Give and take

The NYT reports on a little known industry that has been outsourced to China.

Own Original Chinese Copies of Real Western Art!

At 26, Mr. Zhang estimates that he has painted up to 20,000 copies of van Gogh’s works in a paint-spattered third-floor garret here where freshly washed socks and freshly painted canvases dry side-by-side on the balcony.

A block away, Ye Xiaodong, 25, is completing 200 paintings of a landscape of pink and white flowers in another third-floor garret. And down the street, Huang Yihong, also 25, stands in an art-packed store and paints a waterfall tumbling gracefully into a pool, mixing the paints on an oval palette.

China’s low wages and hunger for exports have already changed many industries, from furniture to underwear. The art world, at least art for the masses, seems to be next, and is emerging as a miniature case study of China’s successful expansion in a long list of small and obscure industries that when taken together represent a sizable chunk of economic activity.

I was a little but shocked and amused to get to the middle of the article and find out that the seat of production had formerly been near my hometown.

Northern New Jersey used to have a small but thriving cluster of businesses with artists churning out inexpensive paintings for restaurants, hotels and homes across the country. But these enterprises have been switching to imports, like the Dae Ryung Company, which had seven painters two decades ago at a studio attached to its offices in Hackensack, N.J., and let the last one leave four years ago without finding a replacement.

“In the beginning it was better here, because we were able to tell them exactly what we wanted,” said Helen Cho, the company’s purchasing and accounting manager. “But after a while, the Chinese caught on.”

Should New Jersey residents be upset that outsourcing has moved yet more crappy, pointless jobs out of our state to a faraway land where people will appreciate them more?

Two days later, the Times printed another article on another industry that is now just beginning to boom in New Jersey.

TEN years ago, New Jersey had 14 wineries. Today it has 27, and within the next year or so the number is expected to reach 40.

Ten years ago, New Jersey made 873,000 gallons of wine (about 360,000 cases). Now it makes almost twice that much, more than 1.5 million gallons. In 1995, it was eighth in the nation in wine production; now it is fifth, behind only California, New York, Washington and Oregon.

But one thing hasn’t changed in that decade of extraordinary growth for New Jersey wine: hardly anyone knows a thing about it. Less than 1 percent of the wine consumed in New Jersey was made in New Jersey – not surprising, considering that few restaurants serve it and few liquor stores carry it. Even experts like John Foy, a consultant who writes a wine column for The Star-Ledger of Newark and assembled the world-class wine list at Restaurant Latour in Hardyston, confess ignorance.

Amazing. Is there really still room for vineyards in the nations most populous state amidst the chemical factories and urban sprawl? Will The Garden State earn its name?

Addendum: A second newspaper reports on a long established Newark, New Jersey based manufacturer whose entire production has been outsourced.

Turpan village holy site

This green dome is built above a cave that is considered the holiest Muslim site in all of China. The Uyghur people who inhabit Xinjiang (or East Turkestan, as it was known during a brief period of independence during the Chinese civil war) were devout Buddhists before they converted to Islam many centuries ago.

According to legend, the king of Turpan, who was a Buddhist, felt threatened by Islam and sent soldiers to chase down the first three Muslim missionaries that came to the region. They were eventually cornered here and sought refuge in the cave. The soldiers thought they would wait them out, but they were miraculously transformed into doves, and flew out of the cave and over the soldiers heads to freedom.

Today, Chinese Muslims often take pilgrimage here, since it is difficult to obtain permission from the government to travel to Mecca.

New photos in Flickr

Some of you may have noticed that the links to my old photogalleries are gone, replaced by Flickr. For those who care, the old galleries still exist at the address Mutantfrog.com/gallery2/ but I was convinced by my friend Joe to try Flickr, and I decided that it was just an easier way to deal with uploading photos, and in particular a good way to avoid bandwidth charges.

That said, with the new service I’m going to try and post photos more often and regularly, and also with blog entries that provide more informative text.

Karl Rove accused one year ago

I just got around to listening to last week’s episode of Off The Hook, the hacker radio show affiliated with 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, and heard something pretty interesting about the current mess with Valorie Plame, Karl Rove, et al. They played a brief clip from a presentation given by a Robert Steele almost exactly one year ago at the Fifth Hope hacker conference in New York City.

I don’t normally write anything about US politics, and I’m not even going to offer any comments this, aside from the fact that it’s kind of cool. However, I did attend this same conference in the year 2000, where I actually met Robert Steele, so let’s just say this falls under my blanket mission of writing about places where I’ve been.

The July 13, 2005 episode of Off The Hook can be downloaded in mp3 form from their web site. The following transript begins 40 minutes into the show.

