confessions of a media junkie: 2008

Google G2? - In China, the market reacts way quicker

二〇〇八年十二月二日
21世纪经济报道

多家国内手机渠道商收到一款名为Sciphone Dream G2(下称G2)的工程测试机，该机采用Android Home Edition V1.0操作系统，GSM三频网络，支持WIFI和EDGE上网，最大支持16GB闪存卡。

更加令人心痒的是，其全面内置Google搜索、Google地图、Gmail、YouTube、Google短信、Blogger、Google日历、 Google Picasa、Google Reader、Google Docs、Google News、iGoogle功能——除了没有侧滑键盘、屏幕缩水外，几乎就是精简版的G1。

G2的全名是Sciphone Dream G2，除了有可能成为第一款应用谷歌Android操作系统的中文手机外，其神秘之处还在于其操刀者Sciphone。

熟悉山寨苹果手机的人士告诉记者，去年，Sciphone的一款i68一举奠定了其在高仿iPhone市场的江湖地位，称得上是一家有一定知名度的山寨厂商。

“如果你喜欢苹果iPhone，但又舍不得掏5000-6000元高价买个水货，那么山寨版iPhone也能满足你90%的需求，而你只需要花费800-1300元之间。”投身山寨机事业两年的魏强说。

“做山寨也要讲求蓝海战略，小白领喜欢智能机，民工和学生对影音感兴趣，东欧的喜欢结实，非洲的喜欢花俏。”魏强说，自己早不做那些300-500元的低端山寨机了，只要是真有创新的东西，1000元左右绝对有市场，“这个价位的产品质量更有保障，自己的利润也更好”。

对于市场中流通的山寨版iPhone，魏强透露有“四大寨主”，分别是来自中国桔子公司生产的iorgane F系列、博客电子有限公司生产的HiPhone、远洋科技公司的Ciphone，以及艾德金电子有限公司的Sciphone i68。

据记者通过市场实地及网络调查，这四家山寨机企业提供的产品，都高仿苹果iPhone，只是在外形尺寸和硬件配置及功能上小有区别，甚至有些产品还克服了iPhone的缺点，比如可拆卸电池、支持双卡双待等。

“这些年来，山寨手机中的确出现了不少独步世界的技术创新、外观创新、工艺创新。很多奇怪的技术和设计被组合在一起，这些组合有时可能是侵权的，却实现了五花八门的功能。”据记者了解，华为内部的一份研究报告就对山寨机的创意表示了非常的欣赏。

“功能极其丰富，价格极其低廉，外观极其新颖，质量极其不可靠。”该人士如此评价山寨手机。不过他在报告中也坦承，“在拥有了双卡双待、MP3、MP4、拍照、蓝牙、电子书、超长待机等诸多功能之外，还标配了256TF卡，只售380元，物美价廉，即使用完就扔，也在所不惜——实在是居家旅行、小孩上学、送亲访友、附庸风雅、装腔作势之必备手机啊！”

Link

Patch upon a patch

It's been such a long time. First I was tied up at work, and then it was the relocation. Unfortunately, the hiatus left the stupid post on a stupid video at the top of my blog for quite some time. Anyhow, the worst has passed. When my computer arrives in a couple weeks, everything will return to normal.

Here is an interesting article about the history of the voting process. Call me an idealist - I still don't understand how such a broken system is permitted to remain the sole channel for the people to express its intent, year after year. Sometimes I wonder if the American obsession with the "Founding Fathers" is also what causes its fervent disregard of reality in its adherence to impractical ideologies.

Rock, Paper, Scissors
How we used to vote
by Jill Lepore
New Yorker, October 13, 2008

On the morning of November 2, 1859—Election Day—George Kyle, a merchant with the Baltimore firm of Dinsmore & Kyle, left his house with a bundle of ballots tucked under his arm. Kyle was a Democrat. As he neared the polls in the city’s Fifteenth Ward, which was heavily dominated by the American Party, a ruffian tried to snatch his ballots. Kyle dodged and wheeled, and heard a cry: his brother, just behind him, had been struck. Next, someone clobbered Kyle, who drew a knife, but didn’t have a chance to use it. “I felt a pistol put to my head,” he said. Grazed by a bullet, he fell. When he rose, he drew his own pistol, hidden in his pocket. He spied his brother lying in the street. Someone else fired a shot, hitting Kyle in the arm. A man carrying a musket rushed at him. Another threw a brick, knocking him off his feet. George Kyle picked himself up and ran. He never did cast his vote. Nor did his brother, who died of his wounds. The Democratic candidate for Congress, William Harrison, lost to the American Party’s Henry Winter Davis. Three months later, when the House of Representatives convened hearings into the election, whose result Harrison contested, Davis’s victory was upheld on the ground that any “man of ordinary courage” could have made his way to the polls.

