented vulgarities identifying dried produce in Chinese supermarkets and the regrettable “fried enema” menu selection that should have been rendered as “fried sausage.”

Although improved translation software and a growing zeal for grammatically unassailable English has slowed the output of new Chinglishisms, Mr. Mair said he still received about five new examples a day from people who knew he was good at deciphering what went wrong. “If someone would pay me to do it, I’d spend my life studying these things,” he said.

Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation in Shanghai who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”

He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”

Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.

He pointed out that this linguistic mentality helped create such expressions as “long time no see,” a word-for-word translation of a Chinese expression that became a mainstay of spoken English. But Mr. Yao, who spent nearly two decades working as a translator in Canada, has his limits. He showed a sign from a park designed to provide visitors with the rules for entry, which include prohibitions on washing, “scavenging,” clothes drying and public defecation, all of it rendered in unintelligible — and in the case of the last item — rather salty English. The sign ended with this humdinger: “Because if the tourist does not obey the staff to manage or contrary holds, Does, all consequences are proud.”

Even though he had had the sign corrected recently, Mr. Yao could not help but shake his head in disgust at the memory. And he was irritated to find that a raft of troublesome sign verbiage had slipped past the commission as the expo approached, including a cafeteria sign that read, “The tableware reclaims a place.” (Translation: drop off dirty dishes here.)

“Some Chinglish expressions are nice, but we are not translating literature here,” he said. “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”

Li Bibo contributed research.

www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/world/asia/03chinglish.html

Book on Samsung Divides Korea

2010-04-25T23:17:00.001-07:00

Book on Samsung Divides Korea
By CHOE SANG-HUN
Published: April 25, 2010

SEOUL — Life has been a roller coaster for Kim Yong-chul since he began talking about Samsung Electronics two and a half years ago. He has been celebrated by some as a whistle-blower, but in a culture that emphasizes workers’ loyalty to their employers, he has also been vilified as a traitor driven by personal grudges.
Enlarge This Image

Choe Sang-Hun/International Herald Tribune
Kim Yong-Chul has written an exposé of Samsung Electronics titled “Think Samsung.”

That was before Mr. Kim’s 474-page exposé, “Think Samsung,” hit stores in February.

The book makes sensational allegations of extensive corruption by Lee Kun-hee, the richest man in South Korea and the chairman of Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest technology company by revenue.

Samsung is the most sacrosanct — and yet often mistrusted — company in South Korea. Since the book’s release, the country’s major newspapers and Web sites have refused to carry advertisements for it, and few South Korean publications have reviewed it. One newspaper reported on its popularity — it became a best seller, thanks to strong word of mouth on blogs and Twitter — but did not print its title or detail its allegations.

“Isn’t this a comedy?” Mr. Kim, 52, said in an interview. “I am challenging them to slap my face, to file a libel suit against me, but they don’t. They treat me like a nut case, an invisible man, although I am shouting about the biggest crime in the history of the nation.”

Samsung executives have dismissed the book as “fiction.”

“We are seething with anger, but we are not going to sue him and make him a star again,” said Kim Jun-shik, Samsung’s senior vice president for corporate communications. “When you see a pile of excrement, you avoid it not because you fear it but because it’s dirty.”

Mr. Lee was charged with tax evasion and breach of trust in April 2008 and convicted on both charges in what became known as the Samsung slush fund scandal. But he avoided prison and eventually received a presidential pardon and returned to the chairmanship of Samsung.

Though the legal case is over, the country is still grappling with the questions that it raised — and that Kim Yong-chul’s book continues to raise — about Samsung, its place in society and the independence of the country’s news media and justice system.

Under Mr. Lee’s direction, Samsung grew into a conglomerate that generates more than a fifth of South Korea’s exports. It employs 270,000 people around the world and has become synonymous with success, style and pride in South Korea.

Mr. Kim joined the company in 1997 after making his name as a star prosecutor who investigated the corruption of Chun Doo-hwan, the former military strongman. He became Samsung’s top legal counsel before quitting in 2004. He went public with his allegations of wrongdoing three years later.

Even for South Koreans accustomed to corruption scandals, his assertions were staggering.

Mr. Kim accused Mr. Lee and his loyal aides of having stolen as much as 10 trillion won, or $9 billion, from Samsung subsidiaries and stashed it in stock and bank accounts illegally opened in the names of executives.

The book alleges that they shredded books, fabricated evidence and bribed politicians, bureaucrats, prosecutors, judges and journalists, mainly to ensure that they would not stand in the way of Mr. Lee’s illegal transfer of corporate control to his only son, Lee Jae-yong, 41.

In his book, Mr. Kim depicts Mr. Lee and “vassal” executives at Samsung as bribing thieves who “lord over” the country, its government and media. He portrays prosecutors as opportunists who are ruthless to those they regard as “dead” powers, like a former president, but subservient to and afraid of Samsung, which he calls the “power that never dies.”

“I wanted to leave a record of Samsung’s corruption because prosecutors’ investigation turned it into historical gossip,” Mr. Kim said. “I wrote this book because I was afraid that children would grow up believing that in South Korea, justice does not win, but those who win become justice.”

The book has sold 120,000 copies so far — an unusually good performance in South Korea for a nonfiction work.

When Mr. Kim first approached the news media with his allegations, he said, no one wanted to touch the subject. It took a group of outspoken Catholic priests to publicize his claims, forcing an investigation.

Prosecutors uncovered 4.5 trillion won in accounts that violated a law requiring depositors to use their real names; they determined that the money belonged to Mr. Lee, inherited from his father, Lee Byung-chull, who founded Samsung.

But they concluded that there was no evidence of bribery, which astonished Mr. Kim, since he had provided a list of prosecutors whom he said he had helped Samsung bribe while he was working there. In addition, a lawmaker said she had once been offered a golf bag full of cash from Samsung, and a former presidential aide said he had received and returned a cash gift from the company.

Last year, Mr. Lee was convicted of having evaded 46.5 billion won in taxes on profits generated from the hidden money and of having helped his son buy shares of a Samsung subsidiary at an artificially low price. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but a judge suspended the sentence, saying the crime “was not serious enough to merit an actual prison term.”

After his conviction, Mr. Lee said he was “sorry for causing trouble to the people.” In February, he received a presidential pardon, and a month later he returned to Samsung as chairman, without a board meeting to approve the appointment.

