|
|
Wednesday, December 17th, 2003
| |
5:54 pm - Ruby on the Radio
|
This is short notice, I know, but I'm going to be on the radio tonight. Specifically, I'm going to be on WYUR's Haflah Radio (co-DJed by my friend  meimad. I will be interviewed about Natacha Atlas and get to play some of her music. For those of you who don't know, Natacha is my favorite Belgian-born, English-raised, Moroccan Jewish-Palestinian-Egyptian-Muslim musician who sings in Arabic, French, English, occasionally in Spanish, and in Hindi and Serbo-Croatian a couple once each for good measure—and should be yours too, I'm not really asking for much here.
Time: 7pm-8pm Central Standard Time, 8pm-9pm Eastern Standard Time, GMT/UTC/BST 0100-0200, 0200-0300 Central European Time, 9am-10am Shanghai (I think that covers most people on my friendslist)
Date: Well, today, whatever that means to you. It's 17 December here, but will be early 18 December for some of you
Place: http://www.wyur.org - the live Internet feed should work with iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player
If you miss the show and you are really that interested, I could probably get you an MP3 later.
current mood: Natacha!
current music: Iskanderia. Natacha Atlas. Diaspora
|
|
(3 comments | comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, November 26th, 2003
| |
4:27 pm - Manhattan Borough President Unaware of Subway
|
 ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , and  Snubbed
In 1999, Manhattan borough president C. Virginia Fields noted that Lower Manhattan is the nation's third-largest business center, trailing only midtown Manhattan and downtown Chicago. "Yet there is, for all intents and purposes, no underground transportation to move people -- business people and residents -- between Upper and Lower Manhattan," she said. "Building the Second Avenue subway will show that we are serious in our commitment to helping grow the economy of our city.
http://www.lowermanhattan.info/news/plans_for_second_avenue_48306.asp
|
|
(3 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, November 25th, 2003
| |
12:10 am - GRE
|
Verbal: 660
Math: 710
I am happy with the way my math score improved from the practice test I took. All that geometry review I did paid off and raised my score by 210. The result is that my math score is higher than my verbal score. This is very strange for me.
On a side note, I've never felt so insulted by a computer program in my life. Before it let me take the test, it displayed lengthy instructions on how to use a mouse and how to edit a document in a word processor. I had to do things like move the cursor over flashing dots before it let me move on. I understand the goal; it's trying to help people who are less familiar with computers get used to the process before they take the test, but an opt-out of mouse-and-keyboard using instructions would have been nice.
|
|
(3 comments | comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, November 19th, 2003
| |
7:20 pm - Human Genetic Variation, Race, and Medical Research
|
Posting my homework on Blurty allows me to fulfill my academic and social needs:
In Brown’s chapter on “Human Genetic Variation” (and elsewhere), he echoes a common paradox throughout the genetics literature: the meaning and significance of common sense racial typing (phenotypes) are simultaneously denied and shored up. How do you see that happening? Would there be a way to address human genetic variation without falling into this paradox?
Brown rejects the concept of race, that is, of a simplistic and essentialist idea of human genetic variation, by agreeing that “human races do not exist in any meaningful genetic context.“ Yet he does so briefly. Without even explaining what he means by “meaningful,” he fills the rest of the paragraph with terms like “group characteristics,” “obvious traits,” “isolated populations,” and “human sub-population[s].” What does Brown mean by a “human sub-population” if he doesn’t intend it as a byword for “race?”
Brown certainly writes as if a mere substitution of terms is all he intends. Take the following sentence as an example:
In other words, two individuals who share a variant allele have a single common ancestor who was the source of that mutation, even if those two individuals are members of different modern subpopulations.
