The following information is used for educational purposes only.
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Monday, November 26, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Using taboo language can alter behavior
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Using taboo language can alter behavior
Swearing provokes a stress response, even when it is done by accident, although euphemisms don’t, researchers found
By Louise Tickle / The Guardian
Oct 06, 2011
I have a friend who can’t say “fuck.” She never has been able to and shakes her head helplessly when teased and dared to give it a go. She is not a prude, but she has such a strong reaction to the word that she cannot bring herself to utter it.
Using the f-word in the first sentence of this article was not done for gratuitous effect, but how did you react to reading it? Would it have been more agreeable to see the euphemism “the f-word” instead? Do some “bad” words make you more uncomfortable than others?
It has been known for a while that people fluent in two languages respond far less strongly to swear words in their mother tongue than in their second language.
However, a new study of people’s reactions to a “bad” swear word — “fuck,” for example — compared to their reactions to a euphemism that they understood to mean the same thing now suggests our strong emotional reactions to swear words happen as a result of early verbal conditioning, rather than the meaning that is conveyed. This raises the possibility that young children may note their parents’ reactions to taboo words before they understand what the words mean.
All sorts of emotions are associated with the sound of swear words as we are growing up, said Jeff Bowers at the University of Bristol in England, who carried out the research.
The results of his study, Bowers said, throw some light on a question often debated by linguists and psychologists: Do the words you say affect the way you think and perceive the world?
Bowers wired volunteers up to a machine that would assess their stress levels by measuring their sweat. He then asked them to say swear words and their euphemisms aloud.
Even though everyone involved had volunteered for the study and was fully briefed as to what was involved, and therefore presumably not likely to be offended, participants showed higher stress levels when they were asked to swear than when asked to state the common euphemism.
Bowers said the difference in stress levels between swear words and euphemisms shows that we don’t only respond to the meaning of a swear word. The furor in December when the BBC radio journalist James Naughtie made an unfortunate slip of the tongue while introducing the British Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt on air demonstrates his point.
After the slip-up went out live on air at breakfast-time, the BBC was inundated with complaints. Presumably nobody imagined the presenter had intended to use the c-word, but many were still so shocked that they called, wrote and e-mailed to tell the broadcaster of their dismay. The BBC felt bound to apologize.
“In our view, euphemisms are effective because they replace the trigger — the offending word form — with another word that is similar conceptually,” Bowers said.
A conversation reported in one of John Pilger’s books, Bowers said, gives a good example of how word forms, rather than their meanings, affect how we think and act.
At an arms fair, Pilger describes asking a salesman to describe how a cluster grenade works: “Bending over a glass case, as one does when inspecting something precious, he said, ‘This is wonderful. It is state of the art, unique. What it does is discharge copper dust, very, very fine dust, so that the particles saturate the objective ...’”
What was that “objective”? asked Pilger.
“Whatever it may be,” the salesman said.
“People?” asked Pilger.
“Well, er ... If you like,” was the salesman’s response.
Pilger observes that salesmen at these events “have the greatest difficulty saying ‘people’ and ‘kill’ and ‘maim.’”
It is doubtful there is any confusion in the minds of buyers or sellers about the function of weapons, Bowers said.
“Nevertheless, the argument we’d make as a result of our research is that the euphemisms allowed business to be conducted with minimal discomfort,” he said.
If people feel uncomfortable with certain words — it doesn’t have to be swear words; it might be bodily functions or the names for genitalia, or saying “kill” and “people” at an arms fair — they may go to great lengths to avoid using them, Bowers explains, including not entering into discussion of a particular subject at all.
This, he said, is a perfect example of how what you say — or what you find too excruciating to say — affects the way you think and act.
In demonstrating that taboo words can create a physiological effect, Bowers’ study highlights how two words that mean the same thing can provoke different responses from us, and, he said, in terms of human relationships, how “subtle differences can make all the difference in the world.”
Bowers’ study, Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity, is freely accessible at www.plosone.org
Source:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2011/10/06/2003515015
Copyright © 1999-2012 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved.
Using taboo language can alter behavior
Swearing provokes a stress response, even when it is done by accident, although euphemisms don’t, researchers found
By Louise Tickle / The Guardian
Oct 06, 2011
I have a friend who can’t say “fuck.” She never has been able to and shakes her head helplessly when teased and dared to give it a go. She is not a prude, but she has such a strong reaction to the word that she cannot bring herself to utter it.
Using the f-word in the first sentence of this article was not done for gratuitous effect, but how did you react to reading it? Would it have been more agreeable to see the euphemism “the f-word” instead? Do some “bad” words make you more uncomfortable than others?
It has been known for a while that people fluent in two languages respond far less strongly to swear words in their mother tongue than in their second language.
However, a new study of people’s reactions to a “bad” swear word — “fuck,” for example — compared to their reactions to a euphemism that they understood to mean the same thing now suggests our strong emotional reactions to swear words happen as a result of early verbal conditioning, rather than the meaning that is conveyed. This raises the possibility that young children may note their parents’ reactions to taboo words before they understand what the words mean.
All sorts of emotions are associated with the sound of swear words as we are growing up, said Jeff Bowers at the University of Bristol in England, who carried out the research.
The results of his study, Bowers said, throw some light on a question often debated by linguists and psychologists: Do the words you say affect the way you think and perceive the world?
Bowers wired volunteers up to a machine that would assess their stress levels by measuring their sweat. He then asked them to say swear words and their euphemisms aloud.
Even though everyone involved had volunteered for the study and was fully briefed as to what was involved, and therefore presumably not likely to be offended, participants showed higher stress levels when they were asked to swear than when asked to state the common euphemism.
Bowers said the difference in stress levels between swear words and euphemisms shows that we don’t only respond to the meaning of a swear word. The furor in December when the BBC radio journalist James Naughtie made an unfortunate slip of the tongue while introducing the British Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt on air demonstrates his point.
After the slip-up went out live on air at breakfast-time, the BBC was inundated with complaints. Presumably nobody imagined the presenter had intended to use the c-word, but many were still so shocked that they called, wrote and e-mailed to tell the broadcaster of their dismay. The BBC felt bound to apologize.
“In our view, euphemisms are effective because they replace the trigger — the offending word form — with another word that is similar conceptually,” Bowers said.
A conversation reported in one of John Pilger’s books, Bowers said, gives a good example of how word forms, rather than their meanings, affect how we think and act.
At an arms fair, Pilger describes asking a salesman to describe how a cluster grenade works: “Bending over a glass case, as one does when inspecting something precious, he said, ‘This is wonderful. It is state of the art, unique. What it does is discharge copper dust, very, very fine dust, so that the particles saturate the objective ...’”
What was that “objective”? asked Pilger.
“Whatever it may be,” the salesman said.
“People?” asked Pilger.
“Well, er ... If you like,” was the salesman’s response.
Pilger observes that salesmen at these events “have the greatest difficulty saying ‘people’ and ‘kill’ and ‘maim.’”
It is doubtful there is any confusion in the minds of buyers or sellers about the function of weapons, Bowers said.
“Nevertheless, the argument we’d make as a result of our research is that the euphemisms allowed business to be conducted with minimal discomfort,” he said.
If people feel uncomfortable with certain words — it doesn’t have to be swear words; it might be bodily functions or the names for genitalia, or saying “kill” and “people” at an arms fair — they may go to great lengths to avoid using them, Bowers explains, including not entering into discussion of a particular subject at all.
This, he said, is a perfect example of how what you say — or what you find too excruciating to say — affects the way you think and act.
In demonstrating that taboo words can create a physiological effect, Bowers’ study highlights how two words that mean the same thing can provoke different responses from us, and, he said, in terms of human relationships, how “subtle differences can make all the difference in the world.”
Bowers’ study, Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity, is freely accessible at www.plosone.org
Source:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2011/10/06/2003515015
Copyright © 1999-2012 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
The e-book business
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The e-book business
Binding books
Oct 25th 2012
EVERYONE will be familiar with the frustration of losing a favourite book. But losing an entire library is another thing altogether. Martin Bekkelund, a Norwegian technology writer, recently blogged about a woman whose e-reader had been wiped by Amazon because it claimed her account was linked to a previously blocked account. Her books were unreadable and no refund was offered.
Though it now appears that the woman's e-books have since been restored (http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-dele.html) . This incident it hardly a first. In 2009, a copyright problem led to Amazon remotely deleting copies of “Animal Farm” and “1984”, two books by George Orwell, from thousands of Kindles (and proving, once again, that reality often outdoes fiction). That time, the company offered refunds, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, eventually apologised to his customers.
It may come as a surprise that this sort of thing is even possible. After all, a high-street bookseller would not spontaneously remove paperbacks from a customer’s home, whatever infractions they may have committed. But, unlike with paper books, customers do not actually “own” the e-books they buy. Instead, they are licensed to the purchaser. Customers cannot resell them and there are restrictions on lending them. The transaction is more like renting access to a book than owning one outright. Plus, e-book sellers have the capability to take them back without warning.
The furious backlash against Amazon’s Orwell deletions in 2009 suggests that many customers do not realise this distinction. (Those that do are clued-up on software of dubious legality that can strip the electronic locks—called “digital rights management”, or DRM—from e-books.) Yet this lack of awareness of the legal terms-of-use is largely the fault of the e-book sellers. Their websites talk of “buying” books as if the digital transaction is exactly the same as one in a bookshop. And the explanation that customers are, in effect, merely “renting” their e-books is buried in long, jargon-filled license agreements that almost nobody reads.