The sequence of events deepened South Koreans’ mistrust of the justice system, following similarly light punishment for the heads of Hyundai, SK, Doosan and Hanwha, all convicted of fraud or other crimes in recent years.

The Grand Prosecutors’ Office has dismissed Mr. Kim’s book as repeating allegations that had been proved “baseless.”

And company officials say the Samsung of today is far more transparent than the Samsung of several years ago that Mr. Kim portrays in his book.

Samsung says it has not used its advertising budget to tame media coverage of Mr. Kim’s allegations. But a rare glimpse of how publications tiptoe around Samsung came in February, when the Kyunghyang daily newspaper rejected a college professor’s column praising Mr. Kim’s book and criticizing Samsung.

The professor, Kim Sang-bong, took his column to an online newspaper. When Kyunghyang reporters raised an uproar, the newspaper published a “confession” admitting that it had rejected the column for fear it might lose Samsung advertisements.

The refusal of newspapers to carry the advertisement for Mr. Kim’s book has actually helped sales, said Kim Tae-gyun, the book’s editor at its publisher, Sahoipyoungnon. Even people who did not want to read it bought copies to show their support, he said.

Sean C. Hayes, an American lawyer and newspaper columnist in Seoul who has worked for the Constitutional Court and taught at a law school here, said he hoped more “brave souls” like Mr. Kim would speak out about corruption “for the benefit of a promising nation that is being choked by corrupt incompetents.”

“The change will have to come from the masses,” he added, “since elite power centers have a firm grasp on most government entities through implicit guarantees that evils will only be dealt with by a little slap on the wrist.”

Mr. Kim said his decision to go public with his allegations against Samsung had exacted a heavy personal price. He said acquaintances had cut off contact with him, and when he gave a lecture at a law school this month, students asked whether attending might jeopardize job opportunities.

“People call me a betrayer,” said Mr. Kim, a classical-music buff who likes to swill espresso. “Others consider me be their avatar, who did something they wanted to but couldn’t.”

Nevertheless, he says his battle is far from over. He is working with activists organizing a boycott of Samsung products.

“I am not a revolutionary, an ideologue or a revenge-seeker,” said Mr. Kim, who is seeking to publish his book abroad. “But I am against business as usual.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/technology/26samsung.html

Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell

2010-04-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

Web Coupons Know Lots About You, and They Tell
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: April 16, 2010

For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).

Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.

The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.

“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”

While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have databases packed with information. And every time a person goes shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another entry.

“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs.

None of the tracking is visible to consumers. The coupons, for companies as diverse as Ruby Tuesday and Lord & Taylor, are handled by a company called RevTrax, which displays them on the retailers’ sites or on coupon Web sites, not its own site.

Even if consumers could figure out that RevTrax was creating the coupons, it does not have a privacy policy on its site — RevTrax says that is because it handles data for the retailers and does not directly interact with consumers. RevTrax can also include retailers’ own client identification numbers (Amy Smith might be client No. 2458230), then the retailer can connect that with the actual person if it wants to, for example, to send a follow-up offer or a thank-you note.

Using coupons also lets the retailers get around Google hurdles. Google allows its search advertisers to see reports on which keywords are working well as a whole but not on how each person is responding to each slogan.

“We’ve built privacy protections into all Google services and report Web site trends only in aggregate, without identifying individual users,” Sandra Heikkinen, a spokeswoman for Google, said in an e-mail message.

The retailers, however, can get to an individual level by sending different keyword searches to different Web addresses. The distinct Web addresses are invisible to the consumer, who usually sees just a Web page with a simple address at the top of it.

So clicking on an ad for Jackson Hewitt after searching for “new 2010 deductions” would send someone to a different behind-the-scenes URL than after searching for “Jackson Hewitt 2010,” though the Web pages and addresses might look identical. This data could be coded onto a coupon.

RevTrax works as closely with image-rich display ads, with coupons also signaling what ad a person saw and on what site.

“Wherever we provide a link, whether it’s on search or banner, that thing you click can include actual keywords,” said Rob O’Neil, director of online marketing at Tag New Media, which works with Filene’s. “There’s some trickery.”

The companies argue that the coupon strategy gives them direct feedback on how well their marketing is working.

Once the shopper prints an online coupon or sends it to his cellphone and then goes to a store, the clerk scans it. The bar code information is sent to RevTrax, which, with the ad agency, analyzes it.

“We break people up into teeny little cross sections of who we think they are, and we test that out against how they respond,” said Mr. Batsford, who is a partner at 31 Media, an online marketing company.

RevTrax can identify online shoppers when they are signed in to a coupon site like Ebates or FatWallet or the retailer’s own site. It says it avoids connecting that number with real people to steer clear of privacy issues, but clients can make that match.

The retailer can also make that connection when it is offering coupons to its Facebook fans, like Filene’s Basement is doing.

“When someone joins a fan club, the user’s Facebook ID becomes visible to the merchandiser,” Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax’s co-founder, said. “We take that and embed it in a bar code or promotion code.”

“When the consumer redeems the offer in store, we can track it back, in this case, not to the Google search term but to the actual Facebook user ID that was signing up,” he said. Although Facebook does not signal that Amy Smith responded to a given ad, Filene’s could look up the user ID connected to the coupon and “do some more manual-type research — you could easily see your sex, your location and what you’re interested in,” Mr. Treiber said. (Mr. O’Neil said Filene’s did not do this at the moment.)

The coupon efforts are nascent, but coupon companies say that when they get more data about how people are responding, they can make different offers to different consumers.

“Over time,” Mr. Treiber said, “we’ll be able to do much better profiling around certain I.P. addresses, to say, hey, this I.P. address is showing a proclivity for printing clothing apparel coupons and is really only responding to coupons greater than 20 percent off.”

That alarms some privacy advocates.

