Muninn

Google has made an unprecedented threat to end the censorship of its search results in China and, if this is unacceptable to the Chinese government, even contemplate leaving the Chinese market. The announcement has been combined with the admission that there has been a massive coordinated attack on Google’s security and the potential targeting of private records of human rights activists.

It remains to be seen what Google will actually do in the near future. I am inspired to post something about this unusual moment in order to make two comments. First, I wish to respond to a kind of cynical reaction to Google’s announcement that I find frustrating. Second, I wish to argue that this is an opportunity for anyone who wants to see a China which one day permits the open, free, and competitive exchange of ideas. As such we need to think about how to amplify its potential impact.

The Google announcement has deservedly generated a huge response, even though it coincides roughly with the terrible news of the destruction in Haiti. The reactions are many, and I’m particularly interested in the variety of responses among Chinese which so far seem to range from complete shock, quiet or vocal support for Google, or a misguided anti-imperialist attitude of “good riddance.”

One of the responses I find incredibly unproductive. Two representative examples can be seen in this Techcrunch article and a posting by Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy. Their message is essentially a cynical one: It is foolish for us to pour praise on Google for what deceptively seems like a just moral stance – the corporation is merely acting out of pure calculated greed.

This is, in my opinion, a complete waste of words, an unnecessary attempt to dampen enthusiasm about what is potentially, but by no means guaranteed to be, a historic moment. No one should be surprised to discover that corporations act in the interest of their profits and shareholder benefits. No one should be surprised to learn that Google is doing a cost-benefit calculation with relation to its future in the Chinese market and we still don’t know what its final fate in China will be. These things should merely be accepted as the, “bloody obvious.”

Which brings me to my second point: what are we going to do about? What potential impact, if any, can this have on a cause many of us care about?

Pragmatic Idealism

I couldn’t give a shit about the profits of Google, or what its real motivations are. I do care, however, what the reactions of the Chinese people are to this and what marginal influence this move can have on efforts within China to change the information environment in the near and the long term.

From that perspective, it is not obvious that Google dropping censorship and withdrawing from the Chinese market is in the best interests of freedom of information in China, even if it were followed by all other foreign companies. If the internet environment in China is dominated completely by Chinese companies who are perfectly willing to censor all of its content, this may result in a worse situation than one in which foreign search engines and some international social and media websites have limited, if censored, presence in China, with even a small percentage of the market share there. Coming from someone who studies traitors and treason, this seems to me to be the classic collaborator’s dilemma: will collaboration limit the damage? Will resistance result in a worse outcome?

The answer is not always that resistance is better – sometimes collaboration is better. Sometimes negotiating with evil produces more good. Sometimes subversion hidden behind compliance is the path to take. These things should be carefully evaluated according to circumstances. Clearly, however, in some cases resistance is the better choice and can move things perceivably towards a desired end.

The answer is not obvious, but I think in this case, if Google were to take a stand, it would matter: despite its low market share, Google has made a splash on the Chinese market, and young Chinese engineers and educated people all over the country recognize and respect the company – many of them dream sincerely of one day working at the corporation. Even some Chinese friends who use the competitor Baidu are disgusted with its corrupt history of manipulation of hits to promote advertising revenues, its occasionally substandard results (sometimes even with Chinese search terms!) and lack of innovation.

Having made its mark, having a well known brand, and then suddenly withdrawing in a blaze of glory—and while withdrawing for a short time removing censorship from its search results: at the very least this will likely produce a memorable reaction: some in China will feel shame, and others will embrace a defiance. Those who are defiant will be forced into the ridiculous position of claiming, “Ha! Be gone stupid imperialistic western company – if you refuse to hide things from us like our dictatorship tells you to, then you are just selfishly giving into those superior companies who are willing to be more submissive to our glorious Party and ever more powerful, if castrated, Nation.” Those who feel shame, will be reminded, yet again, of the contrast between what they are permitted to see, what they may see when they climb over the great firewall, and what most of the rest of the wired world can see, with a few notable exceptions.

However, this isn’t and shouldn’t be up to Google. It is up to us to make it matter: not by hailing Google for its courage, or setting up fan clubs for Google co-founder Sergey Brin. We should ask ourselves how we can maximize the impact of the decision, if Google follows through with it, to say no to collaboration with Chinese censors, then let us see if we can amplify the impact of that decision. There is now a brief moment of opportunity, a time when we can make something like this matter. Instead of cynically deriding Google for merely acting in its own interests, we should be debating how we might best amplify the impact of such a decision while minimizing the similar amplification of a Chinese nationalistic backlash that will inevitably accompany it. The goal is simple: to make the contradictions so obvious to many within China just that much clearer, to make the hypocrisies pointed out by activists within China that much easier to identify, and to increase the discomfort felt by Chinese government as well as institutions both foreign and domestic. It may result in only one of a “thousand cuts” in the farce that is Chinese media and internet policies, but that is how change is accomplished.