Why are e-book buyers faced with this encumbrance? Amazon and others have never fully set out their position. But a likely reason is that publishing digital editions opens up a new form of vulnerability to the business. At the moment, people typically share or resell their books in moderation. (A well-thumbed tome has a low resale value anyway.) And they keep them shelved neatly in a sitting room, in order to have information at their fingertips and to serve as a discreet testament to one's character—or perhaps a form of self-congratulation to one's vanity.
All of this is lost with e-books: they don’t suffer from wear and tear, can be transferred at the speed of light and a digital copy may seem less valuable than a tangible one. Booksellers and publishers might reasonably fear that the sale of a single e-book could result in it being shared or resold many times over, denying the author and publisher income from their product. The threat of illegal copying must be taken into account too.
In this view, publishers and booksellers have an interest in licensing e-books and retaining control over their distribution and secondary uses. After all, e-books are a new format and a different product. If the business model needs to change, goes the argument, why shouldn't the terms-of-use and legal rights associated with the product change as well? But, if this is the case, there should be transparency for the customer too.
Source: www.economist.com
The e-book business
Binding books
Oct 25th 2012
EVERYONE will be familiar with the frustration of losing a favourite book. But losing an entire library is another thing altogether. Martin Bekkelund, a Norwegian technology writer, recently blogged about a woman whose e-reader had been wiped by Amazon because it claimed her account was linked to a previously blocked account. Her books were unreadable and no refund was offered.
Though it now appears that the woman's e-books have since been restored (http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-dele.html) . This incident it hardly a first. In 2009, a copyright problem led to Amazon remotely deleting copies of “Animal Farm” and “1984”, two books by George Orwell, from thousands of Kindles (and proving, once again, that reality often outdoes fiction). That time, the company offered refunds, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, eventually apologised to his customers.
It may come as a surprise that this sort of thing is even possible. After all, a high-street bookseller would not spontaneously remove paperbacks from a customer’s home, whatever infractions they may have committed. But, unlike with paper books, customers do not actually “own” the e-books they buy. Instead, they are licensed to the purchaser. Customers cannot resell them and there are restrictions on lending them. The transaction is more like renting access to a book than owning one outright. Plus, e-book sellers have the capability to take them back without warning.
The furious backlash against Amazon’s Orwell deletions in 2009 suggests that many customers do not realise this distinction. (Those that do are clued-up on software of dubious legality that can strip the electronic locks—called “digital rights management”, or DRM—from e-books.) Yet this lack of awareness of the legal terms-of-use is largely the fault of the e-book sellers. Their websites talk of “buying” books as if the digital transaction is exactly the same as one in a bookshop. And the explanation that customers are, in effect, merely “renting” their e-books is buried in long, jargon-filled license agreements that almost nobody reads.
Why are e-book buyers faced with this encumbrance? Amazon and others have never fully set out their position. But a likely reason is that publishing digital editions opens up a new form of vulnerability to the business. At the moment, people typically share or resell their books in moderation. (A well-thumbed tome has a low resale value anyway.) And they keep them shelved neatly in a sitting room, in order to have information at their fingertips and to serve as a discreet testament to one's character—or perhaps a form of self-congratulation to one's vanity.
All of this is lost with e-books: they don’t suffer from wear and tear, can be transferred at the speed of light and a digital copy may seem less valuable than a tangible one. Booksellers and publishers might reasonably fear that the sale of a single e-book could result in it being shared or resold many times over, denying the author and publisher income from their product. The threat of illegal copying must be taken into account too.
In this view, publishers and booksellers have an interest in licensing e-books and retaining control over their distribution and secondary uses. After all, e-books are a new format and a different product. If the business model needs to change, goes the argument, why shouldn't the terms-of-use and legal rights associated with the product change as well? But, if this is the case, there should be transparency for the customer too.
Source: www.economist.com
BIOTECH-Gene therapy:Hello mothers, hello father
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Gene therapy
Hello mothers, hello father
A technique intended to eliminate mitochondrial diseases would result in people with three genetic parents
Oct 27th 2012
IS IT possible for a child to have three parents? That is the question raised by a paper just published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University. And the answer seems to be “yes”, for this study paves the way for the birth of children who, genetically, have one father, but two mothers.
The reason this is possible is that a mother’s genetic contribution to her offspring comes in two separable pieces. By far the largest is packed into the 23 chromosomes in the nucleus of an unfertilised egg. In that, she is just like the child’s father, who provides another 23 through his sperm. But the mother also contributes what is known as mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondria are a cell’s power-packs. They convert the energy in sugar into a form usable by the cell’s molecular machinery. And because mitochondria descend from a bacterium that, about 2 billion years ago, became symbiotic with the cell from which animals and plants are descended, they have their own, small chromosomes. In people, these chromosomes carry only 37 genes, compared with the 20,000 or so of the nucleus. But all of the mitochondria in a human body are descended from those in the egg from which it grew. The sperm contributes none. And it is that fact which has allowed doctors to conceive of the idea of people with two mothers: one providing the nuclear DNA and one the mitochondrial sort.
The reason for doing this is that mutations in mitochondrial DNA, like those in the nuclear genes, can cause disease. These diseases especially affect organs such as the brain and the muscles, which have high energy requirements. Each particular mitochondrial disease is rare. But there are lots of them. All told, there is about one chance in 5,000 that a child will develop such an inherited disease. That rate is similar, for example, to the rate of fragile-X syndrome, which is the second-most-common type of congenital learning difficulty after Down’s syndrome. Mitochondrial disease is thus not a huge problem, but it is not negligible, either.
New batteries, please
To find out whether mitochondrial transplantation could work in people (it has already been demonstrated in other species of mammal) Dr Mitalipov collected eggs from the ovaries of women with mutated mitochondria and others from donors with healthy mitochondria. He then removed the nuclei of both. Those from the healthy cells, he discarded. Those from the diseased cells, he transplanted into the healthy cells. He then fertilised the result with sperm and allowed the fertilised eggs to start dividing and thus begin taking the first steps on the journey that might ultimately lead to them becoming full-fledged human beings.
Nearly all of the experimental eggs survived the replacement of their nuclei, and three-quarters were successfully fertilised. However, just over half of the resulting zygotes—as the balls of cells that form from a fertilised egg’s early division are known—displayed abnormalities. That compared with an abnormality rate of just an eighth in control zygotes grown from untransplanted, healthy eggs.
This discrepancy surprised—and worried—Dr Mitalipov. The abnormality rate he observed was much higher than those seen when the procedure is carried out on other species. That, though, could be because this is the first time it has been attempted with human eggs. Each species has its quirks, and if mitochondrial transplants were to become routine, the quirks of humans would, no doubt, quickly become apparent. With tweaks, they could be fixed, Dr Mitalipov predicts.
However, turning this experiment into a medical procedure would be a long road, and not just scientifically. Dr Mitalipov has little doubt that his zygotes could be brought to term if they were transplanted into a woman’s womb. That experiment, though, is illegal—and, in the view of some, rightly so. But the fact that it now looks possible will surely stimulate debate about whether the law should be changed.
Two kinds of question arise. One kind is pragmatic: would the process usually work and, if it did, would it always lead to a healthy baby who would have a normal chance of growing into a healthy adult? The second kind of question is moral, for what is being proposed is, in essence, genetic engineering. Not, perhaps, as classically conceived because no DNA is artificially modified. But it is engineering nevertheless. And that might worry some people.
On the first kind of question, the auspices are good. When Dr Mitalipov tested his zygotes, he could find no trace of mutated mitochondrial DNA in them, so the purpose of the procedure seems to have been achieved. And an experiment on monkeys that he began three years ago has produced four healthy offspring that are not apparently different from any other young monkey of their age. These are preliminary results, but they are encouraging.
It is on the moral questions that things may stumble. There is no consensus. Some people oppose such genetic tinkering in principle. Some worry about the consequences of a third adult being involved in the traditionally two-person process of parenthood—though the mitochondrial contribution is restricted to genes for energy-processing proteins and is unlikely to have wider ramifications on, say, family resemblance. Some worry that three-parented individuals may themselves be worried by knowledge of their origin. But until recently such questions have been hypothetical. Now they are real. In September, for example, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which deals with such matters, launched a public consultation to discuss the ethics of creating three-parent offspring of the sort Dr Mitalipov proposes. This consultation runs till December 7th and the results will be given to the government in the spring.
In the end, whether three-parent children are permitted will probably depend on the public “uggh!” factor. There was once opposition to in vitro fertilisation, with pejorative terms like “test-tube baby” being bandied about. Now, IVF is routine, and it is routine because it is successful. In the case of mitochondrial transplants what will probably happen is that one country breaks ranks, permits the procedure, and the world will then see the consequences. If they are good, you will never find anyone who will admit to having opposed the transplants in the first place. If they are bad, the phrase “I told you so” will ring from the rafters.
Source: www.economist.com
Gene therapy
Hello mothers, hello father
A technique intended to eliminate mitochondrial diseases would result in people with three genetic parents
Oct 27th 2012
IS IT possible for a child to have three parents? That is the question raised by a paper just published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University. And the answer seems to be “yes”, for this study paves the way for the birth of children who, genetically, have one father, but two mothers.
The reason this is possible is that a mother’s genetic contribution to her offspring comes in two separable pieces. By far the largest is packed into the 23 chromosomes in the nucleus of an unfertilised egg. In that, she is just like the child’s father, who provides another 23 through his sperm. But the mother also contributes what is known as mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondria are a cell’s power-packs. They convert the energy in sugar into a form usable by the cell’s molecular machinery. And because mitochondria descend from a bacterium that, about 2 billion years ago, became symbiotic with the cell from which animals and plants are descended, they have their own, small chromosomes. In people, these chromosomes carry only 37 genes, compared with the 20,000 or so of the nucleus. But all of the mitochondria in a human body are descended from those in the egg from which it grew. The sperm contributes none. And it is that fact which has allowed doctors to conceive of the idea of people with two mothers: one providing the nuclear DNA and one the mitochondrial sort.
