Quotulatiousness

October 6, 2009

If you can’t believe Xinhua, who can you believe?

Filed under: China, Europe, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:25

Lester Haines had a lot of fun composing this, um, fascinating report from the Chinese news agency, Xinhua:

Chinese media finger Swedish lesbian enclave
Mythical city of Sapphic luuuurv

Chinese media have confirmed what we in the West suspected all along: that concealed in the northern Swedish woods is a city of 25,000 women, many of whom have turned to Sapphic love to satiate their natural Scandinavian sexual desires.

According to news agancy Xinhua, the all-female enclave is called “Chako Paul City”, and was founded in 1820 by a “wealthy widow”. The city is guarded by two blonde sentries who prevent men from entering. Those chaps who do unwisely attempt to force the issue risk being “beaten half to death” by Nordic gender police.

Women, though, are welcome to visit Chako Paul City, which boasts a burgeoning tourist industry with hotels and restaurants catering for international guests. Locals, however, are discouraged from leaving their female paradise, and those who do “are only allowed to re-enter Chako Paul City if they agree to bathe and undertake several other measures designed to ensure that their out-of-town trysts don’t negatively affect the mental state of other women in the town”.

Sounds like an old post in alt.sex.stories.swedish to me . . .

October 5, 2009

Tension in the Himalayas?

Filed under: China, India, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Strategy Page has a short primer on the potentially volatile issue of where the borders are in the Himalayas:

China is causing considerable consternation in India by reviving old claims to border areas. In northeast India, the state of Arunachal Pradesh has long been claimed as part of Tibet (although when Tibet was an independent nation a century ago, it agreed that Arunachal Pradesh was part of India.) Arunachal Pradesh has a population of about a million people, spread among 84,000 square kilometers of mountains and valleys. The Himalayan mountains, the tallest in the world, are the northern border of Arunachal Pradesh, and serve as the border, even if currently disputed, with China. This is a really remote part of the world, and neither China nor India want to go to war over the place. But the two countries did fight a short war, up in these mountains, in 1962. The Indians lost, and are determined not to lose if there is a rematch.

October 2, 2009

Environmental warning from . . . Olympic bid committee chairman?

Filed under: Environment, Japan, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

I guess Japan’s Shintaro Ishihara had to say something to counteract the presence of US President Barack Obama:

Ishihara, who was celebrating his 77th birthday, is the president of the Tokyo bid to win the right to host the 2016 Games which will be voted on by the 100-plus International Olympic Committee (IOC) members here on Friday.

Ishihara, who won won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for the best young author for his novel ‘Season of the Sun’ before he had graduated from university in 1956, said that unless the world took note of what was happening to the environment and global warming the Olympic Games faced a bleak future.

“I think this (the 2016 Games) could be the last for mankind,” he said at a reception for the bid, though, his opinion will come as a shock to his fellow bid members as they have been speaking of leaving a legacy that will last for at least the rest of the century should they host the Games.

“However, more realistically we have to come up with measures without which the Olympics cannot last long. [. . .] Tokyo is prepared to do everything to create the best conditions for the athletes environmentally speaking. [. . .] But if things are left unattended the Olympic Games will not continue for long. [. . .] I want people to make choices with consideration for the environment. [. . .] Global warming is getting worse. Scientists have said that the earth has passed the point of no return,” added Ishihara, whose focus on the environment is one of the major priorities in Tokyo’s bid.

So, since “the earth has passed the point of no return”, you’re devoting your time and effort to win the Olympic bid for your home city? Because it’s the best contribution towards averting this disaster you’re certain will strike? Doesn’t that seem a bit, you know, inappropriate? Thousands of athletes and their trainers/organizers/family/friends flying to Tokyo will add how many tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? Building all the necessary facilities for the games will divert materials and labour away from other activities, yes?

Or are you just trying to take media attention away from Barack Obama?

For the record, I think the notion of returning the Olympics to Greece permanently would be a better idea than the every-four-years circus of cities and regions prostituting themselves to the International Olympic Committee. Greece could use the tourist income, and it would save untold billions of dollars being taxed from residents of the various “winning” cities. A win all-round.

Update: Looks like even trying to out-Gore Al didn’t help Tokyo win their bid. But even more surprising, Chicago was out on the very first ballot:

Rio de Janeiro and Madrid are vying to be the host of the 2016 Olympic Games, after Chicago and Tokyo were eliminated by the International Olympic Committee.

Tokyo secured the fewest of the 95 votes available in the second round at the meeting in Copenhagen. Chicago was knocked out in the first round vote.

Cities will be eliminated until one secures a majority with the winner set to be announced after 1730 BST.

