• Paul Krugman, Op-Ed columnist, Princeton University
• Simon Johnson, M.I.T.
• Brad DeLong, U.C. Berkeley
• Mark Thoma, University of Oregon

My general impression, after reading these experts’ opinions, is that this plan is very risky and will not be likely work; the eventual step might be the bank nationallization, which will see a lot of resistance from the Senate.

It also seems to me that China has certain advantage in the banking system as most of the banks were already nationalized 60 years ago. But because of the corrupted the political system, I think China is suffering from another set of problems in this crisis.

What can we do as a person to help to recover from this crisis?

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I really enjoyed reading this article. It is very insightful. I more or less have similar ideas but was not be able to elaborate them into such a great depth. This article, as the title suggest, is mainly about understanding all these problems happened recently to China’s coming Olympic Games. However it does not offer some constructive suggestions on how to solve them. Maybe the author will offer some suggestions in his next article; here is what I think.

I think that the economic progress has created an unstoppable momentum to push the change of current political system. The people are playing a main role here. They are demanding more rights from the government. I can see that Internet is playing an increasing important part on this progress. When the traditional media is hiding the truth from people, we could dig them up from Internet. When the government spent billions to block the content they did not want people to see, using so called Great Fire Wall, a few of us could break GFW using some easy-to-learn technologies.

I’ve built a site called “Zhuji citizens’ web” (zhuji.jiruan.net), to help the people in my hometown, city of Zhuji, to publish their complains against the local government officials’ law-violating, corrupted behaviors. And as a result, the local government IPs become the most frequent visitors to our website. Although it is still the case that no actions have been given to punish these corrupted officials, we certainly made a substantial progress on this, and we are demanding more.

Somewhere in China, like City of Xiamen, Shanghai, there are some successful cases that people were called over Intenet to have silent protests before the local government offices. They definitely influenced government’s decision making.

To sum up, some Chinese people are trying hard to push the change of government with the help of Internet. Even a chinese like me, far away from China are able to joining this movement. That’s why I think China has a bright future if we try hard enough.

Hope to hear any opinions from you.

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I am a regular attender of the Public Lecture Series offered by our university. I think they are in very good quality in general. Given the limited seats and time, not so many people could attend these lectures. And I see the positive move that your team has made to making these lectures more accessible, namely putting videos online(webcast) from this cultural year!

Here I have one suggestion: making these videos more accessible to all the people around the world, by adopting the best video distributing technologies.

I want to bring your attention to this because the first webcast does not work properly at the moment. The witness link and image are here:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/08/webcast/miller_webcast.html

The video just did not show up. I tried under a windows machine with IE and windoes media palyer perperly installed. I do not know there is exactly the problem, but I see some potential problems:

1. Windoes Media Video format, WMV, is a very closed video format from Microsoft, and it is not as widely adopted in the video market as you thought.
2. The target of WMV audience is too restrictive. This world is not windowes machines only. There are Linux machines, Machintonsh machines all around. The WMA just does not working properly with them, due to the closed approach adopted by Micorsoft.
3. The bandwidth for streaming video is very demanding. I suspect that your current server can handle more than 10 people seeing the videos at the same time.

I think we could do it better:

• Discard WMV, and adopt more open technologies: mp3, flash, and quicktime.

  The most popular ways of showing video or audio over Internet is based on open technologies, as it is accessible to almost any systems: linux, mac, windows, and so on. The best video sharing website Youtube.com is based on flash technology. Here is an exmaple from Yale University’s open courses(there are using a number of open technologies to ensure the delivery of their contents) . Just click the image below to have a look.

• Consider to have a Youtube channel.
  
  I think Youtube is so far the best place to make your videos seen! It provides free service to all, which could be very money costing given the huge amount data that involved.
  Here is an example from a top university in USA: Carnegie Mellon University

  http://www.youtube.com/user/carnegiemellonu

  They use this channel to show very interesting lectures and activities in their university.
  

I hope this will help a bit to make our lectures more accessible to the world, which will build the reputation of our university as a return.

Best wishes,

Ji

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• The research typically has an open end. There can always be more to explore.
• I am lacking a sense of “enoughness”.

I can not really do much to the first one, as that is the nature of research. What I can change is only myself. So how? I think I have to access my work more constantly, and compare it to my past work and the work of others for the similar period. As for the “enoughness” in general, I find this quote is worthwhile to read (ref: How much is enough? ):

I pledge to discover how much is enough for me

to be truly fulfilled, and to consume only that.

I also pledge to be part of the discovery

of how much would be enough for everyone

not only to survive but to thrive, and

to find ways for them to have access to that.

Through this commitment to restraint

and justice, I am healing my life

and am part of the healing of the world.

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Question 1: why should we publish?
Typically in science, you do your research and you need to communicate your results with audience. The best way is to write down your discovery and thoughts so that other people could read and comment. It is a way to make your work te be meaningful to other people.

Question 2: how do we publish now?
Currently, we have a number of ways to publish our papers:

• Through a book
• Through a journal
• Through a conference or workshop
• Through a website

Normally the importance of your publication is decreasing following the above order. If you could wrote a book, it usually means you have done pretty much important work in the area. A journal is usually chaired by the leading experts in the area, so if you could publish a paper there, it means your work has some significance. The conferences and workshops are the forums for the up-to-date research, so they might not have as much high standard as the journal. The website is the least recognized one, since everybody can publish through a website.

Question 3: Is there any problems with the current publishing model?
There are surely problems. The books are hard to write, so it might take very long before it can be published. By the time you publish, it might be already outdated. The journals also take typically 6 months to a year to review your paper and get it finally published. In both cases, you have to go through professional publishers, and your work can not be freely available to other people. The conferences and workshops are faster to get your work known, but sometimes, your paper is not appreciated by some reviewers, so that it is rejected without a very good reason. The website is an easy way to publish, but how could the reader know that your paper has certain quality and is worthwhile to read?

Question 4: how could we solve these problems?
We certainly have better ways than before. The key lies to the Internet, I believe. Take an example from 2006, Grigori Perelman, a famous Russian mathematician, solved a very difficult open problem that had been solved for more than 100 years. But he did not publish his result on a journal, instead, he put his papers on http://arxiv.org , a recognized online free publishing website. His work is freely accessible by everybody, and because of his reputation in the past, people took his papers seriously.

Internet gives a much more efficient way of  publishing your work. Also due to its openness, your work will be easier to be accessed by the people around the world. You will certainly care about what you write, as it might ruin your reputation if you are careless. We could also get our work reviewed by simply adding commenting functionality, which is now a standard feature of the web2.0.

To be continued.

References: (I haven’t read them all)
Can Peer Review be better Focused?
What We Can Do About Science Journals

Feel free to comment.

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Me is a human being.

The connection between research and me is my curiosity about this world. We have an interesting world with some interesting people around. In the mean time, we have a depressing environment with some depressed people around. How could we survive and how could our children’s children suvive is a huge question. There is no definite answers, but we shall do something to make a better world. So let’s start our research.

Ji
20080108

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