The reason for doing this is that mutations in mitochondrial DNA, like those in the nuclear genes, can cause disease. These diseases especially affect organs such as the brain and the muscles, which have high energy requirements. Each particular mitochondrial disease is rare. But there are lots of them. All told, there is about one chance in 5,000 that a child will develop such an inherited disease. That rate is similar, for example, to the rate of fragile-X syndrome, which is the second-most-common type of congenital learning difficulty after Down’s syndrome. Mitochondrial disease is thus not a huge problem, but it is not negligible, either.
New batteries, please
To find out whether mitochondrial transplantation could work in people (it has already been demonstrated in other species of mammal) Dr Mitalipov collected eggs from the ovaries of women with mutated mitochondria and others from donors with healthy mitochondria. He then removed the nuclei of both. Those from the healthy cells, he discarded. Those from the diseased cells, he transplanted into the healthy cells. He then fertilised the result with sperm and allowed the fertilised eggs to start dividing and thus begin taking the first steps on the journey that might ultimately lead to them becoming full-fledged human beings.
Nearly all of the experimental eggs survived the replacement of their nuclei, and three-quarters were successfully fertilised. However, just over half of the resulting zygotes—as the balls of cells that form from a fertilised egg’s early division are known—displayed abnormalities. That compared with an abnormality rate of just an eighth in control zygotes grown from untransplanted, healthy eggs.
This discrepancy surprised—and worried—Dr Mitalipov. The abnormality rate he observed was much higher than those seen when the procedure is carried out on other species. That, though, could be because this is the first time it has been attempted with human eggs. Each species has its quirks, and if mitochondrial transplants were to become routine, the quirks of humans would, no doubt, quickly become apparent. With tweaks, they could be fixed, Dr Mitalipov predicts.
However, turning this experiment into a medical procedure would be a long road, and not just scientifically. Dr Mitalipov has little doubt that his zygotes could be brought to term if they were transplanted into a woman’s womb. That experiment, though, is illegal—and, in the view of some, rightly so. But the fact that it now looks possible will surely stimulate debate about whether the law should be changed.
Two kinds of question arise. One kind is pragmatic: would the process usually work and, if it did, would it always lead to a healthy baby who would have a normal chance of growing into a healthy adult? The second kind of question is moral, for what is being proposed is, in essence, genetic engineering. Not, perhaps, as classically conceived because no DNA is artificially modified. But it is engineering nevertheless. And that might worry some people.
On the first kind of question, the auspices are good. When Dr Mitalipov tested his zygotes, he could find no trace of mutated mitochondrial DNA in them, so the purpose of the procedure seems to have been achieved. And an experiment on monkeys that he began three years ago has produced four healthy offspring that are not apparently different from any other young monkey of their age. These are preliminary results, but they are encouraging.
It is on the moral questions that things may stumble. There is no consensus. Some people oppose such genetic tinkering in principle. Some worry about the consequences of a third adult being involved in the traditionally two-person process of parenthood—though the mitochondrial contribution is restricted to genes for energy-processing proteins and is unlikely to have wider ramifications on, say, family resemblance. Some worry that three-parented individuals may themselves be worried by knowledge of their origin. But until recently such questions have been hypothetical. Now they are real. In September, for example, Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which deals with such matters, launched a public consultation to discuss the ethics of creating three-parent offspring of the sort Dr Mitalipov proposes. This consultation runs till December 7th and the results will be given to the government in the spring.
In the end, whether three-parent children are permitted will probably depend on the public “uggh!” factor. There was once opposition to in vitro fertilisation, with pejorative terms like “test-tube baby” being bandied about. Now, IVF is routine, and it is routine because it is successful. In the case of mitochondrial transplants what will probably happen is that one country breaks ranks, permits the procedure, and the world will then see the consequences. If they are good, you will never find anyone who will admit to having opposed the transplants in the first place. If they are bad, the phrase “I told you so” will ring from the rafters.
Source: www.economist.com
INTAFF/POL-China’s new leadership
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
China’s new leadership
Vaunting the best, fearing the worst
China’s Communist Party is preparing for its ten-yearly change of leadership. The new team could be in for a rough ride
Oct 27th 2012
FEW Chinese know much about Xi Jinping, the man who will soon be in charge of the world’s most populous country and its second-largest economy. This makes the inhabitants of the remote village of Xiajiang, nestled by a river amid bamboo-covered hills in the eastern province of Zhejiang, highly unusual. They have received visits from Mr Xi four times in the past decade. Impressed by his solicitude, they recently erected a wooden pavilion in his honour (above). During his expected decade in power, however, Mr Xi will find few such bastions of support. The China he is preparing to rule is becoming cynical and anxious as growth slows and social and political stresses mount.
Mr Xi’s trips to Xiajiang, a long and tortuous journey past tea plantations and paddy fields in a backward pocket of the booming coastal province, were part of his prolonged apprenticeship for China’s most powerful posts. They took place while Mr Xi was the Communist Party chief of Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. He had just turned 50 when he made his first trip, continuing a tradition started by his predecessor as Zhejiang’s chief, Zhang Dejiang, who now also looks likely to be promoted to the pinnacle of power in Beijing. Mr Zhang’s idea was to visit a backward place in the countryside repeatedly to monitor its progress over time. Xiajiang was the lucky target. When Mr Xi adopted it, villagers found themselves with a sugar daddy of even greater power: the scion of a revolutionary family. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was one of Mao’s comrades in arms, but later fell out with him and spent much of the next 16 years in some form of custody. Since 2007, when Mr Xi was elevated to the Politburo’s Standing Committee, no one has ever seriously doubted that he was being groomed for the very top.
Villagers say Mr Xi helped Xiajiang secure funding and approvals for its projects, which included pooling village land to grow grapes and medicinal plants. It is unclear how much Mr Xi was actively involved, or whether his mere interest in the village inspired lower-level officials. It is known that he took a keen interest in converting the village to the use of biogas. “A master of building methane-generating pits,” Mr Xi jokingly called himself on one visit, referring to his similar efforts back in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution when he worked in a People’s Commune in northern Shaanxi. Recalling his dusty labours there, he wrote in 1998: “I am a son of the yellow earth”—as if he, a “princeling” of one of Communist China’s most powerful families, was just a common man.
Xi, the new enigma
Mr Xi kept in touch with Xiajiang’s officials even after he became President Hu Jintao’s heir-apparent. A large copy in bronze of one of his letters, written in May last year, adorns the new pavilion. “I hope you will thoroughly implement the concept of scientific development,” he urges them. By this he means development that is fair to all, environmentally friendly and sustainable.
In a room in the village headquarters, Mr Xi’s face is all over the walls. Officials have recently given a few honoured residents large portraits of Mao Zedong to hang in their living rooms, as well as photographs of Mr Xi touring the village. (The two men look fairly similar, with their portly frames and full cheeks.) The exhibition calls the village “Happy Xiajiang”.
At the party’s 18th congress, which begins on November 8th and is expected to last about a week, it is a foregone conclusion that Mr Xi will be “elected” to the party’s new central committee of around 370 people. This will then meet, immediately after the congress, to endorse a list of members of a new Politburo. Mr Xi’s name will be at the top, replacing that of Hu Jintao as general secretary. He might also be named as the new chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission, replacing Mr Hu as China’s commander-in-chief. In March next year, at the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, he will be elected as the country’s new president.
Mr Hu’s speech at the 18th congress will thus be his swansong (even if he keeps his military title for a year or two, as predecessors have done, he will probably stay out of the limelight). It will be suffused with references to the signature slogans of his leadership: “scientific development”, “building a harmonious society”, “putting people first” and generating “happiness”. (Indices measuring which have become a fad among officials in recent years, their credibility somewhat undermined by repeated findings that Lhasa, the troop-bristling capital of Tibet, is China’s happiest city of all.) Xiajiang knows the slogans well. A billboard on the edge of the river urges villagers to “liberate [their] way of thinking, promote scientific development, create a harmonious Xiajiang and bring benefit to the masses”. Mr Hu will proclaim success in endeavours like these across the country. Having presided over a quadrupling of China’s economy since he took over in 2002, he has reason to crow. In the same period China has grown from the world’s fifth-largest exporter to its biggest.
Mr Hu, aided by his prime minister, Wen Jiabao (who is also about to step down), can also point to progress towards helping the poor. During the past ten years fees and taxes imposed on farmers, once a big cause of rural unrest, have been scrapped; government-subsidised health insurance has been rolled out in the countryside, so that 97% of farmers (up from 20% a decade ago) now have rudimentary cover; and a pension scheme, albeit with tiny benefits, has been rapidly extended to all rural residents. Tuition fees at government schools were abolished in 2007 in the countryside for children aged between six and 15, and in cities the following year (though complaints abound about other charges levied by schools).
In urban China there have been improvements, too. These include huge government investment in affordable housing. A building spree launched in 2010 aims to produce 36m such units by 2015 at what China’s state-controlled media say could be a cost of more than $800 billion. Over the past five years more than 220m city-dwellers without formal employment have been enrolled in a medical-insurance scheme that offers them basic protection (though, like the rural one, it provides little comfort for those needing expensive treatment for serious ailments and accidents). This means that 95% of all Chinese now have at least some degree of health cover, up from less than 15% in 2000.
