wtrk

You've read the linked article, wherein readers are informed that more than two thousand people (not a tiny number given that only 800 students were sitting for the exam at the school in question -- so think parents and family members) rioted outside an examinations hall demanding that children be allowed to cheat on a test and the local government's response was to agree that enforcement of anti-cheating measures had been too strict.

Are you going to ask me to Google up images of thousands of dead pigs clogging a major river after being dumped there by farmers? Photos of walls of buildings damaged during the 2013 Sichuan earthquake showing that they contain quite a lot of styrofoam beneath a thin layer of cement? Reports of intentional (rather than accidental) food contamination and tampering? The gutter oil rackets -- one of which was busted operating in HK late in 2012? You can find all of that information for yourself.

As for HK, off the top of my head, besides the gutter oil operation there (similar to some of those in the PRC proper) ... Both CE candidates had illegal structures in/on their homes but one managed to squeak through the Beijing-run coronation process before his was discovered, the development secretary resigned last year as a result of a corruption investigation, the head of the city's urban renewal authority resigned recently after being targeted for investigation, the head of security at the airport (a former high-ranking police officer) is being investigated for corruption, etc.

How could you really have lived in Guangzhou for any significant length of time and be so in the dark?

Can I provide evidence to prove to you that my generalization is accurate?

Can you prove to me that Antarctica exists? That there were ever dinosaurs? If I'm intent on not being convinced?

Come to China for an extended visit. Reside in one region for a while, then move to another for a bit. Repeat that process a few times until you're satisfied. Being able to read and write Chinese (simplified characters) and speak Putonghua (or, if you stay in one place long enough, the local dialect) would probably speed things up for you.

Even then, you could (if you were determined enough) maintain a conviction that you had just had a run of bad luck in terms of the places you'd chosen to live and the people with whom you'd happened to interact.

I don't know how much time you'd have to spend here to be satisfied.

Cheating is not endemic within the gaokao system because, as a testing regime, it's excessively vulnerable to cheating. It's not any more cheatable than the SAT, GREs, or other standardized entrance or aptitude exams.

Mainland Chinese society at all levels is thoroughly corrupt and its pretty much impossible to achieve what a reasonable observer would recognize as a materially successful life within the PRC without being actively involved in corruption.

Even simply to muddle along and live hand-to-mouth, content to have most of the doors to success either closed to them from the get-go or slammed in their face, a regular Mainland person has to turn a blind eye to a steady stream of illegal, unethical, and downright harmful behavior on the part of their peers.

That's a part of why (along with many other factors) many Mainland citizens are eager to emigrate to pretty much anywhere that's not the PRC.

> Should I, or anyone else, be fined for that?

If you had been made aware, in advance, that there was a fine, then sure, you should be fined for being tardy.

Are you pattern-matching on "VC", "lateness", "fine", and your own negative feelings regarding having been late to a VC meeting?

Your reaction to this story (VC firm trying to show that it values potential investment targets' time) is like someone worrying that, since a pizzeria has a policy of not charging customers for a pizza if it's delivered late, you're going to have to provide the delivery person with a free sandwich if you don't get to the door quickly enough after he rings the bell.

Instead of discouraging people from showing their care/regard for you (which, with a generous helping of social obligation, is what gift-giving is about), why not try to find ways to help gift givers give useful/desirable gifts?

Children have wishlists (adults too nowadays -- e.g. Amazon), people 'register' for weddings, etc.

Actually, no. If you give someone a delicious homemade chutney and that inspires them, they could gift you the following year with a marmalade or cherry confit or something else.

Your reply suggests that you may be giving homemade gifts and getting retail-purchased gifts in return.

I actually agree with what you're doing but doubt that many recipients truly appreciate your gifts, which are likely pretty neat.

People tend to be polite, especially when it comes to expressing thanks for a gift.

One way to gauge the recipients' true enthusiasm would be to look at how many of them have followed your lead.

If you've been doing this for three years, how many home-made gifts did you receive in return in the second and third years? If you're counting this as the third year, how many such gifts did you receive last year?

I'm not a Futurama head, so I looked it up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasites_Lost

I have read and enjoyed some of the other books already mentioned and would add:

* Paul R. Halmos's "I Want to Be a Mathematician... an automathography: http://www.amazon.com/Want-Be-Mathematician-Automathography-...

* Frederick Mosteller's "The Pleasures of Statistics: The Autobiography of Frederick Mosteller": http://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-Statistics-Autobiography-Fre...

If I look at the sky and it's blue and I tell you that it's blue but you're convinced that it's yellow, should I compromise and agree henceforth to tell people that the sky is green or some shade of yellow?

If the cost of winning certain potential allies to your cause would amount to the complete subversion and hollowing out of your cause, maybe it's better to forge ahead without those allies. If your vision is correct, some of them may come around to the correct position, your position, as time goes on. Or maybe not.

If anyone would like a lifelogging camera right now, you can purchase a Vicon Revue (rebadged/locked version of Microsoft's SenseCam):

http://www.viconrevue.com/product.html

It has a "privacy button" that stops it from taking photos for a few minutes and records other information along with the images (like temperature, for example). Also, all of the images and data are stored locally on the device.

Another lifelogging camera, with better specs, about to hit the market (Nov 2012 according to the register/buy page) is Autographer, from the Oxford Metrics Group:

http://www.autographer.com/

They are advertising 8GB of internal storage, so it would seem that they're storing the images locally too, though the device has bluetooth.

Indeed. But don't expect the sort of person whose battle cry w/re to RS is "But he's so unkempt!" to acknowledge that he tends to be correct.

The article heralds soy as having an uber-low glycemic index ... but doesn't note that soy appears to function as an endocrine disruptor in humans, something of concern for everyone but especially for children/infants.