Companies can “offer you, perhaps, less desirable products than they offer me, or offer you the same product as they offer me but at a higher price,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which has asked the Federal Trade Commission for tighter rules on online advertising. “There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/business/media/17coupon.html

明報社論：政府推出雞肋方案民主進程命懸一線

2010-04-15T15:57:00.001-07:00

政府推出雞肋方案民主進程命懸一線

2010-04-15

【明報專訊】泛民陣營的溫和派（下稱溫和派）一直期望與中央溝通，尋求終極解決普選安排之際，特區政府「突然」公布2012年兩個選舉辦法的方案，此舉顯示中央與溫和派溝通的誠意有值得商榷之處；另外，昨天公布的政改方案並未觸及阻礙民主進程、弊病叢生的傳統功能組別，使人質疑中央和特區政府落實真普選的誠意。

勿讓溫和派平白犧牲

當權者要有後續善意行動

這次政改諮詢，泛民陣營就溫和與激進兩條路線出現分裂，情對泛民陣營和政治生態意義重大。選擇激進路線的公民黨和社民連，搞5區辭職變相公投，要動員市民對中央和特區政府施壓；溫和派則不同意所謂辭職公投，選擇尋求與中央溝通對話，解決政制的深層次矛盾。這兩條路線，並非各有各做那麼簡單，而是溫和派冒被指為轉、投共的巨大壓力，希望與中央和政府開展新的互動模式，解決政改問題。

過去3個多月，溫和派所獲回應，曾經使人有所憧憬，例如，中聯辦主任彭清華表示，注意到「在政制發展問題上，理性討論的聲音有所增強」；政務司長唐英年則與終極普選聯盟會晤，答允轉達希望與中央溝通對話的要求；政制及內地事務局長林瑞麟也破天荒出席民主黨的內部會議，討論政改問題。連串事態發展，使溫和派憧憬有可能與中央溝通，社會上不少人也這樣理解。殘酷的現實是，到特區政府公布政改方案之時，溫和派連一次有意義的對話也未獲安排。

溝通對話談問題，基於立場取態不同，可能會失敗，但是若真的有誠意溝通，則過程十分重要，因為可以反映雙方是否獲得足夠尊重、抑或是予人一方有被耍弄的感覺。溫和派在高風險下尋求與中央對話，若中央認為不必要，大可在早期就表態杜絕溫和派幻想，但是社會人士與溫和派都感受到特區政府和中央的「有得傾」態度，現在回看，可能只是特區政府和中央為分化泛民陣營，拉一派、打一派，使「辭職公投」的聲勢沉寂而已。

除非特區政府和中央對於溫和派有後續善意行動，否則，這次溫和派在政治上將陷入進退維谷困境。一時之間，溫和派可能要為選擇付出一定代價，其支持者也會感到沮喪；不過，即使如此，我們認為特區政府和中央不應該因而高興，因為溫和派肯定不會投奔建制陣營，他們只會被迫採取激進取態，香港政治生態勢必進一步激化；另外，特區政府消息暗示溫和派支持2012年政改方案，以建立與中央溝通的互信基礎，我們認為此情出現的可能性渺茫，因為若溫和派這麼做，形同政治自殺。經此一役，民主派和特區政府、中央之間的鴻溝更大、更深、更廣。這是香港政局的悲哀，香港整體或許會因為內耗加劇而付出沉重代價。

關於特區政府拿出來的政改方案，雖然口口聲聲說增加了民主成分，但是完全不處理傳統功能組別的問題，使人質疑香港能否實施真普選，並非無的放矢。

功能組別要循序漸退

讓香港政制循序漸進

中央和特區政府一貫告訴港人政制要循序漸進，其中潛台詞與功能組別的不民主有關，因此若要使政制循序漸進，功能組別必須循序漸退；另外，功能組別不但是政制深層次矛盾的根源，不少社會深層次矛盾與功能組別也關係密切，例如近期張宇人議員倡議最低工資時薪20元，就觸及貧富懸殊問題。所以，解決功能組別問題，也可以使其他許多社會矛盾得以紓緩或化解。

功能組別之不民主、不公義，已經成為包括推進民主化等改革的負累，雖然連自由黨也建議擴大功能組別選民基礎，但是特區政府以社會沒有共識為由，政改方案對傳統功能組別原封不動。這樣，讓市民怎樣相信特區政府推動真普選的政制民主化？其實，功能組別若不逐漸淡出，到2020年才一下子全面改造或撤銷，那是大變，不符合循序漸進原則。中央和特區政府在功能組別問題上，其實自相矛盾，難免使人對真普選有疑慮。

我們並非要求一下子全部開放功能組別的選民基礎、或是在2012年就全面廢除功能組別，而是認為特區政府要有實質措施，使市民看到功能組別真的在逐步退出政治舞台。

特區政府以沒有共識為藉口，讓功能組別續享政治特權，只是託詞。香港是多元社會，對任何議題不可能得到百分之百共識，只能取得最大公約數；另外，現有功能組別議員和他們所代表的利益，當然不會放棄其政治特權，若政府因為他們的反對而加以維護，那是反映政府沒有落實真普選的決心。

政府應該推動討論，營造共識，而非躲在「分歧」後面的不作為。設若特區政府提出改造功能組別的方案，例如擴大選民基礎等，而功能組別議員反對方案，未能取得三分之二議員通過，這樣情就不一樣了，因為那是功能組別暴露其阻礙民主化的真正本質，與市民追求的民主化為敵；現在則是功能組別躲在特區政府背後，政府成為保護功能組別、窒礙香港民主化的元兇。

政改方案公布之後，泛民陣營溫和派雖然有受騙感覺，但是他們反對方案，基本上不在自身遭遇，在於方案保守，又未能取得更具體、確切的真普選承諾。我們認為，除非中央和特區政府不在乎方案被否決，否則到方案提交立法會表決之前，政府起碼要在功能組別做工夫，讓市民看到功能組別最終都要淡出，或是功能組別的選舉真的朝普及而平等的方向前進。在政治上，講「你信我喇」不會有用，最實際是「無謂講，做俾我睇喇」！

明報社論：期望溫家寶公開緬懷趙紫陽之日來臨

2010-04-15T15:56:00.001-07:00

期望溫家寶公開緬懷趙紫陽之日來臨

2010-04-16

【明報專訊】昨日是中共前總書記胡耀邦逝世21周年，溫家寶總理在《人民日報》發表文章，緬懷他在胡耀邦領導下的一個工作片斷，寫得情文並茂，胡耀邦淳樸、勤政、親民的形象，躍然紙上。這篇文章，使人聯想到溫家寶也曾經在趙紫陽直接領導下工作，以溫家寶現在的顯赫地位，設若有朝一日，他能夠如緬懷胡耀邦一樣，撰文公開與趙紫陽共事的一些片片斷斷，與全國人民分享；果能如此，顯示中國政治走出了予人窒息的暗角，大家都身心舒暢。這樣的政治氛圍，是國人所樂見的。