Mr Hu is also likely to highlight China’s growing global status: its rise from a middle-ranking power to one that is increasingly seen as second only to America in its ability to shape the course of global affairs, from dealing with climate change to tackling financial crises. Its influence is now evident in places where it was hardly felt a decade ago, from African countries that supply it with minerals, to European ones that see China’s spending power and its mountain of foreign currency as bulwarks against their own economic ruin. It is even planning to land a man on the moon. In July the People’s Daily, the party’s main mouthpiece, called the last decade a “glorious” one for China. “Never before has China received so much attention from the world, and the world until now has never been more in need of China.”
The people’s mistrust
Unfortunately for Mr Hu, as well as for Mr Xi, the triumphalism of the People’s Daily does not appear to be matched by public sentiment. Gauging this is difficult; but the last three years of Mr Hu’s rule have seen the opening of a rare, even if still limited, window onto the public mood.
This has been made possible by the rapid development of social media: services similar to Twitter and Facebook (both of which are blocked in China) that have achieved extraordinary penetration into the lives of Chinese of all social strata, especially the new middle class. The government tries strenuously to censor dissenting opinion online, but the digital media offer too many loopholes. One of the greatest achievements of the Hu era (though he would claim no credit) has been the creation, through social media, of the next best thing to a free press. China’s biggest microblog service, Sina Weibo, claims more than 300m users. This is misleading, since many have multiple accounts. But nearly 30m are said to be “active daily”, compared with 3m-4m copies of China’s biggest newspaper, Cankao Xiaoxi.
Chinese microbloggers relentlessly expose injustices and attack official wrongdoing and high-handedness. They help scattered, disaffected individuals feel a common bond. Local grievances that hitherto might have gone largely unnoticed are now discussed and dissected by users nationwide. Officials are often taken aback by the fervour of this debate. Sometimes they capitulate. In September photographs circulated by microbloggers of a local bureaucrat smiling at the scene of a fatal traffic accident, and wearing expensive watches, led to his dismissal.
Many of the most widely circulated comments on microblogs share a common tone: one of profound mistrust of the party and its officials. Classified digests of online opinion are distributed among Chinese leaders. They pay close attention.
Stemming this rising tide of cynicism will be one of Mr Xi’s biggest challenges. Dangerously for the country’s stability, it coincides with growing anxiety among intellectuals and the middle-class generally about where the country is heading. Even in the official media, articles occasionally appear describing the next ten years as unusually tough ones for China, economically and politically. In August official-media websites republished an article, “Internal Reference on Reforms: Report for Senior Leaders” that was circulated earlier in the year in a secret journal. Its warning about the “latent crisis” facing China in the next decade was blunt. “There are so many problems now, interlocked like dogs’ teeth,” it said, with dissatisfaction on the rise, frequent “mass disturbances” (official jargon for protests ranging in size from a handful of people to many thousands) and growing numbers of people losing hope and linking up with like-minded folk through the internet. It said these problems could, if mishandled, cause “a chain reaction that results in social turmoil or violent revolution”.
The author, Yuan Xucheng, a senior economist at the China Society of Economic Reform, a government think-tank, proposed a variety of remedies. They ranged from the liberal (such as easing government controls over interest rates, which act as a way of subsidising lending to state enterprises at the expense of ordinary savers) to the draconian (beefing up the police and “resolutely” clamping down on dissidents using “the model of class struggle”). The next ten years, argued Mr Yuan, offered the “last chance” for economic reforms that could prevent China from sliding into a “middle-income trap” of fast growth followed by prolonged stagnation.
Mr Xi is likely to share his concerns about the economy. They are similar to those raised in a report published in February by the World Bank together with another government think-tank, the Development Research Centre of the State Council. This rare joint study, produced with the strong backing of Li Keqiang (who is expected to take over from Mr Wen as prime minister next March), also raised the possibility of a “middle-income trap” and called for wide-ranging economic reforms, including ones aimed at loosening the state’s grip on vital industries, such as the financial sector. It gave warning that a sudden economic slowdown could “precipitate a fiscal and financial crisis”, with unpredictable implications for social stability (though World Bank officials tend to be optimistic that China can avoid a slump).
Dangers pending
Mr Xi is being besieged from all sides by similar warnings of possible trouble ahead. A recurring theme of commentary by both the “left” (meaning, in China, those who yearn for more old-style communism) and the “right” (as economic and political reformers are often termed) is that dangers are growing at an alarming rate. Leftists worry that the party will implode, like its counterparts in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, because it has embraced capitalism too wholeheartedly and forgotten its professed mission to serve the people. Rightists worry that China’s economic reforms have not gone nearly far enough and that political liberalisation is needed to prevent an explosion of public resentment. Both sides agree there is a lot of this, over issues ranging from corruption to a huge and conspicuous gap between rich and poor. Hu Xingdou of the Beijing Institute of Technology says it has become common among intellectuals to wonder whether 70 years is about the maximum a single party can remain in power, based on the records set by the Soviet Communist Party and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party. China’s party will have done 70 years in 2019.
Chinese intellectuals and officials have a habit of worrying. They did a lot of it after the Tiananmen Square protests, as instability swept the communist world. In the early 1990s many wondered whether China could reach the end of the decade without experiencing another upheaval itself. But the forecasters of looming chaos proved dramatically wrong. They failed to predict the economic spurt in 1992 that propelled China free of its planned-economy moorings. By the turn of the century this momentum began to create a middle class whose members had a stake in keeping the growth-loving party in place.
This middle class, however, is now beginning to worry about protecting its gains from the whims of law-flouting officialdom and the caprices of the global economy. It frets about the environment and food contaminated with chemicals. Even if China’s economy, as some analysts expect, continues to grow at strong single-digit rates for the rest of the decade, most agree that the heady double-digit days of much of the past ten years are over.
China’s media censors do not want the supposed difficulties of the next few years blamed on the outgoing leadership. They were very unhappy with an essay written by one of the party’s own senior theoreticians which was published in September on the website of Caijing, a Beijing magazine. The scholar, Deng Yuwen, who is a senior editor of the party journal, Study Times, wrote that the Hu era had possibly created more problems than it had solved.
The party, he said, was facing “a crisis of legitimacy”, fuelled by such issues as the wealth gap and the party’s failure to “satisfy demands for power to be returned to the people”. Mr Deng’s views were deleted from the website within hours. On his Sina Weibo microblog (with around 6,600 followers: not bad for someone whose job is to write for party insiders) he describes himself as one who “cries out for freedom and struggles for democracy”.
Despite the censors, Mr Deng’s views continue to be echoed by party liberals. In mid-September the National Development and Reform Commission, the government’s economic-planning agency, convened a meeting of some 70 scholars in Moganshan, a hillside retreat once beloved of Shanghai’s colonial-era elite. “I strongly felt that those with ideals among the intelligentsia were full of misgivings about the situation in China today,” said Lu Ting, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who took part. Several of the scholars, he wrote for the website of Caixin, a Chinese portal, described China as being “unstable at the grass roots, dejected among the middle strata and out of control at the top”. Almost all agreed that reforms were “extremely urgent” and that without them there could be “social turmoil”.
Liberals have been encouraged by the downfall of Bo Xilai, who was dismissed as party chief of Chongqing, a region in the south-west, in March and expelled from the party in September. Leftists had been hailing Mr Bo as their champion, a defender of the communist faith. They accused the right of inventing allegations of sleaze in an effort to prevent his rise to the top alongside Mr Xi. The authorities have closed down leftist websites which once poured out articles backing him. But they have not silenced the left entirely: on October 23rd leftists published an open letter to the national legislature, signed by hundreds of people including academics and former officials, expressing support for Mr Bo. The question is, what does Mr Xi think? Will he heed the right’s demands for more rapid political and economic liberalisation, maintain Mr Hu’s ultra-cautious approach, or even take up Mr Bo’s mantle as a champion of the left?
Happy Xiajiang?
There is little doubt that Mr Xi is more confident and outgoing than Mr Hu. His lineage gives him a strong base of support among China’s ruling families. But analysts attempting to divine his views are clutching at straws. A meeting in recent weeks between Mr Xi and Hu Deping, the liberal son of China’s late party chief, Hu Yaobang, raised hopes that he might have a soft spot for reformists. Mr Xi’s record in Zhejiang inspires others to believe that he is on the side of private enterprise (the province is a bastion of it). His late father, some note, had liberal leanings. The Dalai Lama once gave a watch to the elder Mr Xi, who wore it long after the Tibetan leader had fled into exile. This has fuelled speculation that Xi Jinping might be conciliatory to Tibetans. Wishful thinking abounds.
The visitor to Mr Xi’s adopted village, Xiajiang, might be encouraged that it has tried a little democracy. A former party chief there says candidates for the post of party secretary have to have the support of 70% of the villagers, including non-party members. During his apprenticeship, however, Mr Xi has been wary of going too far with ballot-box politics. In a little-publicised speech in 2010 he attacked the notion of “choosing people simply on the basis of votes”. That is not a problem he will face at the party congress.
Source: www.economist.com
China’s new leadership
Vaunting the best, fearing the worst
China’s Communist Party is preparing for its ten-yearly change of leadership. The new team could be in for a rough ride
Oct 27th 2012
FEW Chinese know much about Xi Jinping, the man who will soon be in charge of the world’s most populous country and its second-largest economy. This makes the inhabitants of the remote village of Xiajiang, nestled by a river amid bamboo-covered hills in the eastern province of Zhejiang, highly unusual. They have received visits from Mr Xi four times in the past decade. Impressed by his solicitude, they recently erected a wooden pavilion in his honour (above). During his expected decade in power, however, Mr Xi will find few such bastions of support. The China he is preparing to rule is becoming cynical and anxious as growth slows and social and political stresses mount.