Full text

Follow up: 7 Things that can go wrong on Election Day at Time.

Yay!

Two extraordinary pieces of photographic art

Life Before Death by Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta

This sombre series of portraits taken of people before and after they had died is a challenging and poignant study. Schels and Lakotta recorded interviews with the subjects in their final days, revealing much about dying - and living.

(Via littleoslo)

Alzheimer's by Sloan Breeden

(Go to "Projects" and click on "Alzheimer's)

(Via ahsup)

Jon Stewart – God on TV

I've been going through recent clips from the Daily Show and the consistency in brilliance is astounding. Stewart and his writers have unfailingly found ways to mock and challenge the state of the world today with great humor and insight. What particularly amazes me is his choice of guests, which encompasses many non-mainstream authors with intellectual messages that deserve the public's attention.

Among the many many gems (a congressional hearing on Second Life, a racial dialog, news coverage of the Olympic torch in San Francisco, and interview with Steve Coll, author of Ghost War), I find this one the most akin to my usual reaction to news of the kind and yet is absent from discussions in the media:

By the way, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones make such an awe-inspiring couple on screen! If they are half as funny in real life, their children might suffer from stunted growth due to excessive laughing...

"If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs"

Another year has passed, and that means... we've got another batch of curious book titles!

"Closure" wins oddest book award

By Jeremy Lovell
Reuters

Self-help manual "If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs" won this year's oddest book title competition, The Bookseller trade magazine said on Friday.

The book took an impressive one-third of the 8,500 votes cast online in The Bookseller's 30th annual competition.

Runner up "I was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen", the story of a fictitious World War Two pilot forced to bale out over the jungle, polled a distant 20 percent.

"'If You Want Closure', makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes. So effective is the title that you don't even need to read the book itself," said the magazine's deputy editor Joel Rickett.

The winner beat stiff competition from other shortlisted titles including the somewhat niche "Cheese Problems Solved" and "How to Write a How to Write Book" and the rather provocative "Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues".

The annual competition was launched in 1978 at the Frankfurt Book Fair when it was won by the memorably titled "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice".

Since then, with the exceptions of 1987 and 1991 when no award was granted due, according to Rickett, to a lack of oddness, the weird and wonderful titles have flowed thick and fast with some eyebrow raising winners.

"Joy of Chickens" took the 1980 title, with "The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling" in 1983, "Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual" in 1990, "Living with Crazy Buttocks" in 2002 and "Bombproof Your Horse" in 2004 are but a sample.

However, the 1997 winner "Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition" does stand out among the glittering array, and in September this year the public will be asked to vote for the oddest of all the winners.

"That and 'Nude Mice' probably remain among the weirdest, but it is a strong competition," said Rickett.

"And the quality of weirdness does seem to be improving in part as technology allows greater access to publishing. Certainly we are getting more titles coming forward," he added.

Charlie Wilson's War

With an illustrious cast, a brilliant script writer, and a colorful, larger-than-life subject, Charlie Wilson's War is a movie that could have been so much more.

Unfortunately, among the illustrious cast, only Hoffman fulfilled the potential of his character among the trio. Hanks is simply far too clean and upright to be the swinging alcoholic congressman; given the impeccable casting in other Sorkin movies, I am convinced that there are better candidates for this character. Roberts' character is underwritten, without history, motivation, nor surprises.

As for the story, well, the history was obviously not as simple as it was told in the movie. I'm greatly disappointed by the lack of depth in Sorkin's simplistic script, which lacks even his signature intelligent banters. There could have been more emphasis on the roles that ignorance, domestic politics, and previous diplomatic snafus played in the formation of US foreign policy and the country's consistently dismal performance in long term nation building. While the ending poignantly reminds the audience of the current predicament in Iraq, attention should also have been drawn to how the Talibans and Bin Laden rose from the ashes of the Soviet-Afghan war as a result of the US desertion, which eventually led to 9/11 and right back to the Iraq mess we have today.

With any luck, perhaps the (American) audience may start asking themselves what kind of country does the US want to be: Should the US be promoting, keeping, or "making" peace? Should she be the world police and fight the good fights (and body bags in return) in remote countries? Can pre-emptive strikes ever be justified? How is homeland security affected by the US invasions into other countries? What moral and legal authority does the US have on its own that would allow it to go out unilaterally and perform "nation building"? What are the roles of military and diplomacy when the battle has been won but the war ain't over?