胡耀邦正面形象突出

溫家寶有弦外之音？

溫家寶這篇文章，題為《溫家寶：再回興義憶耀邦》（全文刊A32），文中他稱胡耀邦為「耀邦同志」，憶述當年他擔任中共中央辦公廳副主任時，跟隨胡考察西南貧困地區的情，描述年過七旬的胡耀邦如何風塵僕僕，在病中仍然堅持下鄉聯繫群眾。文章只談1986年初春節前後半個月，在貴州、雲南、廣西一些貧困地區調研的片段，不涉其他。

今年西南大旱，溫家寶前往視察災情，途經當年他跟隨胡耀邦調研的貴州省興義市，看到當年只有一條大路的興義市，已經發展成為一個高樓林立的現代化城市，睹物思人，撫今追昔，溫家寶撰文紓懷，動機或許就是那麼簡單。不過，以溫家寶的身分，對外行誼舉措不由他說了算，他要發表文章，還須得到中共組織上的同意，而以內地政治的一些潛規則和潛台詞，對於領導人的說話，都會被解讀為箇中透露一些什麼信息。

胡耀邦死後的民悼念活動，雖然其後演變成為六四事件，但是中共中央發布的訃告高度評價胡耀邦，所以在中共和中國，胡耀邦是一位正面人物，隨時日推移，他的個人和為官特質，例如清廉勤政親民，比照當今中國官場之種種陋弊，胡耀邦的形象愈益突出。

表面上，溫家寶這篇文章無政治意涵，不過，文中講述溫家寶「親身感受耀邦同志密切聯繫群眾、關心群眾疾苦的優良作風和大公無私、光明磊落的高尚品德，親眼目睹他為了黨的事業和人民的利益，夜以繼日地全身心投入工作中的忘我情景。當年他的諄諄教誨我銘記在心，他的言傳身教使我不敢稍有懈怠。他的行事風格對我後來的工作、學習和生活都帶來很大的影響」。事實上，這些年來，溫家寶在中華大地僕僕風塵，下鄉調研，與農民閒話家常，哪裏有災害事故，哪裏就有溫家寶的身影，當撰寫這篇社評時，溫家寶又奔赴青海玉樹地震災場，指揮救災去了。溫家寶確實是身體力行，實現胡耀邦的言傳身教。

對故人的憶述，溫家寶除了自惕自勵以外，按中國官場的潛台詞，他是否藉此提示官員學習胡耀邦，以端正內地官場的一些不正之風？我們認為，即使主觀上溫家寶並無這個打算，相信內地不少民和官員，都會從這個角度解讀這篇文章。

至於在本港，不少市民也注意這篇文章，溫家寶寫得好是原因之一，對於不少市民而言，文章的吸引力，「胡耀邦」三個字是關鍵詞。不少香港市民的六四情結，在慘劇發生21年之後，仍然極其濃烈，而胡耀邦之死，觸發和演變至百萬學生和民在天安門的爭取民主運動，現在當權的總理溫家寶怎樣寫胡耀邦，肯定備受關注。另外，在本港，不少人提到胡耀邦，都聯想到反官倒、反貪污腐敗，胡耀邦為官清廉，這是他死後正直形象屹立不衰的原因。中國官場的貪污腐敗現狀，與胡耀邦的淳樸清廉對照，胡耀邦自是更令人懷念了。

趙紫陽一切都成為忌諱

中國政治使人心寒之處

趙紫陽在中共總書記任內，因為六四事件下台，當時溫家寶是中共中央辦公廳主任，趙紫陽最後一次公開露面，即到天安門廣場探望學生的一幕，溫家寶陪同，趙紫陽拿擴音器對學生講話的經典圖片，溫家寶就站在趙紫陽背後。當時，趙紫陽和溫家寶的職位，兩人的直屬領導和被領導關係約兩年，工作應該甚為緊密，撇開六四事件，趙紫陽的處事行誼作風，溫家寶理應知之甚詳。設若有朝一日，溫家寶憶述與趙紫陽共事某一特定事態，反映其人其事，這篇文章肯定可讀性甚高。當然，設若溫家寶能夠撰寫並公開發表「六四事件中的趙紫陽」，就更轟動了。

趙紫陽在六四事件中同情學生，反對武力鎮壓，被中共指為「分裂黨」，趙紫陽當日夜裏探望學生後，即從民的目光消失，過了16年被幽禁的生活，2005年病逝。六四事件後，趙紫陽的一切，在中國大陸成為忌諱，民無從得知他的情，若做一些與趙紫陽有關的事，也可能受到官府「關顧」。趙紫陽能夠曾經官至總理、總書記，領導國家，他的能力、政績肯定有過人之處，但是中國官場像他這樣的人，被打入另冊，活像從未存在過一樣，連一些照片也被抹掉。這是中國政治讓人從心底裏打冷顫之處。

期望溫家寶撰寫文章緬懷趙紫陽，只是我們的浮想連篇，以中國的政治現實，不但溫總任內無可能，相信未來10年都不可能發生。不過，如果溫家寶緬懷趙紫陽的文章，「竟然」可以公開發表，則顯示中國已經走上政治現代化的道路。這樣的中國，是我們所企盼的自由民主富強的中國！

李先知: 測試鴿子會否露出鷹尾巴

2010-04-15T15:52:00.000-07:00

測試鴿子會否露出鷹尾巴
李先知

2010-04-16

【明報專訊】政府推出政改方案後，成員包括多名溫和民主派的普選聯即時大潑冷水，表明反對，但特區政府也明言這個方案已是「終極方案」，難有大改動。若雙方立場繼續企硬，回旋的空間確實不大，方案最終得到立法會三分之二議員（即40人）支持的機會看來不大。不過，政壇耳語透風謂，政府高層昨日並沒有放棄爭取溫和派的支持，除了繼續按原來部署由政務司長唐英年帶隊出動解說外，私下亦繼續拉攏他們，其中包括了手握9票的民主黨，並囑咐他們千萬要繼續忍忍忍，並堅稱溝通機會仍在。