Mr Xi’s trips to Xiajiang, a long and tortuous journey past tea plantations and paddy fields in a backward pocket of the booming coastal province, were part of his prolonged apprenticeship for China’s most powerful posts. They took place while Mr Xi was the Communist Party chief of Zhejiang from 2002 to 2007. He had just turned 50 when he made his first trip, continuing a tradition started by his predecessor as Zhejiang’s chief, Zhang Dejiang, who now also looks likely to be promoted to the pinnacle of power in Beijing. Mr Zhang’s idea was to visit a backward place in the countryside repeatedly to monitor its progress over time. Xiajiang was the lucky target. When Mr Xi adopted it, villagers found themselves with a sugar daddy of even greater power: the scion of a revolutionary family. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was one of Mao’s comrades in arms, but later fell out with him and spent much of the next 16 years in some form of custody. Since 2007, when Mr Xi was elevated to the Politburo’s Standing Committee, no one has ever seriously doubted that he was being groomed for the very top.
Villagers say Mr Xi helped Xiajiang secure funding and approvals for its projects, which included pooling village land to grow grapes and medicinal plants. It is unclear how much Mr Xi was actively involved, or whether his mere interest in the village inspired lower-level officials. It is known that he took a keen interest in converting the village to the use of biogas. “A master of building methane-generating pits,” Mr Xi jokingly called himself on one visit, referring to his similar efforts back in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution when he worked in a People’s Commune in northern Shaanxi. Recalling his dusty labours there, he wrote in 1998: “I am a son of the yellow earth”—as if he, a “princeling” of one of Communist China’s most powerful families, was just a common man.
Xi, the new enigma
Mr Xi kept in touch with Xiajiang’s officials even after he became President Hu Jintao’s heir-apparent. A large copy in bronze of one of his letters, written in May last year, adorns the new pavilion. “I hope you will thoroughly implement the concept of scientific development,” he urges them. By this he means development that is fair to all, environmentally friendly and sustainable.
In a room in the village headquarters, Mr Xi’s face is all over the walls. Officials have recently given a few honoured residents large portraits of Mao Zedong to hang in their living rooms, as well as photographs of Mr Xi touring the village. (The two men look fairly similar, with their portly frames and full cheeks.) The exhibition calls the village “Happy Xiajiang”.
At the party’s 18th congress, which begins on November 8th and is expected to last about a week, it is a foregone conclusion that Mr Xi will be “elected” to the party’s new central committee of around 370 people. This will then meet, immediately after the congress, to endorse a list of members of a new Politburo. Mr Xi’s name will be at the top, replacing that of Hu Jintao as general secretary. He might also be named as the new chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission, replacing Mr Hu as China’s commander-in-chief. In March next year, at the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, he will be elected as the country’s new president.
Mr Hu’s speech at the 18th congress will thus be his swansong (even if he keeps his military title for a year or two, as predecessors have done, he will probably stay out of the limelight). It will be suffused with references to the signature slogans of his leadership: “scientific development”, “building a harmonious society”, “putting people first” and generating “happiness”. (Indices measuring which have become a fad among officials in recent years, their credibility somewhat undermined by repeated findings that Lhasa, the troop-bristling capital of Tibet, is China’s happiest city of all.) Xiajiang knows the slogans well. A billboard on the edge of the river urges villagers to “liberate [their] way of thinking, promote scientific development, create a harmonious Xiajiang and bring benefit to the masses”. Mr Hu will proclaim success in endeavours like these across the country. Having presided over a quadrupling of China’s economy since he took over in 2002, he has reason to crow. In the same period China has grown from the world’s fifth-largest exporter to its biggest.
Mr Hu, aided by his prime minister, Wen Jiabao (who is also about to step down), can also point to progress towards helping the poor. During the past ten years fees and taxes imposed on farmers, once a big cause of rural unrest, have been scrapped; government-subsidised health insurance has been rolled out in the countryside, so that 97% of farmers (up from 20% a decade ago) now have rudimentary cover; and a pension scheme, albeit with tiny benefits, has been rapidly extended to all rural residents. Tuition fees at government schools were abolished in 2007 in the countryside for children aged between six and 15, and in cities the following year (though complaints abound about other charges levied by schools).
In urban China there have been improvements, too. These include huge government investment in affordable housing. A building spree launched in 2010 aims to produce 36m such units by 2015 at what China’s state-controlled media say could be a cost of more than $800 billion. Over the past five years more than 220m city-dwellers without formal employment have been enrolled in a medical-insurance scheme that offers them basic protection (though, like the rural one, it provides little comfort for those needing expensive treatment for serious ailments and accidents). This means that 95% of all Chinese now have at least some degree of health cover, up from less than 15% in 2000.
Mr Hu is also likely to highlight China’s growing global status: its rise from a middle-ranking power to one that is increasingly seen as second only to America in its ability to shape the course of global affairs, from dealing with climate change to tackling financial crises. Its influence is now evident in places where it was hardly felt a decade ago, from African countries that supply it with minerals, to European ones that see China’s spending power and its mountain of foreign currency as bulwarks against their own economic ruin. It is even planning to land a man on the moon. In July the People’s Daily, the party’s main mouthpiece, called the last decade a “glorious” one for China. “Never before has China received so much attention from the world, and the world until now has never been more in need of China.”
The people’s mistrust
Unfortunately for Mr Hu, as well as for Mr Xi, the triumphalism of the People’s Daily does not appear to be matched by public sentiment. Gauging this is difficult; but the last three years of Mr Hu’s rule have seen the opening of a rare, even if still limited, window onto the public mood.
This has been made possible by the rapid development of social media: services similar to Twitter and Facebook (both of which are blocked in China) that have achieved extraordinary penetration into the lives of Chinese of all social strata, especially the new middle class. The government tries strenuously to censor dissenting opinion online, but the digital media offer too many loopholes. One of the greatest achievements of the Hu era (though he would claim no credit) has been the creation, through social media, of the next best thing to a free press. China’s biggest microblog service, Sina Weibo, claims more than 300m users. This is misleading, since many have multiple accounts. But nearly 30m are said to be “active daily”, compared with 3m-4m copies of China’s biggest newspaper, Cankao Xiaoxi.
Chinese microbloggers relentlessly expose injustices and attack official wrongdoing and high-handedness. They help scattered, disaffected individuals feel a common bond. Local grievances that hitherto might have gone largely unnoticed are now discussed and dissected by users nationwide. Officials are often taken aback by the fervour of this debate. Sometimes they capitulate. In September photographs circulated by microbloggers of a local bureaucrat smiling at the scene of a fatal traffic accident, and wearing expensive watches, led to his dismissal.
Many of the most widely circulated comments on microblogs share a common tone: one of profound mistrust of the party and its officials. Classified digests of online opinion are distributed among Chinese leaders. They pay close attention.
Stemming this rising tide of cynicism will be one of Mr Xi’s biggest challenges. Dangerously for the country’s stability, it coincides with growing anxiety among intellectuals and the middle-class generally about where the country is heading. Even in the official media, articles occasionally appear describing the next ten years as unusually tough ones for China, economically and politically. In August official-media websites republished an article, “Internal Reference on Reforms: Report for Senior Leaders” that was circulated earlier in the year in a secret journal. Its warning about the “latent crisis” facing China in the next decade was blunt. “There are so many problems now, interlocked like dogs’ teeth,” it said, with dissatisfaction on the rise, frequent “mass disturbances” (official jargon for protests ranging in size from a handful of people to many thousands) and growing numbers of people losing hope and linking up with like-minded folk through the internet. It said these problems could, if mishandled, cause “a chain reaction that results in social turmoil or violent revolution”.
The author, Yuan Xucheng, a senior economist at the China Society of Economic Reform, a government think-tank, proposed a variety of remedies. They ranged from the liberal (such as easing government controls over interest rates, which act as a way of subsidising lending to state enterprises at the expense of ordinary savers) to the draconian (beefing up the police and “resolutely” clamping down on dissidents using “the model of class struggle”). The next ten years, argued Mr Yuan, offered the “last chance” for economic reforms that could prevent China from sliding into a “middle-income trap” of fast growth followed by prolonged stagnation.
Mr Xi is likely to share his concerns about the economy. They are similar to those raised in a report published in February by the World Bank together with another government think-tank, the Development Research Centre of the State Council. This rare joint study, produced with the strong backing of Li Keqiang (who is expected to take over from Mr Wen as prime minister next March), also raised the possibility of a “middle-income trap” and called for wide-ranging economic reforms, including ones aimed at loosening the state’s grip on vital industries, such as the financial sector. It gave warning that a sudden economic slowdown could “precipitate a fiscal and financial crisis”, with unpredictable implications for social stability (though World Bank officials tend to be optimistic that China can avoid a slump).
Dangers pending
Mr Xi is being besieged from all sides by similar warnings of possible trouble ahead. A recurring theme of commentary by both the “left” (meaning, in China, those who yearn for more old-style communism) and the “right” (as economic and political reformers are often termed) is that dangers are growing at an alarming rate. Leftists worry that the party will implode, like its counterparts in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, because it has embraced capitalism too wholeheartedly and forgotten its professed mission to serve the people. Rightists worry that China’s economic reforms have not gone nearly far enough and that political liberalisation is needed to prevent an explosion of public resentment. Both sides agree there is a lot of this, over issues ranging from corruption to a huge and conspicuous gap between rich and poor. Hu Xingdou of the Beijing Institute of Technology says it has become common among intellectuals to wonder whether 70 years is about the maximum a single party can remain in power, based on the records set by the Soviet Communist Party and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party. China’s party will have done 70 years in 2019.