Chicago’s early exit was a surprise, with bookmakers making them favourites.

Update, the second: Rio de Janeiro wins the bid, eliminating Madrid. BBC News story here.

September 30, 2009

Testing whether incentive pay for teachers improves student outcomes

Filed under: Economics, Education, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:13

A post up at Marginal Revolution summarizes a new paper by Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman, examining whether incentive pay for teachers (PDF) improves student performance:

1) Evidence comes from a very large sample, 500 schools covering approximately 55,000 students, and treatment regimes and controls are randomly assigned to schools in a careful, stratified design.

2) An individual-incentive plan and a group-incentive plan are compared to a control group and to two types of unconditional extra-spending treatments (a block grant and hiring an extra teacher). Thus the authors can test not only whether an incentive plan works relative to no plan but also whether an incentive plan works relative to spending a similar amount of money on “improving schools.”

3) The authors understand incentive design and they test for whether their incentive plan reduces learning on non-performance pay margins.

In the west, with most students being taught in publicly funded schools with strong teaching unions, these results will not be welcomed by the majority of school systems or unions. From the abstract:

Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students’ test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 3% of annual pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on “conceptual” as well as “mechanical” components of the tests, suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives, suggesting positive spillovers. Group and individual incentive schools performed equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools outperformed in the second year. Incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value.

I’m surprised that the results were so positive for relatively minor incentive bonus amounts.

September 23, 2009

Watch the collector value of M1 rifles drop now

Filed under: Asia, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

The South Korean government is planning to sell off its large holdings of M-1 rifles and carbines, according to this BBC News report:

South Korea has come up with a novel way to boost its defence budget — by selling a vast stockpile of old Korean-war rifles to collectors in the US.

The guns were originally sent to Korea as military aid, and some were also used during the war in Vietnam.

For more than five decades, they have been kept mothballed in warehouses.

Most of those on offer are M1 rifles — a weapon once described by US General George S Patton as “the greatest battle-implement ever devised”.

I recall when the Canadian Forces retired the FN C1 rifle . . . the government freaked at the thought of thousands of “assault rifles” being sold to civilians, so they changed the regulations to move the FN into a more restricted category (which most casual gun owners didn’t qualify for).

September 18, 2009

US tariff on Chinese tires “a colossal blunder”

Filed under: China, Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

I don’t read The Economist regularly these days, having given up my 20-year subscription about five years back. Their steady drift away from free markets towards statist models made the publication less and less interesting (and much more live most other financial publications). This article, however, at least covers the situation in an even-handed way:

You can be fairly sure that when a government slips an announcement out at nine o’clock on a Friday night, it is not proud of what it is doing. That is one of the only things that makes sense about Barack Obama’s decision to break a commitment he, along with other G20 leaders, reaffirmed last April: to avoid protectionist measures at a time of great economic peril. In every other way the president’s decision to slap a 35% tariff on imported Chinese tyres looks like a colossal blunder, confirming his critics’ worst fears about the president’s inability to stand up to his party’s special interests and stick to the centre ground he promised to occupy in office.

This newspaper endorsed Mr Obama at last year’s election in part because he had surrounded himself with enough intelligent centrists. We also said that the eventual success of his presidency would be based on two things: resuscitating the world economy; and bringing the new emerging powers into the Western order. He has now hurt both objectives.

Several sources mentioned that yesterday’s announcement about cancelling the ABM systems that were to be installed in Poland and the Czech Republic was an attempt to cozy up to Russia. This move can only be interpreted as an attempt to look tough against the Chinese — which would just be dumb — or (even more disturbingly) solid proof that Barack Obama doesn’t have a clue on international trade.

September 16, 2009

An appreciation of the life and work of Norman Borlaug

Filed under: Environment, India, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Gregg Easterbrook looks at the accomplishments of Norman Borlaug, who died on Saturday:

Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was “a fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug’s arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was “inappropriate” for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”

Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.

“Without high-yield agriculture,” Borlaug said, “increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion.” Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.

September 3, 2009

Was Fukuyama correct after all?

Filed under: China, Economics, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:28

Scott Sumner has an interesting post up about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thoughts of the late 1980s:

So the obvious choice for most successful prediction is Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 claim that “history was ending,” that the great ideological battle between democratic capitalism and other isms was essentially over, and that henceforth the world would become gradually more democratic, peaceful, and market-oriented.

[. . .]