本欄昨日已指出，部分參加了普選聯的政黨成員，對他們冒被支持者指摘出賣民主之風險，一直堅持走與北京對話的路，如今卻只能換來一個「桔」，甚感勞氣，因此有成員在內部提出，要考慮「改弦更張」，重投支持「變相公投」以示下馬威。不過，政壇耳語透風謂，民主黨昨晚的中常委會議氣氛出奇地平靜，不但沒有強烈要求跟北京或特區政府反的言辭，而且主席何俊仁在會上更明言，要堅持繼續走溝通的道路，以及重申該黨不支持公投的立場。

有推動通過政改方案的人士在分析，民主黨以至其他溫和民主派若以大局為重，他們必須忍住這口悶氣，因為現在離立法會表決政改決議案仍有3個月時間，其間北京或許仍然會有動作。

他們甚至提出一套「觀察論」，指其實當局突然決定於5月16日5區補選投票日前公布一個沒有重大讓步的政改方案，可能正是希望在5．16投票前，測試民主黨的「真面目」，觀察「白鴿黨」高層經常掛在口邊的理性溝通，到底是「真心」還是「假意」，特別是建制陣營裏早已有鷹派人士「向中央大員落藥」，力證由民主黨催生的普選聯，還是公民黨與社民連的「公投運動」，縱然一個高舉「溫和理性對話」的牌子，另一個擺明是搞激進抗爭路線，兩批人其實是同一個鼻孔出氣，只是一個扮黑臉，一個扮白臉。

相信這套「觀察論」的人士猜想，北大人或許正在盯，在政改方案出台後，這隻早前嘴啣橄欖枝的「鴿子」最終會否露出鷹尾巴來。要是白鴿黨迅速銳變成事事跟北京對幹的「麻鷹」，那麼他們早前提出的對話要求，不提也罷。

不過，有自言已「覺醒」的普選聯陣營人士估計，上述理論只是北京以至特區政府用來「安撫」他們的口術。因為要是普選聯中人依然對與北大人溝通抱有希望，甚至相信至7月政改議案通過前的最後一刻，決定不中途改為支持5區補選，也不高調大肆批評北京的話，則有可能令北京及特區政府在不費吹灰之力下，成功令5區公投運動「滅音」，甚至連刺激民眾「七一」上街的子彈也沒有了。

或許上述「測試鴿子鷹尾巴論」可以解釋政府為何要搶在5．16前推出政改方案，但民主黨如今已公開說了會跟其他泛民成員一起否決方案，所以對政府而言，眼前若要通過這個方案，只剩下兩條路，一是透過獲得壓倒性民意支持，來協助3至4名泛民成員轉，或是針對泛民的「保證普選」要求，再想方法滿足白鴿黨。

觀乎昨日官場中人的舉動，筆者相信政府恐怕正循第一條路挺進。不過，對於北京大人來說，「鴿子是否有鷹尾巴」可能來得更重要。

文﹕李先知

http://blog.mingpao.com/cfm/content.cfm?OwnerID=1&CategoryID=1&TopicID=10883

李先知﹕由希望到失望普選聯感受騙

2010-04-15T15:49:00.000-07:00

由希望到失望普選聯感受騙
文﹕李先知

2010-04-15

【明報專訊】特區政府昨日突然公布政改修訂方案，與原方案大同小異，並表明是終極方案，而人大常委會副秘書長喬曉陽也即時出來見香港媒體駐京記者，顯示特區與中央是有默契地一致行動。政壇耳語透露，對於一直尋求對話的普選聯成員來說，這儼如突如其來的變臉，令他們感到受騙，故此即時醞釀採取一些激進行動。不過，普選聯成員楊森昨晚指出，他會在本周六的普選聯內部會議中倡議繼續要求與中央對話，以理性、據理力爭的方法，爭取2016年及2020年有最大成分的普選。

知情者透風謂，近幾個月，特區政府高層與一些北京派來香港做溝通工作的「特使」，一直有跟民主黨和普選聯核心成員接觸，甚至到了本月上旬，這些接觸仍然非常頻繁。「誠懇」的實質對話令不少局中人到了本周初，還以為「對話」是會有成果的。其間，民主派的核心人物收到了如下的幾個信息﹕

（1）特區和中央政府都不願意看到香港政局不斷激化，令民主派全部倒向公民黨和社民連的「變相公投運動」，特區政府希望爭取大部分民主派議員支持政改方案，而非「夾硬」撬走4票勉強通過方案，因為這樣無助於解決香港的政治僵局。

（2）北京不可能馬上公開承諾2020年取消所有功能團體議席，但可以研究其他方法，令公眾相信中央確有誠意讓香港邁向普選，例如可以考慮進一步增加分區直選和區議會功能組別的議席，從原建議各增5席變成各增10席，令有廣泛選民基礎的立法會議席達到64％，極接近三分之二多數，加上幾位支持普選的功能界別議員，日後要進一步增加普選成分，便不怕傳統功能組別議員為延續自身利益而否決。

這與特首現時提出的方案框架完全一致，只是力度加大，把部分2016年才做的改革提前完成，形成民主派學者盼望的「路徑倚賴」能夠出現。另一個可以研究的建議是，中央授意下由工商界提出功能團體改良方案，顯示就算是工商界保留功能組別特色的方案，也基本符合普合平等的原則，將來的普選不會是假的。

（3）特區政府高層和北京「特使」還拋出了「大和解」構想，即溫和民主派若支持政改方案，而參選立法會的議員與支聯會的核心成員又有所區別，北京有可能放下「六四」包袱，邀請民主派成員到內地，就香港政制發展問題作實質交流，連會面的地點和中方官員的級別都有談及。按這構想，政改方案通過後，中央高級官員會發表公開講話，支持香港在2017年和2020年實現雙普選，並就邁向普選的路徑作一些原則性闡述，確認跟民主派溝通的成果。

（4）踏入4月，即使親北京陣營中一些「鷹派」人士不斷放風攻擊普選聯的方案，而工商界和左派亦放軟手腳，沒有就普選辦法提具體方案或反建議，但特區政府高層仍不斷勸溫和民主派要忍耐，要對溝通保持信心，說很快便會有更高層次的接觸、會有更實質的方案，還發誓說仍未數夠40票，又說應該不會在5月16日補選前提交修訂方案。