Whatever his credentials as a scientist, he shows a limited grasp of logic. If two individuals share this allele, what justifies their categorization into a “subpopulation” besides the very physical traits which are not significant enough to provide a genetic justification for the concept of “race?” Brown’s motivation in advocating the search for correlations between risk factors for disease and “subpopulations,” i.e. socially-constructed identities which are loosely based on phenotype, is to provide a context for selective testing which does not involve the expensive and laborious process of searching entire genomes for risk-factor SNPs, which, unlike racial and ethnic identities, are both present on the genome in concrete form and numerous enough to be medically useful. Using racial and ethnic identities to guess about risk factors is lazy and is just as likely to result in self-identitified members of “subpopulations” not thought to be particularly at risk from a certain disease to not be tested as it is to result in a higher percentage of cases in more at-risk “subpopulations” being detected.
It is necessary to put “subpopulations” in quotes, because when it comes to the spread of alleles through human populations during recorded history, Brown’s information is as limited as his logic. His statement that “by chance, the founders of each subgroup had a higher frequency [of] some variant alleles than the rest of the human population, but overall, they shared no more genetic similarities with each other than with other humans” misses the point entirely. “Subgroups” have not been static. Haplotypes with relatively recent origins, i.e. from the last 2 millennia, are spread with remarkable range around the world because of historical mixing. For instance, 30% of African-Americans males have Y-chromosomes which come from Europeans. Frequencies of mixing are lower in some places and higher in others, but even in Europe, significant portions of the supposedly pure European population have mitochondrial DNA with relatively recent origins in places like southern Africa and eastern Asia. The use of “races” and “subgroups” in medicine will just not work. It is a poor substitute for real research into the causes of disease, may result in more disease, not less, and will become less viable than it already is as the the small number of traits that Brown considers useful for determining “subpopulations” continue to mix at a historically unprecedented rate.
current music: Zebda. Mêlée ouverte. Utopie d'occase
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| |
2:52 am
|
Hmmm. I just realized that in my default Blurty user icon, I look like I'm either praying with or to the Chinese dictionary.
current mood: religious?
|
|
(5 comments | comment on this)
|
| |
2:50 am - Search Inside the Book, Research for Transnationalism Paper
|
Amazon's "Search inside this book" is a great tool for research. I used it tonight to search for more material for my paper on transnationalism, and was able to browse much of Aihwa Ong, et al.'s Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism online. Users of the service are limited to seeing 20% of the pages in a single book but this is a minor limitation for research, especially in volumes where only several chapters or essays are relevant. I have all the information I want from the book, including many references to other sources.
The book, particularly the essays by Ong and Xin Liu, provides excellent support for my thesis, that certain characteristics of transnationalism (social, kinship, and economic ties that transcend political borders) have been present not only in modern migrations such as early twentieth century Italian migration to the United States and contemporary international migration (both skilled and unskilled), but also in early modern migrations and in "internal" migrations across the centuries. The borders involved do not have to be the rigidly-defined borders of a modern nation-state, nor do they have to be international borders at all. Transnationalism, migration, and the association of geographic mobility with the possibility of upward economic mobility, seem to be global historical constants.
The following quote from Liu is especially enlightening, and combined with sources I have read on labor migration and remittances in early modern Britain and on medieval Italian mercantile capitalists, helps make what I believe is a good case for pre-modern transnationalism:
"It is important to note, however, that the current reordering of social meanings of space is the latest shift in an age-old tradition that associated social power with upward mobility. For centuries in China, upward social mobility often also meant physical movements - traveling within the imperial domains. In order to gain access to commercial opportunities, education, or high office, Chinese people traveled from rural areas to urban centers (Skinner 1997). In particular, after the institutionalization of the national examination system through the Tang (618-907 A.D.) and Song (960-1297 A.D.) periods, scholarship became a possible route for rural elites to climb "the ladder of success" (Ho 1962; see also Johnson 1985). Mobility and traveling were an integral part of the social hierarchy in late imperial China. The closer one moved to the top and the center, the greater one's social power; power and prestige diminished as one moved toward the peripheries. It can be said that this model of stratified, vertical arrangement of space informed the imaginations and strategies of many social groups, such as local elites, merchants, and rebelling peasants.