Bernie S: You mentioned a while ago the need for a national traitor intelligence system. On that subject, what’s your take on the whole Valeie Plame outing, and who do you think did it?

Robert Steele: I think Scooter Libby in Dick Cheney’s office did it with Karl Rove’s explicit approval and Dick Cheney’s explicit concealment after the fact.

Bernie S: What are your feelings on it?

Robert Steele: I think it has the potential to be Al Capone’s tax return. It really does.

Bernie S: Do you think that this will ever be- where do you think this investigation will lead, regardless of who’s found to have done it?

Robert Steele: Well, part of our problem is that the Republicans control both houses of Congress and the moderate Republicans are being intimidated by the extremist Republicans and the people haven’t spoken. Right now the people don’t care about Valorie Plame’s outing. Inasumch as the vice presiden’t office, in my humble opinion, very flagrantly and deliberately violated a national law, I would like to see them brought to justice. i would like to see Dick Cheney brought to justice for sole-sourcing billions of dollars to Haliburton. you know these guys are bending or breaking every rule they can find. and the outing of Valorie Plame is i think one of the things that George Tenet simply had to be honest about and it let to his eventual resignation.

The man asking the questions is Bernie S, co-host of Off The Hook. Here is his official mini-bio from The Fifth Hope conference web page.

Bernie S. has been hacking computers, phones, radios, and the authorities for over 25 years – sometimes pushing the envelope too far. In 1995 he was imprisoned for one and a half years by the Secret Service for possessing hardware and software they said had the potential for abuse. Later the U.S. government admitted “there were no victims in the offense” and that they were more concerned about his exposing their covert activities. Bernie continues to investigate and report on communications technologies and government activities.

The man giving the talk is Robert Steele. His bio from the same web site reads:

Robert Steele is the author of On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World and The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political. He is the founder and CEO of OSS.Net, a global intelligence partnership and network that excels at both teaching and performing legal ethical intelligence collection, processing, and analysis. In the course of a 25 year national security career, Robert has served as a Marine Corps infantry officer and service level plans officer; fulfilled clandestine, covert action, and technical collection duties; been responsible for programming funds for overhead reconnaissance capabilities; contributed to strategic signals intelligence operations; managed an offensive counterintelligence program; initiated an advanced information technology project; and been the senior civilian responsible for founding a new national intelligence production facility. He was one of the first clandestine officers assigned the terrorist target on a full time basis in the 1980s and the first person, also in the 1980s, to devise advanced information technology applications relevant to clandestine operations.

Robert Steele’s web page is here.

Robert Steele’s entire presentation, from The Fifth Hope conference, along with those of every other speaker (and there is some great stuff in there), can be found in mp3 format on the web. His presentation is entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Spying, 9-11, and Why We Continue to Screw Up” and is well worth a listen.

Ritsumeikan Swords


Continuing the recent trend of writing about alma maters, here’s something really fun I spotted when googling “Ritsumeikan.”

SWORDS OF THE RITSUMEIKAN TANRENJO

Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto had a small forge (tanrenjo) set up during World War II which made swords for the military and the war effort. The forge was led by Sakurai Masayuki, the second son of Sakurai (Manji) Masatsugu, a well known early gendai swordsmith. He originally signed Masatsuna. He worked in Fukuoka, Osaka, and Kyoto (Ritsumeikan University). He was an early teacher of Seiho Sumitani (Sumitani Masamine), who became a Ningen Kokuho Tosho (Living National Treasure Swordsmith) from Kanazawa.

Good lord, you have no idea how much I want one of these things. I’ve never been a big fan of class rings and that sort of junk, but a class SWORD-sign me up! Does it just seem like a good idea because I spent all of yesterday reading the new Harry Potter book inside as the typhoon raged across Taiwan?

Check out the original page for more photos and information.

Nikkei: How to sit on commuter trains


Nikkei offers some very specific tips from the pros on how to find a seat on Japan’s crowded commuter trains:

Before you get on the train:

  • Line up at worst 4th from the front (in cars with seven-person benches and 3 doors): The 5th in line may not be able to sit. In that case, wait for the next train!
  • Line up near the smoking area of the station: There are many who get on late because they are distracted by smoking. Few people will put out their cigarettes just to line up.
  • Line up behind the door second closest to the stairs: There are usually a lot of people getting off at the door nearest the stairs, so you may be held up getting on the train.
  • Line up near areas where stairs or offices make the waiting area smaller: It’s hard to line up there so there will be fewer people lined up.
  • Line up at the very end of the platform: There are simply fewer people there.
  • Do not line up behind couples: They move together, so if a couple is in front of you you can’t move quickly to grab a seat.