正因上述信息，普選聯的核心人士雖然偶有疑心，患得患失，但萬萬沒有料到，政府會在距離5.16補選尚有一個月，就突然公布一個沒有顯著讓步和改進的保守方案。這等於宣告之前尋求對話的努力盡付東流，難怪有普選聯核心成員感到被騙。

政壇耳語續稱，最教他們氣上心頭的是，直至昨晨，特區政府高層以至個別向來跟民主派有傾有講的行政會議成員，仍然輪流發動電話攻勢，四出聯絡普選聯成員，苦口婆心地勸喻他們，在政務司長唐英年公布政改方案內容後，千萬不要即時「反」，他們忍耐一下，先聽過人大常委會副秘書長喬曉陽下午四時半的發言後，才「翻臉」也未遲，還煞有介事地說「喬老爺會特別回應你們的」。可惜，聽罷喬老的發言後，普選聯中人更火上心頭，感覺被特區政府「搵笨」到極點。

楊森﹕要繼續爭取對話

不過，在一片喝倒采聲中，普選聯成員楊森昨晚特別來電囑咐筆者，要幫他記錄如下幾句話﹕「（民主派）不要因昨日的方案灰心，因大家的眼點從來都在2016、2017、2020年的選舉安排，而不是2012年，今年七月若方案沒有改善，那便否決它，但要堅持爭取以理性及據理力爭的方法與中央對話，以實現終極普選」。

李先知

http://blog.mingpao.com/cfm/content.cfm?OwnerID=1&CategoryID=1&TopicID=10882

诸恶与众善 - 韩寒

2010-04-14T07:01:00.000-07:00

2010-04-14

最近有一篇，流传甚广，叫《不要给西南灾区捐水了》，署名是韩寒。这篇文章并非我写，我的所有杂文的出处都会在我的博客中，如果博客里没有出现过（注意，是出现过，因为我不能保证文章出现以后能一直出现着），那就是没有写过。这篇文章我大致看了，很明显，文中类似“我曾经说过，如果我愿意，我可以去颠覆你们二十多年来形成的价值观，因为生活中很多在你们看来是理所当然的观念都是错误的”这样的话，是不会出现在我的文章里的。

对于本文背后作者的观点，我认同一部分，但对于主观点我不认同。在四川地震前，我已经知道原来红十字会是有一个所谓的手续费的，这个手续费的比例很高。到了四川，我们去了红十字会，当时老罗和我说起此事，我和老罗还说，如果捐款很多，岂不是光手续费就能够收几十亿？我寻思着要不要写这个文章，但是到最后，我都没有写，因为我不能在那个时候打击大家捐款的热情，这个近些年一直表现的自私冷漠的民族，多么难得有如此团结向善的时刻。后来我只是说，我不会向官方机构捐款，手续费是一方面的问题，另外一方面我并不了解最终捐款的去向。好在最终红十字会宣布免收手续费。

至今我一直有一个疑惑，就是比如某处灾难，救灾最终需要一亿，民众积极捐款，捐到了五千万，那到底意味着救灾总款变成了一亿五千万呢，还是救灾款依然是一亿，但是我们捐给了政府五千万？它困扰了我很久，最终解决的方法是各帮各的，各行其善。

西南大旱，天灾人祸都有，无论一个政府做的有多么不到位，都不能妨碍你以个人的身份行善的决心。事实上，经过了汶川地震，震后又出现了一些让人失望的新闻，大家的善心抗震程度又有所提高，之后的几次天灾，民众的热情程度一直不是很高，包括这次西南大旱。但你需知道，也许只有你知道，在你的一身中，一定犯下了罪孽。虽然在这个压力这么大的社会里，我们恨不得都是需要扶助的对象，但是力所能及的慈善，不光是为了让这个世界更加有希望，也是为了减轻你自己的罪恶，这个事情和政府无关，但是和社会有关有一句话：诸恶莫作，众善奉行。但是如果诸恶一直在作，甚至越做越过，乃至是非颠倒，这一切都不影响后面的那句，众善奉行。

只有众善够重，诸恶才能被诛。

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4701280b0100hy9k.html

孔誥烽﹕新民主運動新在哪裏?

2010-04-13T01:15:00.000-07:00

孔誥烽﹕新民主運動新在哪裏？
明報 2010年4月12日星期一

公投派最初提出以補選當公投，被死板的書生政客譏笑：補選是補選，沒有公投法何來公投？後來阿爺承認5區補選有公投之實，並全面杯葛，口誅筆伐，公投派即獲得了民主派從未有過的論述主導權，成功點石成金。他們進一步將公投等同於通過衝擊建制，直接訴諸群眾的「新民主運動」。但「新民主運動」，到底新在哪裏？

通過衝擊建制爭取民主，在民主運動的世界史中，絲毫不新。20世紀初英國爭取婦女普選權的婦運便搞過集體向警察政客吐口水、衝進議會搗亂等行動。中國的五四運動，更有學生火燒北洋政府權貴官邸之舉。這些行動，我想香港最激進的民主派也不敢想像。他們發動的公投，對不少民主國家和地方政府來說，已是習以為常的例行公事，其實比有失控風險的遊行集會還要溫和。

公投之所以顯得新和激，是因為香港人在過去20多年已太習慣主流民主派那種「好學生論政」的氣質。好學生在參與校政時，總會自動自覺地不做師長不喜歡的事，並時刻與壞學生劃清界線，小心保護好學生的身分。不少人指斥阿爺不喜歡的公投是「爛仔交」，便折射出一種好學生藐視壞學生的傲慢。

好學生參政

過去在神父慈祥、校長開明的傳統英式中學中，這些好學生都混得很好，做head boys、head girls、辯論隊隊長、品學兼優之餘，還可以公開擁抱各種前衛思想。進了自由的殖民地大學，他們更可以挾著天子門生的光環，走出校園，批判社會。

在港英的吸納政治下，好學生搞運動，一般都不用害怕犧牲。在美好的上世紀七八十年代，你可以一面念馬克思和法農，一面拿英資財團獎學金負笈牛劍。AO試的考官也不會因為你的學運背景而歧視你（更有傳聞說可能會有分加）。你也可以當一個認為文化大革命好得很的毛派學生領袖，毛到最後成為英資美資銀行大班。如果你不想加入政、商、學界，則可成為當時與公務員一樣薪高糧準的專業社工，繼續投身「社會運動」。