Chinese intellectuals and officials have a habit of worrying. They did a lot of it after the Tiananmen Square protests, as instability swept the communist world. In the early 1990s many wondered whether China could reach the end of the decade without experiencing another upheaval itself. But the forecasters of looming chaos proved dramatically wrong. They failed to predict the economic spurt in 1992 that propelled China free of its planned-economy moorings. By the turn of the century this momentum began to create a middle class whose members had a stake in keeping the growth-loving party in place.
This middle class, however, is now beginning to worry about protecting its gains from the whims of law-flouting officialdom and the caprices of the global economy. It frets about the environment and food contaminated with chemicals. Even if China’s economy, as some analysts expect, continues to grow at strong single-digit rates for the rest of the decade, most agree that the heady double-digit days of much of the past ten years are over.
China’s media censors do not want the supposed difficulties of the next few years blamed on the outgoing leadership. They were very unhappy with an essay written by one of the party’s own senior theoreticians which was published in September on the website of Caijing, a Beijing magazine. The scholar, Deng Yuwen, who is a senior editor of the party journal, Study Times, wrote that the Hu era had possibly created more problems than it had solved.
The party, he said, was facing “a crisis of legitimacy”, fuelled by such issues as the wealth gap and the party’s failure to “satisfy demands for power to be returned to the people”. Mr Deng’s views were deleted from the website within hours. On his Sina Weibo microblog (with around 6,600 followers: not bad for someone whose job is to write for party insiders) he describes himself as one who “cries out for freedom and struggles for democracy”.
Despite the censors, Mr Deng’s views continue to be echoed by party liberals. In mid-September the National Development and Reform Commission, the government’s economic-planning agency, convened a meeting of some 70 scholars in Moganshan, a hillside retreat once beloved of Shanghai’s colonial-era elite. “I strongly felt that those with ideals among the intelligentsia were full of misgivings about the situation in China today,” said Lu Ting, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who took part. Several of the scholars, he wrote for the website of Caixin, a Chinese portal, described China as being “unstable at the grass roots, dejected among the middle strata and out of control at the top”. Almost all agreed that reforms were “extremely urgent” and that without them there could be “social turmoil”.
Liberals have been encouraged by the downfall of Bo Xilai, who was dismissed as party chief of Chongqing, a region in the south-west, in March and expelled from the party in September. Leftists had been hailing Mr Bo as their champion, a defender of the communist faith. They accused the right of inventing allegations of sleaze in an effort to prevent his rise to the top alongside Mr Xi. The authorities have closed down leftist websites which once poured out articles backing him. But they have not silenced the left entirely: on October 23rd leftists published an open letter to the national legislature, signed by hundreds of people including academics and former officials, expressing support for Mr Bo. The question is, what does Mr Xi think? Will he heed the right’s demands for more rapid political and economic liberalisation, maintain Mr Hu’s ultra-cautious approach, or even take up Mr Bo’s mantle as a champion of the left?
Happy Xiajiang?
There is little doubt that Mr Xi is more confident and outgoing than Mr Hu. His lineage gives him a strong base of support among China’s ruling families. But analysts attempting to divine his views are clutching at straws. A meeting in recent weeks between Mr Xi and Hu Deping, the liberal son of China’s late party chief, Hu Yaobang, raised hopes that he might have a soft spot for reformists. Mr Xi’s record in Zhejiang inspires others to believe that he is on the side of private enterprise (the province is a bastion of it). His late father, some note, had liberal leanings. The Dalai Lama once gave a watch to the elder Mr Xi, who wore it long after the Tibetan leader had fled into exile. This has fuelled speculation that Xi Jinping might be conciliatory to Tibetans. Wishful thinking abounds.
The visitor to Mr Xi’s adopted village, Xiajiang, might be encouraged that it has tried a little democracy. A former party chief there says candidates for the post of party secretary have to have the support of 70% of the villagers, including non-party members. During his apprenticeship, however, Mr Xi has been wary of going too far with ballot-box politics. In a little-publicised speech in 2010 he attacked the notion of “choosing people simply on the basis of votes”. That is not a problem he will face at the party congress.
Source: www.economist.com
Friday, October 26, 2012
Food Technology-How Food Became Technology
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
How Food Became Technology [Excerpt]
Patent protection helped transform agriculture into agribusiness
By Frederick Kaufman | October 26, 2012
Image: Flickr.com / Antaean
Once upon a time, nymphs, sprites, and spirits ruled every cavern, tree, field, and brook, and a meal was plucked from a bush, scooped from the mud, or carved from the carcass of some unfortunate creature. Then everything changed. A tribe of infidels and heretics decided it could no longer leave something as important as breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the vagaries of chance and the whimsy of the gods. These revolutionaries drained lakes, rerouted rivers, chopped down forests, and slashed straight into the guts of Mother Earth. They were the first farmers.
Ten thousand years of meddling with food has not made the meddling any more popular, even if the history of civilization has hinged on the science of food. Assyrian bas-reliefs and Sumerian cuneiform tablets depict artificial pollination—and manipulating the sex life of plants was one of the first technological feats that enabled our world of abundant fruits and vegetables, meat, bread, and chocolate.
What set the earliest agriculturalists apart from the even earlier hunter-gatherers? As the first farmers denuded nature, hoarded seeds, and engineered crops, they most likely appeared to be mad scientists, coaxing mutant monsters from the black earth. Of course, we no longer think very much about the fact that almost everything we eat has been domesticated and that domestication implies a history of human intervention. In fact, most people are unaware that the typical supermarket and green market varieties of apples, oranges, lettuce, and raspberries are not at all the same as their wild cousins.
Domesticated fruits and vegetables are generally larger than their undomesticated counterparts. They are sweeter and more aromatic. Compared to their great-great-grandparents, modern fruits and vegetables have lost their fuzz, their fiber, their thorns, and their puberty. A modern tomato—heirloom, organic, process, vine-ripened, or otherwise—bears little resemblance to its puny, sour, undomesticated relations that sprout in the Peruvian Andes. Tomato breeding has changed tomatoes down to the DNA, and the successful varieties that have found their way into our supermarket carts have been cloned and cloned again.
The red jungle fowl of Thailand eventually became a Perdue chicken. The extinct aurochs of the Fertile Crescent eventually became Holstein cows. The primeval apples of Kazakhstan eventually became Gala and Red Delicious. Ancient tillers of the earth needed at least 300 years to domesticate corn and more than 1,000 years to domesticate wheat. But no one really knows how weeds first became crops.
Did mongrel grains serendipitously meld together and sprout from the sewage dumps of sedentary fishing tribes (a current theory), or was the domestication of wheat grasses, pomegranates, and fig trees a willful act of genius? The most ancient of these technologies created new forms of life. And our fear of Frankenstein predates Mary Shelley's monster. In The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare laced Perdita's voice with anxiety and disgust as she condemned "Nature's bastards," new varieties of flowers created by Elizabethan methods of artificial pollination. Not to worry, argued Polixenes, for "Nature is made better by no mean / But Nature makes that mean; so over that art / Which you say adds to Nature, is an art / That Nature makes."
When we talk about the genetic alteration of plants and animals, we rehash the arguments of Perdita and Polixenes. Are molecular meddlings—from the man-made pig and the gene-whacked salmon to the genetically modified soy that hundreds of millions of us consume each day in cookies, crackers, candy bars, and sodas—are these transformations condoned by the tools nature itself has given us, or are they freaks and abominations? In producing as much food as possible for as many people as possible by creating superseeds that promise superharvests—seeds laced with DNA from other species of plants and animals—we may be redeeming the world. However, we may also be aiding and abetting the destruction of nature as we know it.
Biochemistry may be destiny. Once food DNA was discovered, perhaps it was only a matter of time before our daily bread would fall victim to our infatuation with technology. But now that we can take apart and put together the chemical puzzle blocks of food, we can't ignore the game. We can't bury molecular biology underground and move on. We have to figure out what to do with the technology. What we do with it matters.
The greatest U.S. food technologist was arguably Luther Burbank, who bred 30,000 new varieties of plums before he came up with his pitless prune and destroyed who knows how many thousands of failed seedlings before unveiling his white blackberry and his spineless cactus. In 1893 Burbank published New Creations in Fruits and Flowers, and few doubted that the book would assure him a place in the scientific pantheon. Journalists dubbed him a "seer," Henry Ford and Thomas Edison came to visit, and Lionel Barrymore portrayed him in the 1947 radio play The Man with Green Fingers. Today, the effects of Burbank's breeding may be appreciated at McDonald's, where every French fry descends from a variety he invented in the 1870s.
It was largely because of Burbank 's extraordinary achievements in food science that the Plant Patent Act of 1930 amended U.S. patent law to provide botanists with a set of financial motivations to create new plant varieties. (Burbank was posthumously awarded U.S. plant patent numbers twelve through sixteen.) All of a sudden, plant breeding promised more than a little fame and a lot of strange new foods. There was money in it.
The Plant Patent Act of 1930 pushed food science forward and helped power agribusiness into the second most gainful enterprise in the nation (after pharmaceuticals). Companies like Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and Syngenta take enormous profits from their food patent operations, but the emergence of a custom-designed corn seed cannot be blamed on the modern world's seed giants. Hybrid corn appeared more than a century ago on the U.S. retail market, and the result back then was the same as the result today: general outrage. The reason: hybrid seeds lose their potency after a single generation.
For 10,000 years of agricultural history, seeds had been free for those who cared to gather them, a gift that ensured next year's harvest. But the newfangled scientific corn seeds of the 1880s and 1890s had to be cross-pollinated, packaged, and purchased anew every year. What farmer in his or her right mind would buy new seeds every year? Seeds could be gathered from the ground. Seeds were free. Seeds wanted to be free. But then the stalks of corn from high-priced hybrid seeds began to take home banners, medals, and ribbons at state fairs, and farmers recognized that these new products were packed with new genetic information and that agricultural information was not free.