It's good to be excited about research again.
current mood: academic
current music: Natacha Atlas. Diaspora. Disapora.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, November 12th, 2003
| |
2:50 am - The Golden Horde Strikes Again!
|
According to leaked results of the 2002 census of the Russian Federation, Chinese are now the fourth largest ethnic group in the country. In 1989, the year of the last Soviet census, Chinese in Russia numbered just over 5,000, a number insignificant one that Goskomstat SSSR publications included Chinese in the category "Other." Today, they number 3.26 million (2.2% of the total population). This is more Chinese than in the United States, a country with almost twice Russia's population and a history of Chinese immigration a century and a half longer.
More than three-fourths of this population lives in two of Russia's seven federal okrugs, Siberia and the Far East. Demographic data by administrative division has not yet been released (or leaked), but it is safe to say that most of this population lives in three regions of the Far East: Primorye Kray, Khabarovsk Kray, and Amur Oblast. Even if half of the Chinese cited as living in the two federal okrugs live in Siberia (which is quite unlikely), the Chinese population of the Far East is over 18%. 24% is more probable. Opportunities for these immigrants abound. Vladimir Radyuhin writes that:
( Read more... )
Thanks. tazadebevita. for the title.
Edit: I just found a website about Vladivostok in Chinese. Its purpose seems to be to promote investment and settlement in the city, which is called Haishenwei (海参崴) in Chinese. It also includes some brief information about the history which led to the region becoming part of Russia. The Yüan and Qing dynasties (and to a lesser degree the Ming dynasty) included the region that became Primorye Kray, and the Qing dynasty also ruled what became Khabarovskiy Kray and Amurskaya Oblast, but all these regions (along with territory in Turkestan) were ceded to Russia as a result of the Sino-Russian war of 1858-60.
current music: 心驚膽戰, 王菲
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| |
2:49 am - NYC Walks
|
Instead of working, I made a map of several of the longest walks that I've done. The route of the NYC Marathon is shown for comparison. It would be fun to enter the marathon with the intention of walking it. I hear many people do just that. It's the only way to cross the Verrazano Narrows Bridge on foot.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Thursday, November 6th, 2003
| |
11:39 pm - De erroris sapientia
|
"What was the [ethnic] background of Garcilaso de la Vega?" asked my professor.
"He was a mestizo." I responded.
"That's right. He was the son of a conquistador and an Inca princess," he said while trying to write "mestizo" on the board. Spoken words crossed mental paths with intended writing, as they often do, and instead he wrote "mestizador." What a word! "Conquistador" is a noun of action derived from Spanish conquistar "to conquer." A "mestizador" would be an agent of the verb mestizar "to mingle together."
Like the term "mestizo" itself, which, like all other current racial terms, first acquired meaning through sixteenth and seventeenth century colonial structures of power which tended to accord and deny privilege based on a gradient of ancestry (the whiter the better), the term "mestizador" is caught up in a painful history. Sometimes, the "mestizador" was a rapist, a sexual conquistador whose despicable crimes were part of the wider pattern of domination and exploitation that characterized the conquest of America. More often, he was the vastly more privileged partner in an unequal relationship — though Garcilaso de la Vega's mother was the niece of the Inca Huayna Capac, she was only his father's concubine. His father later married a Spanish noblewoman only four years his son's senior; his mother was considered worthy of marrying "only" a commoner. Perhaps the vast majority of European-Amerindian marriages were of this type — between two partners both marginalized by power structures in society.
Thus it is a term that can be reclaimed as positive, for just as children are not responsible for their father's crimes, people who are conscious of the particular racial mixing which resulted in the construction of their own identity, culture, and place in society, can be proud of all branches, especially since, more often than not, and more often now than ever, mixing has occurred outside of (sometimes even in rebellion against) power structures rather than in cooperation with it. "Mestizador" and "mestizadora" can be made positive terms in a way "conquistador" never could be, because its agency can be dual, its purpose can be deconstruction.
My new icon could be considered a combination of both types. Cortés never could have succeeded in conquering Mexico without the help of his translator and lover Malintzin. While the conquest of Mexico is hardly a positive episode in history, their relationship, at least initially, can be interpreted as one of equals. Their son, Martín, is often celebrated as "the first Mexican."