好學生出身的論政參政者，通常對「衝擊建制」聞風色變，也很害怕動員群眾，怕裏面的壞學生越軌搞事，玷污了他們的好學生光環。他們的語言潔癖，也是世間少有。美國副總統在總統簽署醫療改革法案的歷史時刻，在全國觀眾面前爆粗；前副總統切尼更曾在議會殿堂叫一名民主黨參議員「go fxxx yourself」，事後大家都是一笑置之，連政壇死敵，也沒有以此大做文章。我不是說政客可以講粗口，但香港公投運動的部分發起人，只是在自家網台對著自家支持者關起門講幾句粗口，竟然可以在政壇引起中學校園內「哦！你講粗口！」式的哄動，還可以成為一些人反對一條政治路線的主要口實之一，確是世界奇聞。

殖民時代後期，港英汲取了暴動教訓，也要與中共競爭民意，所以不得不進行各種改革。仍未收回香港的中共，也要裝出一個開明的形象，反民主也不敢太過分。在這特殊時空下，進入建制或以建制認可的方式推動民主的好學生，確實能對社會進步有不少貢獻。他們可以同時成為受壓迫市民的喉舌和被建制賞識的青年才俊，左右逢源，兩面通吃。

97年後，參政議政好學生面對的，已經不是港英的吸納政治，而是親疏有別、敵我分明的新格局。在此格局下，只要你要求真普選、平反六四，便都是跟阿爺對著幹。在當權者眼中，拿雪山獅子旗、衝擊成癮的陳小姐，與要求釋放劉曉波，譴責衝擊行為與警務處長一樣不遺餘力的蔡先生，是沒有分別的，同樣都要被檢控。同時，現在的建制逐漸只向根正苗紅的圍內紅人、富人及其後代開放，所以才會出現前一陣子有關香港出現太子黨的爭論。

以往好學生兩面通吃的空間，正在慢慢消失。好學生如想繼續議政、參政，最終很可能要在為民喉舌與被權貴認可之間二擇其一，忠義兩難全。中國1949年後一批自稱第三勢力的民主黨派的遭遇，對我們應該還有一些參考價值。

催生新民運三股力量

當時中共對這些知識分子的統戰，其實是逐一收編、利用，然後逐一鎮壓的過程，「狡兔死、走狗烹」。1950年代初中共搞三反五反鎮反，這些民主黨派都積極配合；但到了反右時，他們卻成了鎮壓對象。反右時民盟的吳晗對其他民主人士落井下石，賣力批判，還得到毛澤東點名稱讚，但最後都在1966年因為暗批大躍進的《海瑞罷官》，成為文革第一炮下的著名炮灰。當時不少天真的知識分子一心要成為當權者的諍友，既沾到權力的好處，也保有為民請命的美名，可是一心兩面通吃，最後卻變成兩面不是人，像吳晗一樣，既保不住多年的清譽，下場也不是很好。

香港新民運誕生，是因為不少人看到好學生參政式的舊民運已前無去路。公社兩黨與「大專2012」，正代表了催生新民運的三股力量：

第一是在港英時代已經不屑做好學生，一路走來，始終如一的壞學生；

第二是在港英時代做慣好學生，但在政治環境畸變下決定落場頑鬥、脫下西裝外套褶起衣袖的前度好學生；

第三是清楚今天就算乖乖當個好學生也不會有何出路的80後。

公投運動，從一開始便不斷被打壓、潑冷水和吹毛求疵。但正如Roundtable 的林輝君所說，公投運動只要帶有反高鐵般「致命的認真」，定能激發大家始料不及的巨大能量。公投運動在過去幾個月克服了一個又一個障礙，最終成局，本身已有極大意義。最初不夠議員在5區辭職的問題，因公民黨加入而解決。後來北京不惜承認補選是公投，全面杯葛，務求一兩區自動當選，讓補選不能成為全民投票，卻因大專2012參選而破功。

公投排除萬難而成局，證明了新民運的社會基礎與動能已超過了關鍵臨界點，現在誰也擋不住。這也證明了建制派的幕後操盤人，其實並非如傳聞中一樣的全知全能。大學生在網上募捐，一呼百應，幾天便籌夠5區參選的25萬保證金，更是矚目。

公投成局，公投運動可說已取得上半場的勝利。就算投票情况不理想，一個讓港人就重要議題集體表態，可重複操作並在實踐中不斷完善的機制，已經形成。至於這次公投運動的下半場結果如何，就要看每一位選民能否在5•16好好利用手裏的投票權利了。

作者是美國印第安那大學布魯明頓校區社會學系助理教授

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/100411/4/hfu8.html

In Scrabble, Minding Z’s and Q’s, and Much More

2010-04-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

In Scrabble, Minding Z’s and Q’s, and Much More

Lars Klove for The New York Times
By STEFAN FATSIS
Published: April 9, 2010

What’s a word? Scrabble has been bound up in that existential question since the game exploded into prominence more than a half-century ago.

The rules on the inside cover of the box, written by the game’s inventor, Alfred Butts, and its first marketer, James Brunot, are explicit: “Any words found in a standard dictionary are permitted except those capitalized, those designated as foreign words, abbreviations and words requiring apostrophes or hyphens.”

The interpretation of those rules, however, has been anything but simple. This past week, outrage sounded worldwide after reports, which proved untrue, that Scrabble would permit the use of proper nouns. The linguistic dust-up was only the latest in the game’s history.

WHICH DICTIONARY? When Scrabble took off in the 1950s, disputes arose over whether words like “ma” and “pa” were permissible. Mr. Brunot declined requests to endorse a dictionary. “It’s only a game,” he told Life magazine in 1953.

Two early enthusiasts, Jacob Orleans and Edmund Jacobson, tore a Funk & Wagnalls dictionary in half and compiled a list of 30,000 words they found useful for Scrabble. By the 1970s, Funk & Wagnalls was the de facto word source for competitive play.

But that book included foreign words like “ja” and “nyet,” and it was clunky; common words were hidden in long lists starting with “un” or “re.” In 1978, the first Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, compiled from five standard college dictionaries, was published. It resolved countless disputes, but created others.