For a while, the farmers complained that the new scientific seeds should be put in contests all by themselves. But after a few harvests, no one cared how the seeds had been produced, and no one cared that they were barren. No one had ever seen such beautiful corn. No one had ever seen such extraordinary yields. No one had ever made so much money.
Soon U.S. universities were constructing their own agriculture and livestock laboratories, and institutes of higher learning joined the new molecular science of food. In the 1920s, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin named Harry Steenbock exposed milk to ultraviolet radiation, which increased its level of vitamin D. Steenbock had figured out how to use radiation to alter the chemicals in food, and with $300 of his own money he patented his method—at which point one of the world's largest companies, Quaker Oats, offered Steenbock $1 million for the rights to use his technology to fortify its breakfast cereals.
Steenbock had created food's first killer app.
Excerpted from Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, by Frederick Kaufman. With permission from the publisher, Wiley. Copyright © Frederick Kaufman, 2012.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com
How Food Became Technology [Excerpt]
Patent protection helped transform agriculture into agribusiness
By Frederick Kaufman | October 26, 2012
Image: Flickr.com / Antaean
Once upon a time, nymphs, sprites, and spirits ruled every cavern, tree, field, and brook, and a meal was plucked from a bush, scooped from the mud, or carved from the carcass of some unfortunate creature. Then everything changed. A tribe of infidels and heretics decided it could no longer leave something as important as breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the vagaries of chance and the whimsy of the gods. These revolutionaries drained lakes, rerouted rivers, chopped down forests, and slashed straight into the guts of Mother Earth. They were the first farmers.
Ten thousand years of meddling with food has not made the meddling any more popular, even if the history of civilization has hinged on the science of food. Assyrian bas-reliefs and Sumerian cuneiform tablets depict artificial pollination—and manipulating the sex life of plants was one of the first technological feats that enabled our world of abundant fruits and vegetables, meat, bread, and chocolate.
What set the earliest agriculturalists apart from the even earlier hunter-gatherers? As the first farmers denuded nature, hoarded seeds, and engineered crops, they most likely appeared to be mad scientists, coaxing mutant monsters from the black earth. Of course, we no longer think very much about the fact that almost everything we eat has been domesticated and that domestication implies a history of human intervention. In fact, most people are unaware that the typical supermarket and green market varieties of apples, oranges, lettuce, and raspberries are not at all the same as their wild cousins.
Domesticated fruits and vegetables are generally larger than their undomesticated counterparts. They are sweeter and more aromatic. Compared to their great-great-grandparents, modern fruits and vegetables have lost their fuzz, their fiber, their thorns, and their puberty. A modern tomato—heirloom, organic, process, vine-ripened, or otherwise—bears little resemblance to its puny, sour, undomesticated relations that sprout in the Peruvian Andes. Tomato breeding has changed tomatoes down to the DNA, and the successful varieties that have found their way into our supermarket carts have been cloned and cloned again.
The red jungle fowl of Thailand eventually became a Perdue chicken. The extinct aurochs of the Fertile Crescent eventually became Holstein cows. The primeval apples of Kazakhstan eventually became Gala and Red Delicious. Ancient tillers of the earth needed at least 300 years to domesticate corn and more than 1,000 years to domesticate wheat. But no one really knows how weeds first became crops.
Did mongrel grains serendipitously meld together and sprout from the sewage dumps of sedentary fishing tribes (a current theory), or was the domestication of wheat grasses, pomegranates, and fig trees a willful act of genius? The most ancient of these technologies created new forms of life. And our fear of Frankenstein predates Mary Shelley's monster. In The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare laced Perdita's voice with anxiety and disgust as she condemned "Nature's bastards," new varieties of flowers created by Elizabethan methods of artificial pollination. Not to worry, argued Polixenes, for "Nature is made better by no mean / But Nature makes that mean; so over that art / Which you say adds to Nature, is an art / That Nature makes."
When we talk about the genetic alteration of plants and animals, we rehash the arguments of Perdita and Polixenes. Are molecular meddlings—from the man-made pig and the gene-whacked salmon to the genetically modified soy that hundreds of millions of us consume each day in cookies, crackers, candy bars, and sodas—are these transformations condoned by the tools nature itself has given us, or are they freaks and abominations? In producing as much food as possible for as many people as possible by creating superseeds that promise superharvests—seeds laced with DNA from other species of plants and animals—we may be redeeming the world. However, we may also be aiding and abetting the destruction of nature as we know it.
Biochemistry may be destiny. Once food DNA was discovered, perhaps it was only a matter of time before our daily bread would fall victim to our infatuation with technology. But now that we can take apart and put together the chemical puzzle blocks of food, we can't ignore the game. We can't bury molecular biology underground and move on. We have to figure out what to do with the technology. What we do with it matters.
The greatest U.S. food technologist was arguably Luther Burbank, who bred 30,000 new varieties of plums before he came up with his pitless prune and destroyed who knows how many thousands of failed seedlings before unveiling his white blackberry and his spineless cactus. In 1893 Burbank published New Creations in Fruits and Flowers, and few doubted that the book would assure him a place in the scientific pantheon. Journalists dubbed him a "seer," Henry Ford and Thomas Edison came to visit, and Lionel Barrymore portrayed him in the 1947 radio play The Man with Green Fingers. Today, the effects of Burbank's breeding may be appreciated at McDonald's, where every French fry descends from a variety he invented in the 1870s.
It was largely because of Burbank 's extraordinary achievements in food science that the Plant Patent Act of 1930 amended U.S. patent law to provide botanists with a set of financial motivations to create new plant varieties. (Burbank was posthumously awarded U.S. plant patent numbers twelve through sixteen.) All of a sudden, plant breeding promised more than a little fame and a lot of strange new foods. There was money in it.
The Plant Patent Act of 1930 pushed food science forward and helped power agribusiness into the second most gainful enterprise in the nation (after pharmaceuticals). Companies like Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and Syngenta take enormous profits from their food patent operations, but the emergence of a custom-designed corn seed cannot be blamed on the modern world's seed giants. Hybrid corn appeared more than a century ago on the U.S. retail market, and the result back then was the same as the result today: general outrage. The reason: hybrid seeds lose their potency after a single generation.
For 10,000 years of agricultural history, seeds had been free for those who cared to gather them, a gift that ensured next year's harvest. But the newfangled scientific corn seeds of the 1880s and 1890s had to be cross-pollinated, packaged, and purchased anew every year. What farmer in his or her right mind would buy new seeds every year? Seeds could be gathered from the ground. Seeds were free. Seeds wanted to be free. But then the stalks of corn from high-priced hybrid seeds began to take home banners, medals, and ribbons at state fairs, and farmers recognized that these new products were packed with new genetic information and that agricultural information was not free.
For a while, the farmers complained that the new scientific seeds should be put in contests all by themselves. But after a few harvests, no one cared how the seeds had been produced, and no one cared that they were barren. No one had ever seen such beautiful corn. No one had ever seen such extraordinary yields. No one had ever made so much money.
Soon U.S. universities were constructing their own agriculture and livestock laboratories, and institutes of higher learning joined the new molecular science of food. In the 1920s, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin named Harry Steenbock exposed milk to ultraviolet radiation, which increased its level of vitamin D. Steenbock had figured out how to use radiation to alter the chemicals in food, and with $300 of his own money he patented his method—at which point one of the world's largest companies, Quaker Oats, offered Steenbock $1 million for the rights to use his technology to fortify its breakfast cereals.
Steenbock had created food's first killer app.
Excerpted from Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food, by Frederick Kaufman. With permission from the publisher, Wiley. Copyright © Frederick Kaufman, 2012.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Technology Integration-Google's Open Course Builder: A Giant Leap into 21st-Century Online Learning
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Technology Integration
Google's Open Course Builder: A Giant Leap into 21st-Century Online Learning
October 16, 2012
Image credit: iStockphoto
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." -- About Google
Google is the most powerful nonhuman teacher ever known to actual humans. Implicitly and ceaselessly, Google performs formative assessments by collecting the following data: the content, genre and media that interests you most; when and for how long you access your external cloud brain; what your hobbies and routines are; with whom you work and communicate; who will get your November vote; and whether you prefer invigorating clean mint or enamel renewal toothpaste. By continuously refining the nuance of your sociogram, Google has already customized your next web exploration and taught itself to teach.
You Are Now Entering the Learning Management System
Months ago, Google entered the massive open online course (MOOC) space by introducing the free Power Searching with Google course to 150 thousand self-enrolled students (shocker: Google is not particularly concerned with enhancing your use of dozens of alternative search engines). More recently, Google gave away Open Course Builder -- tools that were used to construct its popular course -- and further disrupted traditional notions of who gets to play teacher (anyone) and how many students can take a class for free (1 or 100,000).
If you are an advanced geek, you will be able to author and publish your own e-learning space using Open Course Builder. If you don't know the difference between a .txt file and .jpg, choose a different learning management system (LMS) for now.
I enrolled in Power Searching to assess how Google's tools support 21st-century skills: critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity.
With his gray beard and soothing demeanor, Senior Research Scientist Daniel M. Russell donned an avuncular professor role on streaming video as he explained the course's organization and tests: pre-class, midterm and culminating.
Online learning modules should be intuitive, persuading learners to forget that an infrastructure is unobtrusively guiding their knowledge and skill acquisition. Power Searching is pure course craftsmanship, what you might expect from a team of well-paid (and fed) content geniuses and instructional design experts.