I get very annoyed when I see people say “the Chinese case proves that economic development doesn’t inevitably lead to political liberalization.” There are so many problems with this sort of statement that one hardly knows were to begin. China has seen incredible political liberalization since 1978, indeed even some progress since 1998. But what about western-style democracy? To answer that question, consider the list above. I would argue that China most resembles Thailand. Both have similar per capita GDPs, both have a huge split between the urban elite and the rural poor. My hunch is that consciously or subconsciously, the urban residents of China are not thrilled by the idea of a pure democracy that would effectively turn the country over to the rural poor. But wait a few decades, when China goes from being 60%-70% rural, to 60%-70% urban, and from mostly poor to mostly middle-income, and from mostly undereducated to mostly educated. Then let’s see how Fukuyama’s thesis holds up.

History is still ending. Or maybe I should say “his story” is ending, the story of war, revolution and voyages of discovery. The Illiad and the Odyssey. And “her story” is beginning. A world focused on improving education, health care, cuisine, leisure time, the arts, communication, animal rights, the environment, etc.

August 6, 2009

China soon to be capable of settling the “Taiwan question”?

Filed under: China, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

According to a recent report from RAND Corporation, unlike the last time they ran the simulation (in 2000), their current projections have the Chinese able to win an air battle over Taiwan:

In 2000, the influential think thank RAND Corporation crunched some numbers regarding a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and concluded that “any near-term Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan would likely be a very bloody affair with a significant probability of failure” — especially if the U.S. raced to the island nation’s defense. But nine years later, a new, much-updated edition of the RAND study found that China’s improved air and missile forces “represent clear and impending dangers to the defense of Taiwan,” whether or not the U.S. is involved.

“A credible case can be made that the air war for Taiwan could essentially be over before much of the Blue [American and allied] air force has even fired a shot,” the monograph notes.

I’m not sure if this comment was intended to forestall the cancellation of the last part of the F-22 order, or if it’s a marker for a future “We told you so” debate:

It’s a potentially controversial assertion — and one that might have fueled the (now-resolved) debate over whether the U.S. Air Force should buy more F-22s. RAND found that F-22s flying from the relative safety of Guam could be surprisingly effective in blunting a Chinese air assault.

Remember that the air battle would only be part of the military equation . . . fighters and bombers still can’t overcome ground forces by themselves. A seaborne invasion would still be necessary, and the PLAN does not (yet) have sufficient lift tonnage to ensure a chance of success. Amphibious attacks are the hardest to accomplish (despite the Allied string of successes from 1942 to 1951), and always depend on both command of the air and command of the sea. China could, according to RAND’s latest study, win the air battle but still does not have the necessary preponderance of force to win control of the sea.

But the century is yet young . . .

H/T to Jon for the link.

July 31, 2009

Cue up the ominous music . . .

Filed under: Asia, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:58

. . . ’cause it’s the return of Krakatoa:

Krakatoa_July2009(Detail of image from the article)

With an explosive force 13,000 times the power of the atomic bomb that annihilated Hiroshima, the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa killed more than 36,000 people and radically altered global weather and temperatures for years afterwards.

The eruption was so violent and catastrophic that no active volcano in modern times has come close to rivalling it, not even the spectacular eruption of Mount St Helens in the U.S. in 1980. Now, almost a century-and-a-half on, are we about to experience the horrors of Krakatoa once again?

‘Volcanic prediction is getting better,’ says Professor Jon Davidson, chair of Earth Science at Durham University and a volcanologist who has studied Krakatoa first-hand. ‘But we are never going to be able to fully predict big and unusual eruptions, precisely because they are unusual.’

Yet there is little doubt that if Krakatoa were to erupt again with such force and fury, the impact would be far more devastating than that which was experienced in the 19th century.

H/T to Nick Packwood.

July 21, 2009

iPhone prototype loss leads to suicide?

Filed under: China, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 16:53

A very disturbing tale from The Register:

A Chinese engineer committed suicide after he was allegedly roughed-up by company security services when one of the iPhone 4G prototypes entrusted into his care went missing.

Twenty-five-year-old Sun Danyong, a recent engineering graduate, was employed by Foxconn, manufacturer of Apple’s iPhone and iPods. According to reports from China Radio International (Google translation), VentureBeat, and others, Sun leapt to his death from the 12th floor of his apartment building on July 16th, a few days after the iPhone 4G prototype disappeared.

The reports indicate that on July 9th, Sun received 16 of the prototypes, but a few days later, he could account for only 15 of them. After searching the factory, he reported the missing iPhone to his superiors on Monday, July 13th.

Two days later, his apartment was allegedly searched by Foxconn security who, according to CRI and others, beat Sun during their investigation.

Although the beating is unproven, what happened at 3:00 am on Thursday the 16th is not in dispute: Security cameras in Sun’s apartment building taped him leaping from an open window.

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