THE NO-NO LIST. In 1993, a Virginia woman was horrified to find “jew” in the O.S.P.D., defined as “to bargain with — an offensive term.” Her complaints led Hasbro, Scrabble’s North American owner, and Merriam-Webster, publisher of the players dictionary, to delete several dozen words, among them “jesuit,” “libber” and “fart.”

Competitive Scrabblers revolted — on the board, words are devoid of meaning — and a compromise was reached. The expurgated O.S.P.D. would be for home and school play. Club and tournament play would use a book listing every word, including the “dirty” ones, sans definitions. (One Scrabbler sells a laminated bookmark of the banned words. It’s called the Poo List, after one of them.)

THE SCHISM. While Scrabble in North America is governed by the Official Club and Tournament World List, or OWL, the rest of world uses a more expansive list, Collins Scrabble Words, a combination of the OWL and Britain’s Collins English Dictionary. For decades, American and Canadian players competing abroad have had to learn thousands of additional words — and forget them while at home.

Advocates love the international game’s lexical inclusiveness and enhanced scoring potential (more words equals more chances for points). Opponents resent having to learn hundreds of new words to keep playing at a basic level. In a referendum, North American players rejected the international lexicon. Today, a few American tournaments include an international-words division.

CLEANSING THE BOOK. While some players support a bigger lexicon, others want a cleaner one. “Typical Scrabble enthusiasts are good spellers who find implausibilities on nearly every page of the O.S.P.D.,” says Dan Pratt of Russett, Md., a retired mathematician and linguist who hopes to publish a revised word list to compete with the existing one. His reasoning: The initial O.S.P.D. relied on several standard college dictionaries dating to as early as 1963. It has been updated three times, most recently in 2006, resulting in the addition of thousands of words. Only a handful, however, have been removed. So Scrabble allows many words that can’t be found in any 21st-century American college dictionary.

Words cited by Mr. Pratt include “al” (defined in the O.S.P.D. as an East Indian tree), “oxid” (an alternate spelling of “oxide”) and “toadless” (having no toads). He even noted that one word, “knesset” (the Israeli parliament), is listed in all the dictionaries used to update the O.S.P.D. except one as, yes, a proper noun.

Stefan Fatsis is the author of “Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/weekinreview/11fatsis.html

散文一篇 - 韩寒

2010-04-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

在昨天，我看到了一条新闻，新闻说我候选了时代周刊的两百个影响全球的人物，中国同时入选的还有敏感词，敏感词和敏感词等人。当时我正在我们村里挖笋（我挖的是自己家的），没怎么注意，后来回去一看手机上有不少的短信，问我对此事的态度，我只回复了新京报和南都的两位朋友，其他媒体写的均为凭着对我性格的猜测下的友好想象。我没有想到大家还比较关心，在这里我就做一个统一的回复。

首先，我非常感叹和惋惜，为什么别人有这样的新闻媒体，当时代周刊弄一个人物榜的评选的时候，能够让全世界其他的国家都起波澜。我多么渴望我们中国也能有类似的一个新闻媒体，当他评选人物的时候，在全世界也引起关注。我们不能说这样的一个媒体完全公正，但是它是有完全的公信力的，我多么渴望我们国家也有。可惜我们并没有。不是说我们的媒体人要比其他地方的媒体人差，而是因为一些……原因，这些原因众所周知，点到为止，多说必死，死后鞭尸。

我经常自问自己，我为这个充满着敏感词的社会做出了什么贡献，可能到最后我只贡献了一个以我的名字命名的敏感词而已。我天天睡到中午，经常浪费钱买数码产品，还挑食，但好在我也未曾给这个社会增加罪孽和负担，至少迄今为止是这样。我没有辽阔的远见，我唯独只想让相关部门善待文艺和新闻，不要给他们过多的审查以及限制，不要用政府的权利和国家名义去封杀或者污蔑任何一个文艺工作者和新闻从业者，这样的话，不用你们花大价钱，这个国家会自动生产出输出到西方世界的文艺作品和新闻媒体，我们的每一个小小的读者听众观众网民市民国民都能同享荣光。我未必有天赋和能力写出好的东西，但是别人有，但你不要阉人有夸人无。

电话里记者问我，有一些地方还说你和西方反华势力勾结，我说这个很正常，人家这招用了六十年了，前几十年还有发自内心的，后几十年纯粹是用于泼脏水了。我一个要去西方国家比赛经常因为材料不够齐而差点签证都办不出来的人，还西方势力呢，况且都什么年代了，还勾结不勾结的，这词说出去多难听啊。相信如果有哪位朋友天天监听着我的电话的话，您一定很清楚我究竟是一个怎么样的人，您说呢，电脑前一定会有一位朋友会心一笑的。但我只是奇怪，这些御用笔杆子，怎么几十年都用一个体位，他不烦，对象都烦了。但是，我坚决赞同他们的存在，因为总有正方和反方，总有甲方和乙方，如果我们国家能做到话不投机一拍两散，而不是话不投机把你封杀，那就是我们国家的巨大进步，我们也将为此而努力。

后来他又发短信问我，那么换句话说，你这个人的观点和言论符合了西方人的价值观，你觉得是么？
我回消息说，难道不符合中国人的价值观么？
我相信地球人和外星人也许价值观不一样，但是西方人和东方人，除了生活习惯不一样以外，价值观应该是差不多的，为何一定要争呢。

最后说回到所谓的影响力，我经常非常的惭愧，我只是一介书生，也许我的文章让人解气，但除此以外又有什么呢，那虚无缥缈的影响力？在中国，影响力往往就是权力，那些翻云覆雨手，那些让你死，让你活，让你不死不活的人，他们才是真正有影响力的人。但是不知道是因为他们怕搜呢还是不经搜，往往在搜索引擎上还搜不到他们。我们只是站在这个舞台上被灯光照着的小人物。但是这个剧场归他们所有，他们可以随时让这个舞台落下帷幕，熄灭灯光，切断电闸，关门放狗，最后狗过天晴，一切都无迹可寻。我只是希望这些人，真正的善待自己的影响力，而我们每一个舞台上的人，甚至能有当年建造这个剧场的人，争取把四面的高墙和灯泡都慢慢拆除，当阳光洒进来的时候，那种光明，将再也没有人能摁灭。

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4701280b0100ht1x.html

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