Here's an idea: Expertise over theory

States across the country should revamp their teacher certification requirements by deemphasizing traditional education courses and requiring prospective teachers to pass rigorous exams in the subjects they plan to teach, according to a new federal report.

Book review on Escape From China:

a fascinating glimpse of China's outcasts, vagrants, itinerant farmhands, fishermen, former prisoners and others scraping by on China's social margins. It also demonstrates the limits of the reach of the Chinese state.

Some stuff about John Woo

Mr. Woo's signatures � the slow-motion amplification of violence, the air thick with wood chips and shattered glass; the impossibly cool hero, who leaps and rolls through a battle with guns blazing in both hands; the intimate stand-offs between antagonists, their gun barrels pressed into each other's foreheads � have been imitated by filmmakers as different as Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg. From "The Matrix" to "Spider-Man," it is hard to cite a major action film in recent years that hasn't incorporated Mr. Woo's attitudes and innovations.

This sounds a little weird to me: a growing body of research suggests that the human affinity to nature -- plants, animals and landscapes -- is something hard-wired into us.

Violating the government's own rules, it Detains Prominent Chinese Lawyer

Police in Beijing have detained a prominent defense lawyer for more than a month in a case that underscores China's troubled attempts to reform its judicial system.

Chinese law says that suspects have a right to meet with an attorney within 48 hours of being detained, but police routinely deny authorization.

Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, has reported that families of Chinese suspects can spend months or even years searching for their loved ones after arrests, despite the laws guaranteeing access to a lawyer and family notification.

An old article on the acrylamide hysteria.
And similarly,

A set of simple risk charts could help people put in perspective their risk of dying from cancer, smoking, and other diseases and conditions....The charts appear in the June 5 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

I can't find the charts, though.
Update: here they are, I guess, but you have to pay. Bastards.
But I did find this, which tells us about the bad science in the movie "Erin Brockovich":

the movie encouraged exactly the wrong way to think about data, elevating individuals' medical histories to the level of proof and distorting the notion of risk.

Why I like Stephen Hunter so much:

What an amazing little film. God love the French. They make movies with ideas in them, other than: How many cars can we blow up?

which recalls:

Or maybe it's the influence of the blastmaster Jerry Bruckheimer, who never produced a movie that didn't have at least leventy-lebin 'splosions in it.

From spiked:

The paradox of health means that although we are healthier, expect and get more from medicine than ever before, and rarely encounter death, we feel worse. Although all object indices of health have improved during this century, and indeed during the last 40 years, our own perception of our health has declined.

Nothing in life is safe or familiar any more. Everything we eat, drink, breathe, use at work, or make phone calls with, now seems to pose a risk. We now believe we have the right to live in a risk-free society, which we intellectually acknowledge as an absurd proposition, yet emotionally we take it on board. We feel we cannot accept any risk.

And while you're there, look at All cultures are not equal.

Not exactly an addendum to the recycling post below: Communism has trashed traditional Confucianism, and then trashed itself--no, that's not the recyling part. It's sparked by the news that Chinese peasants fashioned six-foot cannons from empty gas cylinders and cantaloupe-size projectiles from scrap metal, shooting hundreds of cannonballs across a half-mile of rice paddies in two daylong battles, killing a dozen people & destroying 60 homes.

A couple of things on recycling, motivated by this on WWII scrap drives. At least they weren't as bad as the backyard furnaces of the Great Leap Forward. (insert here obligatory rant on government stupidity in times of war--although technically the Chicoms weren't at war during the Greap Leap.)
I remembered Cecil also had one on recycling, which seemed a little simplistic to me. Basically he said we must participate in the grand experiment: there's no opting out. (insert here obligatory rant on government stupidity) This one seems far more convincing to me:

Recycling is neither "good" nor "bad"; solid waste is neither trash nor treasure. Like all other activities, recycling makes economic and environmental sense in some cases and not in others.

Forcing specific, arbitrary levels of recycling may be counterproductive.

