Happy National Day!

Happy National Day, Republic of China!

Do NOT Go out unless While Must

This photo is taken in Beijing, the characters on the banner said: Reduce the frequency of going out, such to convenient all the international friends.

Why There Are More International Students in Engineering Fac?

Q: I am a new graduate student in Computer Engineering. I would like to get my MS and possibly my Ph.D. I have learned that 90% of my department is from India and many others are from China. All the students come here to study and there are only 7 US citizens in the engineering program this year. Why is that? I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?

A: Most Americans are probably happy with just an undergrad degree and don’t want to go to grad school.

Exactly. Americans find perfectly good engineering jobs with “just” a bachelor’s degree. There aren’t enough jobs which require advanced degrees in engineering to make it worth the time to give up 2-3 years of engineering paychecks, pay for college, pay for books, pay for living expenses, and earn those advanced degrees. More than likely, you’d graduate with a master’s or a PhD and work at the same job you could get with a bachelor’s degree.

On the other hand, foreigners looking to immigrate to the United States work under the assumption that if they go to school here and earn one of our advanced degrees, then we’d be more likely to allow them to stay once their studies are complete. THAT is why foreigners outnumber Americans in these topics. It’s not because they’re smarter, not because they love engineering more, and not because education is better in their country. It’s because they want to immigrate here.

The Practice of Differentiating Simplified Chinese Wikipedia and Traditional Chinese Wikipedia

Wikipedia.org has been banned for long in China Mainland. People are getting annoyed and irritated by the unaccessibleness to this infamous wiki site. It’s supposed to have a way out, they claim. So it comes: to differentiate the Simplified Chinese version and the Traditional Chinese version. Well, it sounds reasonable, Google and Yahoo! set examples, didn’t they?! But, not wikipedia.

It’s not practical to make Chinese audience access wikipedia by simply compromise to the Chinese commie government, not at all. Mainly, 2 reasons:

Who will actually need a censored and biased version of wikipedia? Compromising to the government means to remove the items the government doesn’t like and to modify certain items according to the government principles which may cause biases and incorrectness. All these things that abovementioned harm the usability of wikipedia. The fickleness of Chinese government is so widely-known that you would never be aware of what is “sensitive” and what is okay to talk about. It’s not practical to hire someone as the official of Simplified Chinese Wikipedia to receive the calls from anonymous callers who command him to remove or delete some sentences or items. It’s not practical that, of the editors side, there would be too many works need to be done to satisfy the government’s desire without the government being 100 persent satisfied.

The government would never ever let kinds of form like wiki exist as long as they can’t fully control them. Yahoo! and Google are not exceptions, but examples. Their servers are both in China mainland (Yahoo! and Google here are exactly Chinese Yahoo! and Chinese Google), which is available to call the person in charge to remove whatever the government dislike and track down whoever does not follow their orders. By such reasons, their businesses go well and smoothly in China. Wikipedia, I have to say, can’t put its server into China shortly (hopefully), because of which it will sure be banned.

I’m eager to discuss any ideas that would be useful to let all the Chinese view prohibited sites freely, but not such kind of compromising and self-censoring.

Chinese or Japanese?

Tips on Saving Money

As the inflation rate rises in China recently, saving money becomes more and more essential to an ordinary family. So, how to save money effectively? Here are some useful tips:

