GeoGrow

And now a standard post

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 03:03:13 +0000

With just in in-line image added down in the text.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum. Typi non habent claritatem insitam; est usus legentis in iis qui facit eorum claritatem. Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius. Claritas est etiam processus dynamicus, qui sequitur mutationem consuetudium lectorum. Mirum est notare quam littera gothica, quam nunc putamus parum claram, anteposuerit litterarum formas humanitatis per seacula quarta decima et quinta decima. Eodem modo typi, qui nunc nobis videntur parum clari, fiant sollemnes in futurum.

A quote post

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 02:57:11 +0000

What, pray tell, will a quote post look like?

It looks mostly like a regular post, except a lighter font. Link text gets formatted really subtly–but maybe a bit better looking than on regular posts, where it appears as smallcaps.

A Gallery Post.

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 02:27:40 +0000

And a gallery?

An aside

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 00:19:39 +0000

What good might an aside post be? What are we to say about such things?

An aside is a nice long blockquote.

New theme: Status post

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 00:17:38 +0000

I’m assuming a status format is geared towards a micro-post.

The map wars

chinagrow — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 06:32:24 +0000

It’s such an exciting time. Apple making its own map. Google upgrading. All of a sudden I find myself explaining that putting together a map of the world is a good trick, but we have the technology. It’s been done any number of times.

The trick seems to be a combination of getting the usability right (thank you Google, mostly) and keeping the data alive (thank you social web and state capitalism).

Of course, mobiles have a huge hand in this as well. We knew back in 2010 that maps are the most persistant mobile app (the most used category of app) among UC faculty, staff, and students. 67% of my Chinese respondents (smartphone carrying, second-tier city dwelling, college students. n=49) used their mapping app at least once a week.

And I’m sure a rigorous enough assessment has yet to be done. Is Yelp a map app? Do people consider using their phone as a navigation device “using a map”? I certainly do, but I’m a bit of an outlier. I would pre-download tiles before heading out in Wuhan with compass, map, and GPS. That boat dock? That’s mine.

Interesting times indeed.

The geography of Chinese art districts

chinagrow — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:26:30 +0000

Actually, there are many of them. But Caochangdi seems to have a unique story to tell. Or perhaps the patterns of politics and land use repeat themselves. The international gallery money menioned in this article could just have easily been the Hong Kong retail/restauranteur money that built Shanghai’s Xintiandi.

Thanks to An Xiao Mina for a compelling, well-documented story that takes place over a time span that includes a long weekend art-trip to Beijing.

It’s complicated

chinagrow — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 03:39:57 +0000

I was enthralled with the radio two Friday nights ago as first Marketplace and then This American Life recounted how monologist Mike Daisey seems to have portrayed many of the ideas in his piece The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs as facts. Do I remember correctly that the hourly NPR headlines even had the retraction as a news item?

To make a long story short, go here. But really, I think you should listen to both radio pieces. The Marketplace story is about 7-minutes and has reporters pointing out inconsistencies with the story as presented, and relating their own experiences on the ground–none of which contradict anything Daisey claims happens in factories in China. I would tell you to listen to the original This American Life episode, but it’s been not just retracted, but pulled down.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

L and I listened to the whole piece when it first aired in January. This is what I remember from the first listening: wow–he found a crappy factory. I didn’t pay attention to city names. I didn’t pay attention to how long he spent researching, and now I can’t go back and listen to the original, because it’s been pulled down. But what is now apparent is the whole stage show is based on a 6 day trip to China–that alone seems absurd in hindsight.

The Marketplace piece made it seem like all the English-speaking reporters in China listened to the story and picked up on the inconsistencies immediately. But he’s been doing this stage show for more than a year–you couldn’t have called bullshit earlier Shanghai Correspondents Club?

So the radio piece we listened to in January was a, …, what? A fabrication? An exaggeration? The product of someone making up what he couldn’t find?

Two aspects of this whole affair make me want to comment. First: I wasn’t even sure that TAL is supposed to be a credible source of information, but I guess that’s how I’ve been treating it. In retrospect, I always thought that it was clear when it is fiction, and it is clear when people are storytelling. Personal narratives are identified as such. But this piece– my memory is that I listened to it as news. I assumed it was real. But Daisey makes a good point throughout the retraction interview: he’s doing theater. He’s storytelling. ‘Ripped from the headlines.’ Both Marketplace and TAL stressed that they are not disputing that these things happen in Chinese factories (and in all fairness, Apple Computer Corporation readily admits to a lot of them). The types of things that Daisey described happen. But in the end, Daisey has little or no first-hand experience with these matters.

Second: Does this mean that I have to start second guessing what is storytelling and what is news? What separates a Teri Gross interview from a David Sedaris essay? Did David really say all those things when he was a Macy’s elf? Did he actually work at Macy’s or was that just a funny bit that he wrote? L says: “Don’t all Americans know that they need to watch all their media as if it’s fiction?” Unfortunately honey, they don’t.