These are the topic that I believe form the premise of war. To me, good war movies always prompt the audience to think about some of these questions. Charlie Wilson's War is, of course, not a generic war movie, but it has such great potential (and Sorkin!) to ask the above. Without doing so, the movie fails to highlight the significance of Charlie Wilson's actions and becomes merely a shallow tale of a slightly eccentric congressman and his illicit lover.

Further readings:

Ghost Wars, a comprehensive history of the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan
Fiasco, regarding another instance when the US forgot to plan for the aftermath before waging a war

The jobs cut league table

Another league table that investment bankers would never generate. Massive rounds of layoff have become the standard knee-jerk reaction to strategic mistakes made by the senior management. The insecure executive and workers are therefore encouraged to be more risk-taking during the good times, which invariably lead to more calamitous downfalls. It is a sad state of affair, exemplifying the many problems of unbridled capitalism.

From Bloomberg news
March 24, 2008

Firms and jobs cut

Citigroup – 6,200
Lehman Brothers – 4,990
Bank of America – 3,650
Morgan Stanley – 2,940
Washington Mutual –2,600
Merrill Lynch – 2,220
HSBC – 1,650
Bear Stearns – 1,550
WestLB – 1,530
UBS – 1,500
Goldman Sachs – 1,500*
National City – 900
Credit Suisse – 820
Royal Bank of Canada – 500
Fortis – 500
Wells Fargo – 500
Wachovia – 443
Deutsche Bank – 370
JPMorgan Chase – 100

TOTAL – 34,463

The above table shows jobs eliminated by the biggest banks and securities firms since the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in July 2007. The figures are based on company disclosures.

* Goldman Sachs said on Jan. 25 that its job cuts reflected the
firm's policy of weeding out underperformers.

Religion is a means of advancement during group selection, methinks

I positively feel fortunate that the enigma of religion is unfolding during my life time. Although my knowledge in this vast space is highly limited, I am feeling more and more comfortable with my little theory that organized religion was bred by the need to satisfy man's biological need for religiosity and continuously strengthened by its effectiveness during the group selection process.

The article below is difficult to excerpt since it is long and contains many experiments and hypotheses. I invite you to take a few minutes and go through the original article to see for yourself. My previous post on religion can be found here.

Where angels no longer fear to tread
Mar 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

BY the standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum... [which] will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

The experiments it will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a “surveillance-camera” God might improve reproductive success to an individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person's reputation—for instance, do people think that those who believe in God are more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside it.

Closer

Slow dining

有一次，跟銘漢哥在中環吃午飯，在一家意大利館子用膳。

我告訴他，這家館子挺有詩意，晚上會放一塊黑板在門外，用粉筆寫着：“Slow dining with Italian cheese”。

銘漢哥想也不用想便說：“咁慘！？”

****

亂馬½是我最最喜愛的漫畫。高橋留美子實在搞笑得不能想像。其中有一個角色叫畢克雷．夏爾達，是法國格鬥飲食的傳人。格鬥飲食除了講求速度以外，還要保持優雅的食相，即是在過程中不能讓人家看到嘴部的動作。畢克雷吃得極快，旁觀者往往只見到他面前的食物突然消失，和一絲閃光在他的嘴角稍縱即逝。

銘漢哥一家都有夏爾達的真傳。每次我和他們吃飯都會變成飯桌上的loner，因為他們在我拿起飯碗、開始夾餸那幾秒之内就已經把自己的食物吃得乾乾淨淨。和我家人吃飯的時候，我爸媽常常見他停了手，都特意着他多吃一點，就算他也已經撫着肚皮說飽。我唯有指出他面前堆積如山的骨頭作為證據，爸媽才會相信。

****

當然，我是那種恨不得每餐都能吃上三個小時的人。

這種細節是拍拖的時候發現不了的啊，嘻嘻。

一元復始　萬象更新

恭喜恭喜！

恭祝各位2008年“八”個盤滿缽滿，日子過得稱心滿意！

Quarter of Brits think Churchill was made up

Heeheeeheee.

Sun Feb 3, 7:12 PM ET

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real.

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain's most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi and Battle of Waterloo victor the Duke of Wellington also appeared in the top 10 of people thought to be myths.

Meanwhile, 58 percent thought Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Holmes actually existed; 33 percent thought the same of W. E. Johns' fictional pilot and adventurer Biggles.

UKTV Gold television surveyed 3,000 people.