We already have a way of figuring out when particular uses of resources make sense and when they don't, and this method doesn't involve mandates or government micromanagement. It's called market pricing.

Prices emerge as a result of scarcity. When a resource becomes scarcer, its price increases; consumers, responding to this market signal, cut down on their use of the resource. When a resource becomes more abundant, its price drops, signaling to consumers that they can use more of it. The price of a product, in a competitive economy, is, all in all, a pretty good indication of its resource-intensiveness.

As far as commodity fetishization goes, in China

Fifteen years ago, "if you had an electric fan, people felt you were already rich enough," said Xiao Yin Shao, deputy general manager of Intel's test and assembly plant in the Pudong district of Shanghai.

And as the article points out, what's left of Mao these days is also mere commodity fetishization. What would Marx say? Say, maybe that should be my new slogan.

Why I'm not worried about getting Alzheimer's: it can rob patients of self-insight �X the ability to recognize what is wrong with them. What--me worry?

According to noted writers (ya wonder how they compiled that list) the top 100 books of all time. Glad to see some of my favorites have made the list. Hey, I'm glad to see I've actually heard of some of them, much less read a few of them. Although I've got to say that I don't think much of #1 on the list, Donkey Hotay.

Jeez, a reviewer about a lesbian film writes,

It's a perfectly poised distance that she establishes, one that ironizes without alienating, observes without fetishizing.

For the record, all of my ironizing alienates, just as all my observations fetishize. A quick search for fetishize turns up this link:

the word "fetish" has a titanic frisson for contemporary theorists. Simply to employ it appears to induce rapture.

Dummies.

Experts say China, with its almost endless supply of cheap labor, could dominate in products that require intensive manual labor to grow or prepare green vegetables, nuts, fruit or dressed meats like shrimp or chicken.

The exports could help offset an expected influx of wheat, corn and soybeans from countries with large, mechanized farms, such as the United States.

"China has great potential. Anything that is labor-intensive, you can do cheaper here. Not just computers and clothes, but broccoli and oranges, too," said Li Xiaoming, deputy director of Anhui Agricultural University, in the central city of Hefei.

But experts say China has many problems to overcome before it can become a real global player.

One is primitive roads and infrastructure, especially in its vast interior. Another is inferior quality: Many fruit and nut growers will have to rip out entire orchards and start from scratch because of poorly shaped and tasteless produce.

Then there's the growing concern overseas about pesticide overuse. Japan �V China's largest overseas market for farm goods �V ordered expensive inspections of Chinese broccoli and other produce in January after finding pesticides that exceeded safe levels. Experts estimate broccoli sales to Japan could fall to less than half of last year's $15 million.

"Chinese farmers thought these chemicals were miracle drugs," said Richard Herzfelder, vice president of China Food & Agricultural Services, a Shanghai-based research and consulting company.

Most of China's exports come from coastal areas, which enjoy better roads and proximity to ports. These areas are already switching to vegetable and fruit production to meet rising demand from prosperous coastal cities such as Shanghai.

Lagging behind are the poorer "breadbasket" provinces of central and northeast China, where most of the country's wheat and corn is grown.

Notebook manufacturing is rapidly migrating to mainland China, a move that will inevitably lead to lower laptop prices.

Migration will lead to lower manufacturing costs and, inevitably, to lower notebook prices.

Now let's see if American consumer groups protest that the notebooks are too cheap.

"Land is cheaper, the cost of doing business is cheaper," said Gartner analyst Todd Kort. Other factors, of course, will contribute to lower notebook prices, including increased capacity worldwide in monitor manufacturing.

Labor is also cheaper in China. Monthly wages for a factory employee are roughly $650 less in China than in Taiwan, said Victor Tsan, director of the Institute for Information Industry, a Taiwanese analysis firm associated with the government.

The push toward China comes from both necessity and opportunity. China is rapidly taking over PC and electronics manufacturing, which has been a mainstay of the Taiwanese economy.