I have been doing research in Asia for two years and during this time I have sent back about twenty boxes to the US. Most of these have contained books and a few, especially from Korea, contained important documents that I photocopied in the archives.

Before sending them, I take pictures of their contents, make a little inventory, and in the case of documents, create an index with each document numbered.

I am very happy about the fact that since 2004, none of the many boxes I have sent back from Japan, Korea, or Taiwan have been missing, or their contents suffered more than the occasional dented book spine.

This year, however, I had a bit of a disaster. I sent two boxes back from Jinan, China. I sent them in official China Post boxes to New York state via sea.

Altogether my boxes contained about 60 books, with padding of a blanket and a few sweaters. Many of the books make up a series on Shandong during Sino-Japanese and civil wars. Perhaps half of them were out of print used books I had spent several days hunting down in various used book sellers in Jinan.

Neither of the original boxes arrived. Instead two new, smaller and very much lighter boxes arrived, containing a collection of about 20 mangled and, in some cases, ripped books. It was stamped “Arrived damaged, New Jersey”

I guess I should be grateful that about 20/60 of my books arrived. I’m also very glad that I hand carried the 20 or so volumes of published but long out of print and restricted distribution (內部) historical documents most important for my dissertation.

While the US postal system is hardly worthy of praise, I have never had more than bruised corners on the many other boxes I have sent back from Asia. Thus, a warning to those of you studying in China: hand carry out the most important stuff.

Wenlin is the the best piece of software around for students of Chinese. Among other tools, it has a powerful and handy offline dictionary with very flexible and fast search options as well.

I know many students of Chinese that use Wenlin to get their definitions and input vocabulary into flashcard software. Most recently I saw someone do this in a coffee shop here in Taipei, and it brought back a lot of memories of me doing the same in Beijing almost a decade ago.

Wenlin doesn’t make it easy for you, however, to get the word entries into a format that can be easily imported into flaschard applications. There is no “export” feature, presumably because the developer doesn’t like the idea of large parts of the Wenlin dictionary getting out of the software and into a separate database. However, the lack of such a feature means that students have to copy and paste words from Wenlin and add their own tabs. In my case, I also like to delete the alternate hanzi to keep my flashcards more clean.

Although a more experience programmer with good regular expressions skills could easily take this further, I am releasing the results of an evening spent trying to learn how to program in the programming language Ruby:

Wenlin Conversion Script 1.3

Here is a screencast explaining how to use the script:

Wenlin Conversion Script Screencast

This script takes a text file with a list of Wenlin dictionary entries (Saved in TextEdit, not in Wenlin) and puts tabs between the hanzi and the pinyin and between the pinyin and the definition. It saves the converted file which can then be easily imported into your favorite flashcard program.

It is made up of two scripts: the convert.app applescript application which you is what you use to run the script and the convert.rb ruby script which does the actual conversion. You can customize three options in the convert.rb script. Just open it up and set the three option variables at the top to true or false according to your preference for that option. There is a description of what each option does in the ruby file but basically they control whether the alternate traditional/simplified hanzi are removed, whether the “|” character is changed to “Example: ” and the “~” in examples replaced by the pinyin of the word.

I haven’t tested this too extensively so if you see it do strange things with the wenlin vocab items let me know and I’ll tweak the script in the future.

UPDATES:

-I just noticed in the screencast that it split the word “fandong fenzi” and put “fenzi” into the definition – I need to update the regular expression so that it looks for the part of speech rather than a space to separate the pinyin from the definition. I didn’t realize that Wenlin sometimes puts spaces into its pinyin words. I’ll release this soon.

-I just updated a 1.1 version. See the enclosed Read Me file for things I have fixed and changed in this new version of the script.

-I just updated the script again to 1.3, see the readme in the download for the details.

I have just posted the Sixteenth Asian History Carnival! Check it out over at the Frog in a Well – Japan history weblog.

In the past I have repeatedly complained about claims of copyright protection where no such protection exists.

I have talked about this problem on Google Books, where books are not given full view when they are fully in the public domain or where public domain books republished by Kessinger Publishing are used which wrongly claim copyright protection. A recent critique of Google Books by a blogger at the AHA has mentioned a similar problem in a posting here.

