After one week of virus rule I am still handicapped, still every attempt to get out of my bedroom prison is punished by severe coughing fits forcing me back to a more solitary environment after a short time. Yesterday my sense of duty led me to a panel discussion at the Darmstadt Chamber of Industry and Commerce, jointly organized with the Hessen public broadcasting station HR Info. The megalomaniac title went along the lines of “Web 2.0 was yesterday. Web 3.0 is tomorrow”. So what is today? This perplexity must have been part of the program, as the whole event lacked any sense of direction. We all bravely suffered through an arbitrary selection of talks (mostly not bad, though!), chaotic discussions and permanently failing microphone and speaker systems. If we hold the HR Info people responsible, I’d say: This was Radio 0.7. Guys, you owe me a drink!
Sunshine Supermen
But where do we find the sun? – Anyway, kudos to the students from Darmstadt’s Technical University!
It’s complicated
Have you ever wondered how to turn a sphere inside out without producing wrinkles? Ask no more.
Going global
As an aside, when I recently mentioned my fledgling Chinese media research in a conversation with some german colleague, he immediately talked about the recent spectacular Alibaba 阿里巴巴 IPO. Something like that would have been impossible even only a few months ago. It seems that China’s finally got some global brands after all (and it’s not necessarily the search engine giant Baidu 百度).
Whose song am I to sing?
Corporate media are on the rise. In a country like Germany, where established journalistic standards like thorough research and independence are felt to be under attack by an ongoing commercialization, this fact is mostly met with suspicion and skepticism. In a country like China, where the times of a journalism dominated by government decree and formulaic propaganda are not long past, corporate publishing may even be a liberating force.
The Chinese business weekly “Economic Observer” has an interesting article (in english translation!) about The Evolution of Corporate Media, portraying among others a monthly magazine by the renowned real estate company Soho, the Soho XiaoBao 小报 (Soho Small Paper). The very excellent Danwei.org provides necessary background.
Goodbye, Jack Crawford!
We are living in bleak times. No, I’m not talking about the Bush junta or islamist terrorism, nor about climate change or no more Harry Potter novels. I’m talking about the endemic spread of superstition that has especially gotten hold of the fairer sex in this country. Talking with females in Germany you’ve got a 95 percent chance that they’ll be humourless devotees of some obscurantist creed, be it astrology, homeopathy or the healing power of stones. Worse still, being attached to these would-be witches or fairy queens, even sober males lose their natural bond to rationality and skepticism and send their dogs, cats and kids to psychics and natural healers.
Being as mad as I am about this fact – seriously, it means that any decent conversation with, like, 60 percent of the population is going to end in embarrassment sooner or later – I take some perverse pleasure in any event that purges the last remaining twists in my very own sobriety. Something like that just happened when I found this recent gem by star science journalist Malcom Gladwell in the current issue of the New Yorker: Gladwell dismantles the popular folklore about and praise for forensic psychology and the work of profilers. It turns out that not only they are not better as psychics, actually both professions exploit the same tricks.
Bringing Creative Commons to China
China is considered by many to be the wild Wild West of Intellectual Property. Not necessarily so, when there are reasonable standards, it seems. Thanks to the relentless work of Prof. Wang Chunyan, the Creative Commons movement is gaining ground in China. On November 4th, a Chinese CC Photo Award was celebrated in presence of Joichi Ito, chairman of the CC board, sponsored, among others, by portal giant sohu.com.
(Via China Vortex)
Numbers, Numbers!
If I interpret this news correctly, Chinese portal provider Sina.com has registered 1.5 million entries as yet in its blogs related to Ang Lees movie “Lust, Caution”, making it the most commented-upon movie in the history of Sina.com.
God knows how many entries that would have been had the Chinese been allowed to see the unpurged, even more erotic original version of the movie.
(Via Pacific Epoch , though a little misleading)
Erecting the Orchis Tower
I start this blog with an unspectacular pointer to the 3rd Annual Chinese Blogger Conference in Beijing. John Kennedy has an english language live blog from the event. Protocoling among other things a talk by Flypig (飞猪) about the very professional and interesting Podcast site “Antiwave (反波)” (produced by Flypig together with former radio journalist Ping Ke 平客). Wish I could understand more of Antiwave’s shows. Danwei.tv, in one of Jeremy Goldkorn’s famous Hard Hat Shows, has an interview with the makers. Antiwave received the Global Best Podcast Award of Deutsche Welle in 2005.
Postscript: Good summaries of the first and the second day of the conference (with pictures!) by David Feng at BlogNation, and by Rebecca McKinnon at her blog RConversation.
Brights and Supers
Daniel Dennett is one of the heroes of my philosophical past. At the time I started reading philosophy of mind in the early 80s, he was cult, and it seems he’s never ceased to be, expanding his field of expertise from theories of consciousness to the topic of evolution and others.
Recently Dennett has joined the ranks of outspoken (and even campaigning) atheists. After he nearly died and subsequently recovered from a severe heart crisis he wrote a very impressive and much-discussed article, politely but distinctly disapproving of those who’d said they’d prayed for his health: “Thank Goodness”.
Later he was one of those who proposed to re-name atheists as “brights”, in an admittedly arrogant coining of a term analogous to the term “gay” for homosexual men. (The whole atheist movement he’s part of is inspired by the gay liberation, even adapting the term “coming out”.)
Now Dennett has received the “Richard Dawkins Award” (no big surprise, as both have been friends for a long time), and on Richard Dawkins’ website there are videos of his speech. Before you get to Dawkins’ laudatio and Dennett himself, though, you have to suffer the introduction of a certain Julia Sweeney, who proves the fact that being an atheist does not preclude ickyness.
One of my favorite parts of Dennett’s speech is when he grants the religious people a positively connotated name, like “straight” for heterosexuals, and proposes the term “super” (for believing in the supernatural).