Course Organization Chart for Google's Open Course Builder
Credit: Google
The six 50-minutes classes were easy to navigate. An overview to each class was followed by five or six lessons featuring short introductions to content chunklets. After completing an exercise, students were invited to access supplementary resources and participate on discussion forums facilitated by teacher assistants.
Emails and Hangouts
Creating a simple LMS is not simple, particularly when you are trying to align curriculum and instruction with modern constructivist pedagogy while simultaneously transforming a giant mob of participants into engaged community members. Thankfully, Power Searching did not succumb to the "read-and-quiz" (then repeat) trap; there were many opportunities for watching, discussing, and applying.
Unlike another MOOC for which I signed up last year that subsequently bloated my inbox with pages of single-spaced information written in tiny Helvetica, Power Searching developers were disciplined enough to keep updates and content bite-sized. Moreover, course information was pushed to the spaces where I spend the most time: Gmail and my Google Calendar. Here is what appeared in my Gmail inbox last week:
Welcome to the fifth class of Power Searching with Google! Class 5 focuses on avoiding confirmation bias and verifying sources of information. •Class 5 available
Upcoming course events: •Hangout 3 with search experts: +Thursday, October 4, 10:00 -10:45pm PT (+1:00pm New York / +6:00pm London / +10:30pm Hyderabad / world time zones) (add to calendar)
•Submit questions for search experts: http://goo.gl/mod/zdCw
•Class 6 & post-class assessment available: +Friday, October 5
Several emails, like the one below reminded me to join virtual question and answer sessions in Google Hangouts:
Join your fellow Power Searching classmates in watching the third and last Hangout on Air with search experts +today! •When: +10:00 -10:45am PT ( +1:00pm New York / +6:00pm London / +10:30pm Hyderabad / world time zones)
•Where: Our Google Online Courses Google+ page or our YouTube channel.
•Ask: Submit your questions for our search experts and vote for the questions you'd like to see answered here: http://goo.gl/mod/zdCw.
•Can't Attend? We will post a recording of the Hangout on our Google Online Courses Google+ page and YouTube channel.
•Optional: Attending and watching the Hangout is optional.
•Need more info? See this presentation on how to watch a Hangout on Air. Ask questions in the course forum!
During the streaming video discussions in Hangouts, Russell, in rolled up shirtsleeves, talked with charming guest experts like librarian and search geek Tasha Bergson-Michelson about number range operators and site colon queries. "You're not going to break Google by trying things out," said Russell. Experts wore a disarming assortment of jeans and corduroy. Non-Apple (double-shocker) notebook computers were held or rested on the Ikea ottoman in the foreground. Learning needn't be stuffy, right?
Leading Education Online
A handful of extroverts can sometimes dominate a lecture hall discussion. But by employing Google Moderator during Hangout sessions, facilitators democratically answered only questions that participants voted up.
After the final quiz, I was invited to continue my learning adventure by solving Dan Russell's Wednesday search challenges on Google+: "Can you determine how much Thomas Jefferson wrote about wine to his friends?" Answer.
Power Searching with Google challenged students to think critically, even to the point of interrogating Google's first search results. Furthermore, the course offered ample opportunities to communicate and apply new information. Finally, the multi-modal learning environments successfully reinforced content, earning Power Searching a 96% positive rating by its first batch of students.
In the vast and messy education landscape, where does Open Course Builder fit?
According to GigaOm, "Universities are increasingly partnering with online education startups like Coursera, Udacity (which was co-founded by Thrun) and 2tor but, as more schools look to expand their presence online, Google's new tool could be a way to help them do that." Google's model has already inspired Stanford, universities in Spain, and the developers of Udacity and Coursera to re-conceptualize learning online and learning technology. If nothing else, Google has shown how its suite of technologies can be coherently integrated into a learning experience that definitively belongs in the 21st century.
Source: www.edutopia.org
Technology Integration
Google's Open Course Builder: A Giant Leap into 21st-Century Online Learning
October 16, 2012
Image credit: iStockphoto
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." -- About Google
Google is the most powerful nonhuman teacher ever known to actual humans. Implicitly and ceaselessly, Google performs formative assessments by collecting the following data: the content, genre and media that interests you most; when and for how long you access your external cloud brain; what your hobbies and routines are; with whom you work and communicate; who will get your November vote; and whether you prefer invigorating clean mint or enamel renewal toothpaste. By continuously refining the nuance of your sociogram, Google has already customized your next web exploration and taught itself to teach.
You Are Now Entering the Learning Management System
Months ago, Google entered the massive open online course (MOOC) space by introducing the free Power Searching with Google course to 150 thousand self-enrolled students (shocker: Google is not particularly concerned with enhancing your use of dozens of alternative search engines). More recently, Google gave away Open Course Builder -- tools that were used to construct its popular course -- and further disrupted traditional notions of who gets to play teacher (anyone) and how many students can take a class for free (1 or 100,000).
If you are an advanced geek, you will be able to author and publish your own e-learning space using Open Course Builder. If you don't know the difference between a .txt file and .jpg, choose a different learning management system (LMS) for now.
I enrolled in Power Searching to assess how Google's tools support 21st-century skills: critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity.
With his gray beard and soothing demeanor, Senior Research Scientist Daniel M. Russell donned an avuncular professor role on streaming video as he explained the course's organization and tests: pre-class, midterm and culminating.
Online learning modules should be intuitive, persuading learners to forget that an infrastructure is unobtrusively guiding their knowledge and skill acquisition. Power Searching is pure course craftsmanship, what you might expect from a team of well-paid (and fed) content geniuses and instructional design experts.
Course Organization Chart for Google's Open Course Builder
Credit: Google
The six 50-minutes classes were easy to navigate. An overview to each class was followed by five or six lessons featuring short introductions to content chunklets. After completing an exercise, students were invited to access supplementary resources and participate on discussion forums facilitated by teacher assistants.
Emails and Hangouts
Creating a simple LMS is not simple, particularly when you are trying to align curriculum and instruction with modern constructivist pedagogy while simultaneously transforming a giant mob of participants into engaged community members. Thankfully, Power Searching did not succumb to the "read-and-quiz" (then repeat) trap; there were many opportunities for watching, discussing, and applying.
Unlike another MOOC for which I signed up last year that subsequently bloated my inbox with pages of single-spaced information written in tiny Helvetica, Power Searching developers were disciplined enough to keep updates and content bite-sized. Moreover, course information was pushed to the spaces where I spend the most time: Gmail and my Google Calendar. Here is what appeared in my Gmail inbox last week:
Welcome to the fifth class of Power Searching with Google! Class 5 focuses on avoiding confirmation bias and verifying sources of information. •Class 5 available
Upcoming course events: •Hangout 3 with search experts: +Thursday, October 4, 10:00 -10:45pm PT (+1:00pm New York / +6:00pm London / +10:30pm Hyderabad / world time zones) (add to calendar)
•Submit questions for search experts: http://goo.gl/mod/zdCw
•Class 6 & post-class assessment available: +Friday, October 5
Several emails, like the one below reminded me to join virtual question and answer sessions in Google Hangouts:
Join your fellow Power Searching classmates in watching the third and last Hangout on Air with search experts +today! •When: +10:00 -10:45am PT ( +1:00pm New York / +6:00pm London / +10:30pm Hyderabad / world time zones)
•Where: Our Google Online Courses Google+ page or our YouTube channel.
•Ask: Submit your questions for our search experts and vote for the questions you'd like to see answered here: http://goo.gl/mod/zdCw.
•Can't Attend? We will post a recording of the Hangout on our Google Online Courses Google+ page and YouTube channel.
•Optional: Attending and watching the Hangout is optional.
•Need more info? See this presentation on how to watch a Hangout on Air. Ask questions in the course forum!
During the streaming video discussions in Hangouts, Russell, in rolled up shirtsleeves, talked with charming guest experts like librarian and search geek Tasha Bergson-Michelson about number range operators and site colon queries. "You're not going to break Google by trying things out," said Russell. Experts wore a disarming assortment of jeans and corduroy. Non-Apple (double-shocker) notebook computers were held or rested on the Ikea ottoman in the foreground. Learning needn't be stuffy, right?
Leading Education Online
A handful of extroverts can sometimes dominate a lecture hall discussion. But by employing Google Moderator during Hangout sessions, facilitators democratically answered only questions that participants voted up.
After the final quiz, I was invited to continue my learning adventure by solving Dan Russell's Wednesday search challenges on Google+: "Can you determine how much Thomas Jefferson wrote about wine to his friends?" Answer.
Power Searching with Google challenged students to think critically, even to the point of interrogating Google's first search results. Furthermore, the course offered ample opportunities to communicate and apply new information. Finally, the multi-modal learning environments successfully reinforced content, earning Power Searching a 96% positive rating by its first batch of students.
In the vast and messy education landscape, where does Open Course Builder fit?
According to GigaOm, "Universities are increasingly partnering with online education startups like Coursera, Udacity (which was co-founded by Thrun) and 2tor but, as more schools look to expand their presence online, Google's new tool could be a way to help them do that." Google's model has already inspired Stanford, universities in Spain, and the developers of Udacity and Coursera to re-conceptualize learning online and learning technology. If nothing else, Google has shown how its suite of technologies can be coherently integrated into a learning experience that definitively belongs in the 21st century.
Source: www.edutopia.org
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
The following information is used for educational purposes only. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the next generation Alex Cu...
-
The following information is used for educational purposes only. We the Future | September 2018 Michael Green: The global goals we´ve ...
-
The following information is used for educational purposes only. Aprender un nuevo idioma es bueno para el cerebro Los investigadores desc...