I have also expressed my frustration with the new Footnote.com service which gives access to completely public domain documents through a paid service and then forbids the viewers to copy and freely use this completely unprotected and public domain content through their restrictive licensing agreement. This is part of the trend towards using licenses to restrict the usage of materials which cannot otherwise be defended by copyright.

Isn’t it enough that we have to face an unjustifiably long lasting copyright protection laws, and various other blocks to the increasing potential for cultural innovation and information sharing provided by the internet?

Well, this problem isn’t limited to the online world. I have been looking at a lot of microfilms lately of US government documents, mostly from the US State Department. These are documents I can usually see the originals of by visiting the National Archives. Almost all of these documents, that is, any documents produced by the US Government, are completely in the public domain and no publisher or individual can “legally assert copyright unless the publisher or individual has added original, copyright protected material.”

So explain to me why it is that University Publications of America, which created the microfilms of these US government archival records, can get away with proclaiming their copyright on the microfilm reel (Click picture to view larger version):

Even if they could claim copyright on messages they put at the beginning of the microfilm, which is hardly what I think the law has in mind when it says “original material,” then they copyright does not extend to the materials held within. I don’t think that reproductions of these public domain documents in this photographic form, is in anyway original. Furthermore, when there are copyrighted materials (there are scanned published books in the possession of the state department, for example), UPA can hardly claim copyright over such materials, even if I’m grateful that they include such scans in the microfilm, possibly in violation of the copyrights on those materials.

Look at this warning they put in:

Even if we let them have their copyright on this page of the reel, I don’t understand how UPA has any right to graciously “grant” me permission to make enlarged photocopies of only selected items, or deny me the right to make a reel duplication of almost the entire reel, except their introductory frames. Where do they get this right over the material? If these are public domain materials, I should be able to duplicate and use these materials in any way I see fit, whether it is selected photocopies, or print outs, or by copying every single unprotected page within the reel. I should have this right whether I’m engaged in research, or even if I wished to publish a book (without asserting copyright) with the entire public domain contents shown.

These kind of false claims help contribute to the “permission culture” that we find ourselves in, where we become increasingly paranoid about exchanging ideas and creating new culture that uses the rich variety of materials that we have access to.

I just spent two days at the US National Archives at College Park, MD. It is a truly wonderful place to work as a researcher. Sunlight streams through the windows in the wide open reading room on the second floor where researchers sit at well spaced workstations with their happily plugged in laptops and work a box at a time from a trolley full of boxes delivered to them during the several archive “pull times” throughout the day. One corner of the second floor is filled with copy machines and a long “research assistance” room behind the workspace area is staffed by often elderly looking archivists who command the range of obscure knowledge required to guide you in requesting the materials most likely to be useful for your research.

To get to the National Archives complex (Archives II) I simply hopped on the Green Line of the Metro and took it to Greenbelt, where I took the R3 bus that goes into the archive campus and will drop you off near the entrance (you can probably get off at one of the earlier Metro stops and take the bus from there as R3 passes several Green Line stops).

There are a few rules and procedures a researcher has to go through to get to their materials but on the whole I found the whole process very smooth and everyone respectful and helpful along the way. When you enter the building you have to put your luggage through an X-Ray machine and go through a regular airport check-in-like screening. If it is your first visit, you then turn right and enter the orientation room where they make you view a computer slide presentation summarizing the important rules and fill out an on-screen form to register yourself as a researcher. After this you are issued a photo ID “researcher card” on the spot which is valid for one year. There are lockers in the basement to store most your possessions. All I brought in with me was my laptop, power cable, headphones, and a few stapled sheets of paper with some notes listing what archival documents I wanted to look at. No bags or pens are allowed inside (they provide pencils, note cards, and paper once you get in), papers brought in have to be approved/stamped, and laptops, scanners, and other equipment need to be registered. When you exit the protected area you have to check the serial number of your equipment against the registration receipt, open laptops to show that no documents are hidden within, and any photocopies you make while on the inside have “Secret” or “Confidential” etc. blacked out if this is written on them, get stamped “Declassified” and identified as copies.

Whenever you enter and leave the protected area they swipe your card. Whenever you enter a room to work in, they swipe your card, and check your materials when you leave. I never felt this process to be that annoying however, and the archivists were incredibly friendly everywhere I went. I left my belongings and microfilms at my workstation whenever I went downstairs and outside the protected area to visit their nice cafe or the convenience store for a snack.