Bit I do suppose all news is this way. Recently, I’ve been realizing that I sometimes have simultaneous and opposite intellectual and emotional responses to things I read. It’s about what frame I choose to put around a topic. At the end of the day, a huge portion of our electronic consumer goods come from China. We get access to amazing gadgets that we couldn’t possibly afford if they were built in unionized American factories paying living wages in big cities, sourced with all-American parts. In return, the average Chinese factory worker gets an increased standard of living. Every single Chinese person I’ve met says that, generally speaking, everyone is better off now than they were 30 years ago. Yes, people fall out of the labor market. People are abused and left behind. There are a whole host of negative social and environmental consequences to China’s rapid development. But generally: it’s an improvement. There’s no mass starvation. Most people have access to rudimentary health care. A lot of people have access to pretty good health care. College enrollment is growing rapidly. Just about every single person who wants a cellphone has a cellphone.

Now, I’m not a China apologist. What I know about China after looking at it closely for the past seven years is that it is too complex for anyone to ever completely understand. Like the rest of life, it is filled with contradictions. My friend Hiromi, who sort of got stuck in China after the Fukushima nuclear accident, says “it’s tricky, crazy, dirty!” But every large institution has a dark underbelly –when you go looking for it.

I’m also not apologizing for Apple. I’m a bit of a fanboy. The first iPad I handled was in China. I was trying to get a point across about good design and kept referring to Apple. One of my (elite, urban) students pull her iPad out and I was able to sort of pantomime my point–I had heard about the great feel of selecting icons and swiping (Apple spent a lot of money on the physics of the swiping). But no matter how good the design of iOS is, every large institution has a corrupt underbelly–when you go looking for it.

One of the things that Daisey says that is most powerful does stand true. Despite all of the automation, most of our gadgets are ultimately made by hand. Most of them are made in Asia, by people who live in conditions that a lot of Americans would not tolerate. But a lot of Americans live and work in conditions that a lot of us wouldn’t tolerate. TAL says that almost every factory in China has conditions that NO American worker would tolerate. Daisey went on and on about explosion hazards. But didn’t I hear something about mine owners turning a blind eye to disabled safety monitoring devices in a West Virginia coal mine a couple years ago? Where’s the one-man show about that? Industrial accidents happen everywhere there is a financial advantage to cutting corners. That means they happen everywhere.

A couple weeks on, and I’m still thinking and talking about this. I’m still not even sure how much of the retraction I believe: Kathy, the translator, seemed to directly say “no” quite a bit. That’s very unusual for a Chinese person. She also says she never sees guns. But every city has military bases and government buildings guarded by soldiers with rifles. And armored car guards carry weapons as well. Does she mean to say that she has never noticed these armed guards?

Becky Worley on TWIT says: “when you misrepresent the facts, you make it seem like the facts aren’t strong enough on their own. And they are.” But now the whole situation is so muddy that most people aren’t going to have the patience to have a serious conversation about how Chinese factories work. One of the topics that should be talked about is that one major complaint of Foxconn employees is the lack of enough overtime.

Hello again, China

chinagrow — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:08:59 +0000

In an amazing act of serendipity, I was checking in yesterday with how the new WP template was rendering archives. Turns out that 6 years ago today I made the first post. This was shortly after deciding that China was going to stick. It was just after my first quarter of Chinese language study, and I had started to think seriously about how I was going to get a research project done in a foreign country.

When I decided to go back to school, I (and most everyone around me I presume) assumed that my thesis would be about constructing a GIS data library or creating some sort of metadata tool to help librarians and geographers. Instead, I followed what might be the longest Google-hole ever. I reconnected with an old friend from Milwaukee, then and still living in Vancouver BC. I set about to learn an ideogrammatic language–and failed spectacularly.

What I did manage to do was learn enough to get around. I learned that it’s pretty easy to move around the globe with a credit card and a Lonely Planet. (And yes, that does make me part of a 1% –but not that 1%.) It’s even easier to move around China–provided you don’t mind a little physical discomfort now and then and aren’t a picky eater. Being willing to talk to strangers and put anything in your mouth that’s offered helps too.

The great thing about China? That proffered morsel is typically delicious.

Have I written as much as I’d like? No. But does anybody? This blog was going to be just about geography, so it’s much skinnier than my other one. China is in there a lot –and the first evidence of the fascination came two months before this blog started. Keeping the two separated never really had a lot of logic to it (truth be told, they started on different software platforms–adding a second blog was just my way of learning a new tool).

So this morning we sit in a coffee shop in a new city. I have the ability to see the obvious hagiography in an LA Times piece on China’s next president, I can speak and read a tiny little bit of Chinese. I’ve had the good fortune to have made four trips to the Middle Kingdom. And we have new friends all over the world. It’s been an educational six years, but I still don’t know anything about China.

With imaginary friends, 2007

With real friends, 2011

Happy New Year.

admin — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:27:30 +0000

That’s about all the template editing I can handle for now. I’m still not sold on the quilts. Does it look like a teenage girl’s MySpace page?