也來談談博益結業

我不反對博益結業。

像Leona所說，大家多久沒有買博益的書了？我家裏有大量倪匡、畢華流、錢瑪莉（鄧小宇）、赤川次郎、川上春樹等的藏書，但都是最少十年前買的了。近年見博益也偶有佳作，在本地的出版市場上不算頂尖，但也不算潦倒。

然而，作爲一盤生意，好的管理層除了應要求一項業務有利潤之外，也應時時檢討該業務是否使用資本的最佳方法。而SCMP作為一家上市公司，絕對有義務盡這管理的責任。因此，博益結業，是一項商業決定；雖然令人惋惜，但大喊結業 = 無良未免過於嚴重了。

問題是，博益有沒有考慮過它結業的安排是否妥善？為什麽不讓作者買回版權？為什麽不把回書作大減價以一次過清倉？能不能把版權庫一次性賣掉？有沒有嘗試為博益這個老字號找買家？實在有太多能帶來雙贏局面的選擇。一家以營利為目標的公司，在準備完全把資產減值前，應該盡辦法為資產找變現的方法，而絕對沒有理由讓一項這麽有價值的資產隨便地一筆勾銷。

這些愚蠢的決定，除了不是competent的商業做法，也嚴重地損害了南華的名聲及出版界的地位。作為一張需要有社會公信力的報紙，把它的作家這麽公然地踐踏，實在是太不漂亮了。

時間會過去；出版社亦然。只是，就像男女分手的時候會問：這是最好的處理方法嗎？做事留一線，他日好相見。還是有點氣度好。

Facebook group: 支援博益作者及反對博益結業大聯盟 (I only agree with the first premise)
An online petition: 博益停業(一人一名支持博益作者取回版權並反對南華早報作出銷毀書籍行為！)
A collection of bloggers' responses at Sidekick

Zimbabwe update - $10 mn bill

A follow up to my previous posts.

Zimbabwe bank to issue $10m bill
By Peter Biles
BBC Southern Africa correspondent

Zimbabwe's central bank is to introduce new higher-denomination banknotes in an effort to ease the critical shortage of cash in the country.

Zimbabwe has been in economic decline for the past eight years, with annual inflation widely thought to be in excess of 50,000%.

The highest value note that will go into circulation on Friday is worth 10m Zimbabwean dollars.

But that is worth less than US$3.90 (£2; 2.60 euros) on the black market.

...

The government's only response is to print more money - and that is seen as the main reason for the hyperinflation.

There have been no official inflation figures published for the past three or four months.

Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank governor, Gideon Gono, has called on the business community not to increase prices every time new measures are taken to adjust the currency.

The Asset Write-down League Table

When I was an analyst in an investment bank, I had to spend a disproportionate amount of time on whipping up the best looking league tables by tweaking various parameters and recording such tweaks in minuscule font. Here is one that no banker would touch with a 10-feet pole:

From Here is the City News
Last updated: 18/01/2008

Citi - $32.1bn
Merrill Lynch - $19.3bn
UBS - $13.7bn
Morgan Stanley - $10.6bn
Credit Agricole (Calyon) - $3.7bn
Barclays Bank - $3.3bn
Deutsche Bank - $3.2bn
Bank of America - $3bn
JPMorgan - $3bn
Bear Stearns - $2.8bn
Royal Bank of Scotland - $2.5bn
Credit Suisse - $2bn
Goldman Sachs - $1.7bn
Lehman Brothers - $1.5bn
WestLB - $519m

The worst is yet to come, my dear friends.

BRACE! BRACE!

Mafia killers arm themselves with degrees

January 21, 2008
Richard Owen in Rome
From The Times Online

Mafia bosses do not come much more brutal than Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano. Among the crimes, for which the brothers have been serving life sentences since 1994 are involvement in the murder of two anti-Mafia judges, the killing of an anti-Mafia priest, the bombing of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and another in Rome that killed 10 people and injured 93.

Yet both have shown an unexpected aptitude for turning their brainpower to a higher purpose: academic study. They recently gained first-class degrees — Giuseppe in mathematics and Filippo in economics.

Prison authorities said that a growing number of imprisoned Mafia killers are taking degrees, and that their motives may not be entirely to do with academic achievement.

“A favourite subject is law,” Giuseppe Giustolisi, an expert on the Mafia, said. “Either they want to find out where they went wrong, or they hope they will get out one day and that detailed knowledge of the law will help them to evade prison in future.”

He said that another motive was that they were allowed to travel to the university where they had enrolled to take exams — and the universities were often in their home towns.