I was impressed by the huge variety of people doing research here.
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I’m waiting for my flight to Stavanger here in the beautiful and extremely expensive Oslo airport (Bottle of water: $3.17, Strawberry Yoghurt $2.70, Small Cheese and Ham Roll $7.77, etc.) and reading today’s Dagbladet (I think it is usually considered a somewhat leftist Labor party supporting and populist paper). In a series of articles entitled “Norwegian Schools in Crisis” there was one piece listing the results so far from a series of studies on Norwegian education and comparisons with several other European countries and the US. Below are a few of the conclusions so far according to two professors Anne Welle-Strand and Arild Tjeldvoll:

-Too many bad teachers Apparently there a lot of under-qualified and not sufficiently trained teachers in Norway, including some recruited straight out of secondary school (C: can this be true? Am I not understanding this correctly: “I flere år er det blitt rekruttert svake kandidater fra videregående skole.”)

-Not enough specialization While teachers in other countries focus on one topic or one grade level, Norwegian teachers often follow their class from one year to the next. This has resulted in many Norwegian primary school teachers lacking in specialized knowledge. C: I remember this when I spend a brief time in Norwegian elementary school (Sunde Skole). I have often wondered what the pros and cons of this system must be.

-Strong opposition to evaluations and student testing The researches sees this as the biggest problem with trying to raise quality. C: I agree to a point that this can be a problem but I would want to guard against the opposite problem which arises in places which go way too far in trying to quantify progress and knowledge with elaborate testing and evaluation schemes.

-An ‘Anti-Knowledge View” («anti-kunnskaps-syn») These researchers claim that over-emphasis on the socialization aspects of education has gotten in the way of knowledge and hurt Norwegian’s ability to compete internationally.

-The results of a study of OECD countries. last year showed that only 47% of Norwegians surveyed believed that “education was important.” which was 20% below the average responses in other countries.

I’m looking for an obscure 1917 book by the philosopher and Unitarian minister W. Tudor Jones called the Spiritual Ascent of Man. W. Tudor Jones is mentioned by a Japanese philosopher and pragmatist Sugimori Kôjirô in a separate 1917 book I’m looking at here today in the rare book collection at Harvard. I’m doing some research on Sugimori and I suspect he was influenced by Jones. I wanted to read the Jones book and was delighted to discover that Google books has it! How wonderful, I thought, this will save me a trip to the Divinity school library, where they have a hard copy.

Yet again Google books has showed me how powerful it has become as a tool for researchers. However, when I go to the Google Books copy and view the book, in the right hand margin it says, “Copyrighted Material” and restricts my viewing to a limited number of pages.

When I go to the copyright information at the beginning of the book, it says, “Copyright, 1917 by W. Tudor Jones” and at the bottom of the page it says the publisher is “The Knickerbocker Press, New York”

Here we have a book, copyrighted in 1917 that has been published in the United States. According to this handy chart over at the Cornell Copyright Information Center without condition all books published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain. Why then does Google deny the visitor access to the remainder of the book?

The most likely answer is that Google has some connection to the book via Kessinger Publishing, which sells reprints of rare books. Have they copyrighted their scan of the book? If you look at the Google introductory page for the book, it lists Kessinger as publishing and copyrighting the book in 2003.

Projects like Google Books and even more, the Gutenberg Project are wonderful resources for research. At Gutenberg’s archive, for example, I was able to download a full copy of a book by Jones examining the work of a German philosopher, Rudolph Euken. However, in the case of Google books, I’m annoyed to see so many books that should be fully in the public domain are showing up as copyrighted. At the Google blog entry on public domain books in Google Books they excitedly announce that you can find books out of copyright by searching for books with the tag “steam engine date:1500-1923″ That is fine and it shows up tens of thousands of books from this period. However, the book I searched is also published before 1923 but like many other books I have found published from this period on Google Books, it is “copyrighted material.” Presumably, Google will now be content to have a 2003 “copyrighted” scan of a public domain 1917 work in its collection.

I have uploaded a new index page for our Frog in a Well project. It displays the new Frog in a Well logo, based on a painting by Joseph Y. Lo, who has kindly given us permission to use a modified version of it for our project.

In addition, I have prepared two buttons that you are free to use when linking to Frog in a Well:

So far looks like casualties are low, but who knows what the final number will be. Very tragic day for London.

Here is the WikiNews page collecting information on this and links to other articles:

WikiNews London Blasts
Wiki Article on the Blasts (Contents Changing rapidly)
BBC Live News Stream
Guardian News Blog on the Blasts