Indeed. AFAICT from the linked post, there's no proof (e.g. visual sighting of a whale at any of the locations from which the sounds have emanated) that the source of the sounds is even a whale at all.

The (unframed) article: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/mark-kitto-youll-...

Thanks for posting this. A few seconds before the eight-minute mark, Vinge says that he expects the Singularity to occur before 2030 assuming that (A.) it is technologically possible and (B.) no disasters (e.g. a nuclear war) derails us before that point.

I'm a year or two away from eligibility of permanent resident status here in HK and, while I obviously haven't hated living here enough yet to pull up stakes and move, I can't really agree with your assessment of HK as a great place.

The pollution is frighteningly terrible most of the year (some from vehicles here, some from coal-fired power plants here, and about 60% from industrial activities across the border on the Mainland), about half of the population endure a desperately low standard of living and live in sprawling public housing estates because they simply cannot afford to purchase or rent apartments of their own, the economy is run by a handful of tycoons that dominate every sector and drive the price of each and every good and service up, elections for the chief executive (local equivalent of mayor/governor) are "small circle" (a few hundred people, mostly pawns of the tycoons or pro-Beijing folks cast votes last time), etc.

It's a third world city with some British traditions that are being systematically expunged or, when that would likely draw too great of an outcry, gradually eroded under Beijing's rule.

"The Real Story of JPG Magazine"

http://powazek.com/posts/534

I think that something like the Math Emporium could represent an excellent additional resource ... but using it to replace lectures altogether would seem, to me, to be a missed opportunity and a big mistake. I hope that they at least have something like recitations / TA-led classes so that students can get face time with, periodically, with someone knowledgeable w/re to the subject matter.

Also, the article says "The key is letting computers do what they do best - grading multiple-choice tests, [...]".

That's alarming because it suggests that the automatically generated practice tests and possibly even the real, proctored tests in the Math Emporium scheme are all multiple-choice. For exams in introductory, memorization-heavy humanities courses, that's fine, but the multiple-choice format is ill-suited for math. There's no way to assign partial credit for wrong answers and, more importantly, there's no capability to examine the steps that the student took when trying to find the solution to a given problem so that their mistake can be explained to them.

Based on the article, it sounds as though Virginia Tech is replacing part of their undergrad math curriculum with Kumon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumon) for grown-ups. Depressing.

The NSF and NCTM are anti-AP? I googled and didn't turn up anything on this, but it's altogether possible that I didn't search on the right terms.

Do you have any links?

Why was this deleted?

[Posting as a reply to dangoldin's comment b/c I can't post a top-level reply.]

Sorry! I follow HN primarily through the RSS feed and a lot of posts/threads never show up there.

Before posting, I did Google for polls on the subject of version control and didn't turn up anything (oddly enough, this thread seems to be at the top of the results page):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="version+control"+poll+site:news.ycombinator.com

Even if I had seen your poll, though, I probably would have posted anyway because I'm interested in getting a feel for how many people use some of the systems that are listed at top besides Git, Mercurial, and Subversion.

Here's a roughly-scanned version of Coase's paper: http://ccer.pku.edu.cn/download/7874-2.pdf

Just to clarify, Coase wrote (in "The Lighthouse in Economics" in the 1970's) specifically on the case of lighthouses in the British Isles.

Lighthouses in England are maintained by Trinity House (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_House) which is not in any recognizable way a private organization. While it operates with a large degree of autonomy, it is part of the UK government.

According to Coase, Trinity House funds its activities through "light dues" that are assessed on a per-tonnage basis to ships arriving at or departing from British ports. Assuming that there are never shortfalls or times when TH needs to draw on outside funds, then the scheme is self-supporting.

IOW, We're not looking at a bunch of hard-working libertarian lighthouse keepers each independently negotiating with ship captains in a free market.

This is precisely why I would never buy a Kindle.

The Soviet regime ran a large system of forced labor camps. China currently runs a large system of forced labor camps. Horrible human rights violations occurred under the Soviet system and are currently occurring in China.

Here's a recent, quite representative, example of the sort of thing that can happen to someone in China:

"Chinese teacher sent to labour camp for earthquake photos" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/30/chinaearthquake....

Excerpt:

  A Chinese teacher has been sent to a labour camp over his   
  internet photographs of schools that collapsed in the 
  Sichuan earthquake, a rights group said today.

  Liu Shaokun was ordered to serve a year of "re-education   
  through labour", according to Human Rights in China. The 
  system does not require a formal charge or criminal trial 
  and there is no appeal.

The Chinese equivalent to the Soviet-era gulag is the laogai ("reform through labor") camp:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai

He used two commas in his post and they demarcated a parenthetical phrase.

Yeah - find some Australians, British citizens, Canadians, etc. who are serving lengthy jail terms or are currently under house arrest for speaking out about environmental disasters, labor disputes, and the like. Especially reach out to the ones who've been beaten and tortured for voicing their views and attempting to organize.

The problem of course is that none of that stuff happens to peaceful protesters and activists. It does happen in China.

Any effort to cast the Chinese government and its policies as somehow morally equivalent to the governments of liberal Western democracies is going to fall flat.

Ask the Tiananmen Mothers how much China has changed. Ask the Uighurs or Tibetans. Ask some of the current crop of Chinese dissidents - the ones currently being harrassed, kept under house arrest, or those who've been secretly arrested, beaten, and tortured. Ask factory workers who are finding that the new labor law gives them little/no real protection from their employers. Ask nail house residents who are being forced out of their homes with little or no compensation to make way for developers with close ties to local officials. You won't read about any of these people much in the local press - either the government mouthpieces or the censored commercial media - and any significant interaction with them will end up with you being branded an "enemy of China" and hounded out of the country.

I have been living and running a business here, in China, for the past several years and I see plenty.