“I am worried that this loophole in the high-security system enables them to somehow communicate with their local henchman,” Sebastiano Ardita, the former head of the Italian prison service, said.

...

Mr Ardita said: “I do not believe they have changed their ways. There is something more to it.” He said that a display of intellectual superiority helped Mafia bosses to maintain their “supremacy” over clans, and travelling to their home turfs to take exams offered “a loophole in a system that is supposed to isolate them”. Antonio Ingroia, an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Sicily, said: “It does seem absurd to relax a high-security regime intended to ensure they have no contact with the criminal underworld.”

However, Emilio Santoro, a professor at Florence University, said that even Mafia bosses deserved a chance to better themselves. He cited the case of Carmelo Musumeci, a mafioso from Catania, who gained a law degree with a dissertation on “the experiences of prisoners serving life sentences”.

Mafia prisoners are held under a security regime known as 41b, which the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has criticised as excessively harsh. They are allowed only two visits a month and open-air exercise for up to four hours a day.

Library of Congress Goes Web 2.0

This is freakishly amazing.

Library of Congress Goes Web 2.0

(Via GigaOM)

A hilarious standup comedian in Hong Kong

Vivek Mahbubani

(Via VC Digest)

On religion

Maslow collected reports of what he called "peak experiences" – those extraordinary self-transcendent moments that feel qualitatively different from ordinary life. ... Here are some [of the common features of peak experiences]: The universe is perceived as a unified whole where everything is accepted and nothing is judged or ranked; egocentrism and goal-striving disappear as a person feels merged with the universe (and often with God); perceptions of time and space are altered; and the person is flooded with feelings of wonder, awe, joy, love and gratitude.

Maslow's goal was to demonstrate that spiritual life has a naturalistic meaning, that peak experiences are a basic fact about the human mind. In all eras and cultures, many people have had these experiences, and Maslow suggested that all religions are based on the insights of somebody's peak experience. Peak experiences make people nobler, just as James had said, and religions were created as methods of promoting peak experiences and then maximizing their ennobling powers. Religions sometimes lose touch with their origins, however; they are sometimes taken over by people who have not had peak experiences – the bureaucrats and company men who want to routinize procedures and guard orthodoxy for orthodoxy's sake.

- From The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

Father and sons

[His son] Jimmy’s service is the lone subject about which McCain will not answer questions – "We’re proud of all our kids, is what we say." He has another son, Jack, who is a midshipman at the Naval Academy, like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him. McCain will talk about Jack, because Jack is safe in Annapolis. But McCain will not talk about Jimmy, whose imminent departure represented one of those rare instances when a family’s and a nation’s dramas unfolded on the same front line. Not since Adlai Stevenson had a presidential candidate seen his son off to war.

- John McCain’s Last War by Chris Jones at Esquire

Another reason why McCain is perhaps the most honest and honorable Republican candidate of the decade.

The World of Warcraft becomes a source of "inspiration" for the traditional media

魔兽世界“入侵”传统媒体
包括央视在内的主流媒体屡次发生借用网游地图事件

A map of Mesopotamia?

　　显然，很多媒体从业者都是魔兽世界的忠实玩家。前不久，沈阳一家报纸在讲古代中美洲瘟疫的时候配上了魔兽世界西瘟疫之地的地图，河南一家报纸在描述股票牛市的时候借用了魔兽世界牛头人种族的形象，央视的节目里也几次出现了魔兽世界的主题音乐渲染气氛。

　　没想到，这几天央视军事栏目似乎也找不到世界地图了。

　　1月2日，CCTV七套军事纪实栏目中总结2007年全球军事演习时，用了一张插图标明土耳其、伊拉克和伊朗的地理位置――同样是魔兽世界里的一张地图。

全文见南方都市报

To start the new year

Friday's come round, sure. But the moment I get home, the weekend'll begin to die and Monday'll creep nearer, minute by minute. then it'll be back to five more days like today, worse than today, far worse than today.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Google G2? - In China, the market reacts way quicker

Patch upon a patch

Yay!

Two extraordinary pieces of photographic art

Jon Stewart – God on TV

"If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs"

Charlie Wilson's War

The jobs cut league table

Religion is a means of advancement during group selection, methinks

Closer

Slow dining

Quarter of Brits think Churchill was made up

也來談談博益結業

Zimbabwe update - $10 mn bill

The Asset Write-down League Table

Mafia killers arm themselves with degrees

Library of Congress Goes Web 2.0

A hilarious standup comedian in Hong Kong

On religion

Father and sons

The World of Warcraft becomes a source of "inspiration" for the traditional media

To start the new year

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