    • Once you are on the train:

  • Stand in front of the person who moves to sit on the end seat: The end seat on a bench is the most popular since you don’t have to deal with people sitting next to you on both sides. Once that seat opens, people who were sitting in other seats will often move to the end. You should stand in front of them because it is likely they’ve been riding for a while, increasing the likelihood that they’ll get off soon (leaving the seat for you!)
  • Look for indicative signs that people are about to get off: Looking out the window, putting away books or headphones, glancing at the tsurikawa (straps to hold on to to keep you from falling over), any signs that they might get off soon.
  • Judge from clothing or items in riders’ hands where they will get off: Check for school uniforms or company seals or envelopes to predict where they’ll get off. You can also tell from regular clothes, such as a housewife working part time or a student at a preparatory study school.
  • Remember the faces of people who always get off at the same station: Salarymen are the easiest to remember. It is also effective to write your own list of people’s features.
  • You can guess where someone will get off by what they’re reading: Hardcover readers are long commuters, while people reading paperbacks often have short commutes. You can also tell where someone will get off by labels indicating the libraries where the books came from. There are also theories that people who read sports newspapers tend to have long commutes.

    • The bulk of the story comes from interview with self-described experts on finding seats in crowded trains Hajime Yorozu, a worker at a publishing company who is such an expert he has his own mail magazine and book on the topic.

    The list in Japanese can be found at this blog in case you don’t believe me. The above image was ripped off from this blog that also covered the Nikkei story. Thanks again, Technorati!

    Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance

    Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance
    By GEORGE JAMES

    A Rutgers University task force is recommending creation of a college of arts and sciences that would standardize admissions criteria, graduation requirements and other procedures. Under the proposal, some Rutgers colleges would function as campuses, but no longer by name as colleges.

    The suggestion, which is part of a 175-page report that is scheduled for release on Monday, was criticized yesterday by the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College, which introduced a Web site earlier in the day, savedouglasscollege.org, calling for the measure’s defeat. The group said the proposal would mean the end of Douglass College.

    The university president, Richard L. McCormick, said in a telephone interview last night that the report would undergo months of discussion. He noted that the plan was not calling for a merger; the colleges would retain their distinct qualities.

    “It recommends creating something that every other research university has, a college of arts and sciences,” Dr. McCormick said. “And it recommends calling our residential campuses what they are: residential campuses.”

    He created the 75-member Task Force on Undergraduate Education in April 2004 to guarantee that in emphasizing research, Rutgers does not shortchange undergraduates on courses and access to faculty members. In addition, Dr. McCormick said, he wanted to bring unity to what he called “a patchwork quilt” of schools and programs situated in New Brunswick and Piscataway.

    Besides Douglass, which is an all-women’s college, Rutgers College, Livingston College and University College would all be affected.

    “What it does, it effectively ends Douglass College,” said Sheila Kelly Hampton, class of ’70, who is president of the Douglass alumnae group. “By calling it a campus, they just are talking about where someone happens to live. They don’t address many of the student life issues and program issues.”

    Dr. McCormick disagreed. “Douglass will be as it is now, a women’s-only campus, and will continue to have its signature courses on women, retain its distinctive mission and continue to reflect its unique history,” he said.

    Each individual college now sets its own criteria in certain areas, including admissions, honors programs and graduation requirements, and none have faculties of their own; they are served by a general faculty of arts and sciences, he said. A new college of arts and sciences, under a unified structure, would simplify standards for students, faculty and administrators, and get faculty members more involved with students, he added.

    But the executive director of the alumnae, Rachel Ingber, class of ’83, said: “Eliminating colleges does not bring faculty closer to students. It creates one huge university where undergraduates don’t have small colleges where they can get academic advice on curriculum programs and the unique mission that Douglass College provides for women.”

    This may be removed from our usual topics, but since I am a Rutgers graduate, and I know a number of other Rutgers alumni read this blog, I just wanted to point out this important development concerning the school.

    The current president of Rutgers University previously managed to scuttle a recent plan proposed by our former governor James McGreevey to merge Rutgers university with the states other medical and research oriented universities. This plan would have done little to improve the quality of medical education or research, while confusing the organization of the university as a whole. The previous plan was entirely based around the medical and research divisions of the universities involved, which included Rutgers, UMDNJ, NJIT and possibly others, while providing no reasonable plan for the administration of liberal arts and undergraduate departments. This current report seems to be a response to that, confirming that undergraduate education must be a priority at public universities.