But this doesn't mean that Taiwan will come out the loser.

Rather than fight the trend, Taiwanese companies are increasingly emphasizing product design, inventory management, software-hardware integration and other professional services.

In this scenario, U.S. PC companies will largely become marketing and sales organizations, while Taiwanese companies will handle logistics, operations and engineering. They will also manage manufacturing in China.

The sticking point, however, is China itself. Although war is unlikely, many fear that the government will impose onerous or arbitrary regulations.

Although I saw an article in last week's Far Eastern Economic Review that pointed out that with the reforms that China's going to have to undertake for its pension system, it's going to have to
develop its capital markets, making its stock market less of a casino but one that can support long-term institutional investors.

Here's something about Americans and foreign languages from the Washington Post. Mostly about Arabic, but also applies to Chinese. Boo-hoo.

"The best way to learn a language is without distraction, which makes most university language programs problematic, because students are probably taking biology, psychology and basket-weaving along with it," said Roger M. Allen, a leading Arabic scholar who is a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

"It becomes just another subject, which is exactly what it is not," he said. "It is a skill, and it takes a lot of practice."

Learning other languages has never been a high priority among Americans. The United States was built by immigrants who, until recently, tried to shed their old languages and accents to melt into their new world, said Kirk Belnap, an Arabic professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

World War I left Americans suspicious of anything foreign, and the Supreme Court in the early 1920s overturned laws in 22 states that restricted the teaching of foreign languages. In 1979, a report commissioned by President Jimmy Carter declared that Americans' "incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of scandalous," and many linguists say that not much has improved since.

Fewer than one in 10 students at American colleges major in foreign languages, according to the National Council of Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages. And most of those language majors choose French, German, Italian or Spanish. Only 9 percent learn such languages as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Indonesian, ones that are spoken by the majority of the planet's people.

Foreign languages are not considered a core subject in the United States, unlike in Europe, where people cross borders more frequently. Europeans also start students on languages at an early age and get more practice than Americans.

Arabic belongs to the Semitic group of languages, which includes Hebrew and Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia. It is grouped with Chinese, Japanese and Korean by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages as the hardest for an English-speaking person to learn.

Also, a few years of college instruction often isn't enough. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages estimates it takes between 2,400 and 2,760 hours of instruction for someone with a superior aptitude for languages to attain the highest level of achievement in Arabic -- one that would be good enough to be a translator or lawyer.

A typical university course that meets daily offers about 280 hours over two years.

In the 1980s, the U.S. government began providing money for programs that stressed proficiency. Guidelines for teaching Arabic emphasized speaking, listening, reading and writing. Those remain the foundation, though government funding dipped in the 1990s. After Sept. 11, millions were added to boost language instruction.

The next era, some linguists and U.S. officials say, is for Americans to look at other languages not merely as a way to learn about another culture or read literature, but also as a tool to conduct financial, diplomatic and intelligence activities. And they must drop the assumption that because English is becoming a world language, they don't have to learn any other.

I should say something about this, since China Airlines is the one we've come here on & are going back. Sure,

China Airlines has one of the worst safety records in commercial aviation, with nine fatal crashes since 1970, including Saturday's.

But frankly I think it's even more dangerous on the roads anywhere, especially here in Kaohsiung.

Ha-ha. Geezer TV: satisfying old favorites like "E.R.," "N.Y.P.D. Blue," and "West Wing", where

the formula guarantees speedy resolution of all life's problems. At the end of the hour, the Constitution, common sense or good science has restored order. Life goes on, with a reassuring feeling that things always turn out fine in a nation governed by laws, rules and human kindness.

Here's an idea: the NY Times promotes investment & trade in poor countries in this & a story below--instead of just throwing money at them.

Although there are problems with this sort of thing. According to a recent article in the Economist, there are so many lenders offering microloans that some of them make larger and riskier loans to keep clients from moving to a competitor. As a result, more borrowers are defaulting.