undead astronauts

I came across this article on internet use in China. There are a lot of interesting points made by the article, but one that stood out to me was how and why Twitter – and the inevitable Twitter-like clones in China – is not allowed by the Chinese government. This might seem obvious, since China censors so much already on the internet… but Twitter is different from say Blogger or YouTube because it’s so akin to instant messaging, in my mind at least, which everyone and their mother uses in China. Anyways, the link to the article is here.

(sorry, link fixed now hopefully)

2009 SAT scores have been tabulated and the wsj summarized the results (hat tip to halfsigma).

Average scores for the class of 2009 in critical reading dropped to 501 from 502, in writing to 493 from 494 and held steady in math, at 515. The combined scores are the lowest this decade and reflect stalled performance over the past three years. The reading scores are the worst since 1994.

Many observers Tuesday viewed the flat results of recent years as discouraging in light of a more than 25-year effort to improve U.S. education. “This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “If there’s any good news here, I can’t find it.”

au contraire mr. finn, but there is good news…

Asian-American students showed the most dramatic gains. In math they scored an average of 587 — 72 points better than the general population. Since 2008, their average math score has climbed six points. (more…)

Yet another sad story about young people in China being addicted to games. This one is much more bizarre:

Deng Fei stood by his son while crying his heart out. He was very sorry: “We sent him over there to quit his addiction to the Internet. We never imagined that we were sending our son to the guillotine!”

Rest of the article here.

An insightful article on the demographics of twitter.

Apparently the Chinese have no qualms using IKEA’s resources for what they are:

Beijing loves IKEA — but not for shopping

This sounds like a potential premise for a zombie video game…

Government health officials are mobilizing to launch a massive swine flu vaccination campaign this fall that is unprecedented in its scope — and in the potential for complications…

More here.

Interesting story featured on ChinaSmack.com:

My little brother has left my home for four months already – because he is an Internet addict.

My brother was always an obedient kid, but started going on the Internet constantly in college because of video games: Journey to the West (a game in China developed by NetEase), Legend of the Swordsman 11, and World of Warcraft…

rest of article here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/world/asia/22journalists.html?_r=2&hpw

“But here in South Korea, human rights advocates, bloggers and Christian pastors are accusing them of needlessly endangering the very people they tried to cover: North Korean refugees and the activists who help them.”

I’ve put off putting up a post on District 9 out of fear of inadvertently revealing spoilers or elements of the film that might be better off discovered on one’s own while watching the film in theaters. Now it’s been a week since I saw District 9, and I think I might as well put up some thoughts on the film now before I forget more than I already have.
(more…)

can’t find the embed.

http://www.justin.tv/kenion

so US news & world report came up w/ a list of the best places to grow up. guess what city showed up?

just a little blurb i thought was funny.

some genius cops raided the home of a hacker forum admin and used the forum server (r00t-y0u.org) as a honeypot to grab info on the hackers. being rather proud geniuses, they let ABC do a feature on their feat. of course, hackers being hackers, found that the geniuses hadn’t put a password on the root database on which they stored the evidence and seized control of it shortly afterwards.

jason richwine, a writer for the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute or AEI, has an article up about how he would change immigration policy.

he goes over some of the ground i’ve mentioned here such as diversity being a killer of community bonds, even between ppl of the same race. he goes on to suggest that immigration policy should change to that of canada’s or australia’s which imports by skill and not family relation.

i don’t have any objection to a change policy which emphasizes IQ over all else, and in fact i’ve supported that position for a long time. but i’m not sure that it will foster much greater community bonding. at best it seems like it would only mitigate an increase in crime. (more…)

so evil, lol.  at least they left the front airbags in.

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/08/17/report-enterprise-sold-cars-after-removing-side-impact-airbags