    I haven’t yet read the actual report (although I intend to), but after spending four years at Rutgers, New Brunswick I’m rather familiar with the organizational structure of the university. As it currently stands, Rutgers New Brunswick is actually a network of several nearby campuses in the neighboring towns of New Brunswick and Piscataway, linked through a system of free buses. As a large university, Rutgers consists of several different colleges, and each college is associated with a different campus. Each college has a unique history and origin, and today there are five liberal arts colleges, which share a common faculty of arts and sciences, and a number of specialty schools, each of which has their own faculty for their specialized programs. Students in specialty schools (such as Engineering, Pharmacy, Mason Gross School of the Arts etc.) also take at least a basic number of liberal arts classes as well, which are the same classes that members of the five liberal arts colleges take.

    Here is a brief summary of the history, characteristics, and my thoughts on the future of the four liberal arts colleges, in chronological order of their founding:

    Continue reading Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance

    Correction: Government only sort of asking people to use their real names on the Internet

    Japan Media Review follows up on earlier Kyodo reports that the Japanese government was trying to end anonymity on the Internet by teaching them to use their real names on blogs from a young age, information that I passed along earlier.

    Turns out the government has a slightly more nuanced take on the situation:

    Later Monday, however, an anonymous blogger who calls his Weblog a “Diary of a Kasumigaseki Bureaucrat” (Kasumigaseki is the Tokyo district where most government offices are located) took the trouble of leafing through the panel’s draft report that had been published online earlier in the month and discovered that many of the Kyodo report’s descriptions didn’t match what the panel actually said in its report.

    For instance, the blogger noticed that nowhere in the report did the panel actually advocate calling on people to use their real names in cyberspace, or to drop using screen handles. Rather, it outlined a more subtle argument. It noted that the prevalence of anonymity in Japan has led to an atmosphere in which many feel that it doesn’t matter what they do or say in cyberspace so long as they are not caught. To that end, raising the credibility of the Internet in Japan will require an improvement of general public “morals” online. Consequently, the report said, “It is necessary to teach [children] how to interact naturally with each other in cyberspace, using either their real names or some kind of assumed name.” Thus, he noted, the Ministry accepts anonymity, so long as it is practiced with good “morals.”

    Moreover, business journalist Hiroyuki Fujishiro, writing his own column about the blogging world for Nikkei BP, checked the 86-page final draft of the panel’s report that appeared Tuesday. He noted that much of the rather inflammatory writing in the original Kyodo article, in which the Internet is called a “hotbed of evil” or “hotbed of dangerous information” and where anonymity is linked somehow to online suicide sites or to online information about bomb-making, does not appear in the report. He did find, however, that the panel displayed considerable concern about the “dark side” of the Internet, one feature of which was the irresponsible behavior that stems from anonymity.

    I highly suggest that you check out Japan Media Review if they’re at all interested in Japanese and wants to read news about Japan or in Japanese. Their analysis is great and they offer a good set of links as well. Especially now that I don’t have the time to exhaustively check Japan news myself, I may end up depending on their coverage to keep up with media happenings. Thank god they’re funded by the US government.

    Headlines

    New light thrown on origins of Chinese culture as lost civilization emerges

    One of the world’s great cities once flourished here at Jinsha village in China’s southwest, the 1000 B.C. equivalent of New York or Paris, and then inexplicably vanished, leaving no trace behind in the historical records.

    Until recently, locals had no idea they were living on top of a great lost bronze-age civilization.

    Myanmar Woman ‘suddenly grows penis’

    Medical doctor Aye Sanda Khaing put it in layman’s terms in a local journal: “Her penis appeared at the site of her clitoris,” the doctor was quoted as saying.

    Regardless of the official findings, local villagers and other curious Myanmar nationals are flocking to the Aung Myay Thar Yar pagoda, in this new satellite township 19km from Yangon, to see Than Sein for themselves and make donations to him or the temple.

    Up to 400 gather at the pagoda each day, often in a courtyard under colorful umbrellas to ward off the sun’s rays, waiting for the chance to talk with and touch Than Sein.

    Japanese researchers invent promising new HIV drug

    The drug’s main feature is that it shuts out the AIDS virus at the point when it tries to intrude into a human cell.

    Current AIDS medicines can lose their effectiveness in a few days when the virus changes and develops a resistance to those drugs. But AK602 is different because it reacts to human cells instead of attacking the virus, Mitsuya said.


    Developers and purists erase Mecca’s history

    Sami Angawi, an expert on the region’s Islamic architecture, said 1,400-year-old buildings from the early Islamic period risk being demolished to make way for high rise towers for Muslims flocking to perform the annual pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest city.

    “We are witnessing now the last few moments of the history of Mecca,” Angawi told Reuters. “Its layers of history are being bulldozed for a parking lot,” he added.

    Angawi estimated that over the past 50 years at least 300 historical buildings had been leveled in Mecca and Medina, another Muslim holy city containing the prophet’s tomb.

    Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s dominant doctrine which promotes a strict narrow interpretation of Islam, was largely to blame, he said.