1. Do NOT buy the breakfast outside in the market, cook it yourself at home. Do NOT throw away yesterday's rice, instead, boil it to porridge, enjoy it with Chinese pickles. Saving: ￥150 Monthly.
2. Do NOT take air-con buses to go to work. Get up 10 min earlier in the morning to take the non-air-con buses. Better you own a bike, you can exercise as well as save money by riding a bike. Saving: ￥240 Monthly.
3. Does your danwei offer lunch? No?! Ok, prepare more supper every evening, pack the extra with food container, bring it to the danwei. Saving: highly depend on how much you spend normally for lunch. Usually ￥150~300 for an individual, ￥300~600 for spouses. Monthly.
4. Does the wife eat snacks? Yes?! Save the money of dried plum and crushed beef! Drink water as the substitution. It could not only slim your body but also beautise your face. Does the husband smoke? Yes?! Quit then. Saving: ￥350 or more Monthly.
5. What do you eat for supper? Chicken? Duck? Fish? No!That's too luxurious! Buy some cheap cabbage/carrots/vegetables right before the markets closes. Buy some can't-be-even-smaller small yellow croakers if you really can't help doing so for ￥2/kg after negotiation with the seller. The you can save ￥30 every day, which would be ￥1000 every month.
6. Take baths every day? Yes?! That would be too frequent! One bath per week is sufficient! And, do not flush the bath water yet, keep them for clothes washing. Do NOT invoke a washing machine in case of wasting water and electricity. Wash them all by bare hands. It can save some washing powder too. Saving: ￥100 Monthly.
7. Do you always watch TV with the lights on? Turn off the lights before you watch TV! Saving: ￥30 Monthly.
8. What kind of cosmetics do you use mostly? foreign brand or domestic brand? Apply 1-yuan cheapie instead! Then you could save a considerable amount of money every month! Does the husband use cosmetics? Stop the usage of shaving paste or shaving cream from now on. Another amount of money! How often would you cut your hair? Weekly? Monthly? The wife should keep a tony-tail and the husband a butch haircut for two months. It may bring the husband  unacceptably long hair, though, as long as it indeed saved numerous money on haircut.
9. Always go to restaurants with your family during weekends? Stop it now.
10. How much does your baby's powdered milk cost? 100 yuan? Waaahh… How can you feed him with such an expensive stuff?!10 yuan plus would be fine for him! Calcium powder?! Cod liver oil?! Colostrum abstracts?! No!! Totally NOT! They are horribly expensive! Besides milk, feed him/her with carrots or vegetables. It's already very good since the children from Old-Society still grew up without these things.
11. Nearly forgot your phone fee! Switch off your mobiles, switch them on merely when you need to send sms-es. Reduce the calls from your own phonesets, call from your office/danwei. Do NOT connect to the internet from your house, surf only in your office/danwei.

There are still some other ways to save money, such as "to bring empty 2L bottles to your office, bring it back with full of spring water in it every day, so that you don't need to purchase water anymore", "Take plastic bags home from danwei", "Grab some print papers home from danwei, squeeze them so to use them as toilet tissues", …, "Do taste one before you buy any fruit, well, it's kind of waste of money buying fruits, forget it."

How’d We Lost Our Freedom of Journalism

Double-clicking the shortcut icon of news.163.com, I started my day of all in all work. This piece of news, for sure, makes today a normal. Obviously, being indifferent to human rights and stuporous to basic freedom are the elementary parts of Chinese daily life.

It’s about a story of state-owned newspaper Guilin Daily in Guangxi Province, Southern China. It exposed some widely-known facts of fraud by the local tourist guide with 9 cases to demostrate them. It also quoted some complaint letters of tourists from Yunnan and Hubei Province.

It seems to be absolutely okay, if not, until the local government interferes with claiming that this un-suited report brought a terribly bad reputation to the torism of Guilin city. Thus, they, namely the government, demand a reclaim to the piece of news and an apology from the reporter. Also, some personnels whom employed as guides or so are keeping on visiting the relating officials to require some explaination and clarification.

The result? Hmm… the reporter as well as the newspaper declared in their 7th page yesterday saying that “we, as our report was indeed un-suited and badly reputed the local torism fame, so as it is, apologise publicly.” Cheers.

“Transformers” Was Banned to Advertise in China

The infamous movie “Transformers” was banned to advertise in China, so, local newspapers use “neglected” to describe it in box-office lists.

Planning to do

Maybe one of my friend was right when she cited that I’m not kind of guy who could stick on one specific job for a long time. I intend to change careers frequently, without thinking much more than freshness. Others could say that I am abnormal or whatever out of it, but I am.

I’m tired of the manager position with pretending to be busy in front of my boss and I am sick of it. I hate being working in a family enterprise since which I need to follow the requests from those stupid offspring of my boss. I’m working for you does not qualify that I work for your damn holy daughter too! Can you dig this?! Hmm.. guess I need to take a rest.

I can read some books in the mean time, money’s not a big deal right now. I need to improve my English actually, I still encounter new vocabs sometimes, and it embarrasses me, a lot.

The necklace would reach me soon, probably in one or two days and I get my jade Buddha sent by my girlfriend. What all I care about is my girlfriend, nothing else. Simple is good, right?

Simple is good.

The Overlook of the Chinese Yuan’s Appreciate

Oh, no, don’t look at the title and think it’s a overhaul essay about the Chinese economy and don’t treat it as a solemn article either. I’m just sick of the inflation rate of all the everyday stuff. A levi’s jeans for example, $14.99 during the sales in a certain US city, and 700 plus RMB in a Chinese fashion store. The appreciate? I can’t see it. A pair of NIKE flip-flop, 10 bucks around in US and 140+ RMB in China. Uhhmm.. of course you can accuse the taxation, but the thing is do we have to pay so much more to enjoy the exactly same thing?

Well, it is illogical of this post, hmm, I just wanna write it.