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, November 5th, 2003
| |
10:34 pm - Political Compass
|
I took the test at Political Compass that everyone has been taking. My "Economic Left/Right" score is -6.25 and my "Libertarian/Authoritarian" score is -8.00. This places me in Cartesian Quadrant III (Left Libertarian) with the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Jean Chretien. As far as I can tell, I am more to the left and more libertarian than both Mandela and the Dalai Lama (definitely of Chretien), but the charts they have showing prominent world leaders' scores omit the coordinate system, so I can't tell exactly. This quiz is pretty well constructed, though their web design needs some work.
In any case, it makes more sense than the World's Smallest Political Quiz, which has only 10 badly-worded questions. Most of them are constructed ridiculously enough that everyone who doesn't click "yes" (most people that go to the site do, since the site has linked to prominently by the Libertarian Party and other right-libertarians since about 1995) will just keep clicking "maybe" and wind up a centrist.
current music: Le petit Robert. Zebda. Essence ordinaire.
|
|
(11 comments | comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, October 29th, 2003
| |
9:48 pm - Soundwalk: NYC Chinatown v.1.0
|
The mission of Oversampling, Inc. is, according to their website, "to foster… a renewed awarness of cities worldwide" by providing high-quality walking tours that take the curious "on urban tours no tourist riding atop a double-decker bus will ever see." Each of the company's Soundwalk tours is conducted by a neighborhood insider whose mission is to "take [listeners] on a walk and show [them] what's behind those doors," and in the fifty-minute process, make visitors insiders themselves.
( Read more... )
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, October 28th, 2003
| |
4:29 pm
|
Today before Inventing America, a student got up and set the clock about six minutes forward, hoping that the professor would be confused and end class early. "This class is really boring," she said, expecting that the people in the room would agree with her. No one did, but no one told her off either. I didn't feel like starting an argument with her about her attempt to waste everyone's money, asking her why she is taking a class like this in the first place, or mentioning that, in any case, we were just watching a movie today, so I just rolled my eyes while looking away from her. Another student sitting a couple of seats from me got my gesture and concurred with a shrug.
Five minutes later the clock stopped. She got her justice. Class lasted about a minute past the regular time.
|
|
(4 comments | comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003
| |
6:20 pm
|
| What Irrational Number Are You? | You are √2 You are in good company, many other square roots are also irrational numbers. Just by being a square root you have been branded a radical. You are considered very attractive, especially by Europeans (at least on paper.) You fear that a relationship with another √2 may somehow end up complex and ultimately imaginary. In reality, only another √2 will make you whole. Your lucky number is approximately 1.41421356 | |
|
|
(6 comments | comment on this)
|
| |
6:05 pm - Chinatown, Globalization, and the Legacy and Future of Exclusion
|
It has been sixty years since the U.S. Congress and President Roosevelt repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, thirty-eight since the 1965 Immigration Act allowed, for the first time since 1882, more than a small number of Chinese immigrants into the U.S. per year, and thirty since the opening of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China made one of the Chinese community's greatest fears — selective (or even mass) deportation to China due to an anti-Communist movement — diminish from a constant fear to a present, but ever more distant worry. Chinatown remains as a demographic and political consequence of this history, yet other factors compete with the legacy of exclusion in shaping today's Chinatown. The nature of Chinatown's future will likely depend as much on these factors as on those which shaped the neighborhood during the exclusion era.
( Read more... )
current music: Zhi Lai Zhi Wang. Yan Zi. Leave.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, October 21st, 2003
| |
1:53 am
|
|
| Friday, October 17th, 2003
| |
4:59 am - Options
|
My best option for next year might be to join NYC Teaching Fellows. If accepted, I would get a fully funded master's degree in education in two years and also be able to make enough money to pay back my undergraduate loans (particularly the extremely large ones that I will have to get this year), back taxes, that dreadful collection agency, and maybe even my father's funeral bill. That would leave me in a much better position to take out my own private loans for further postgraduate study in Brighton or elsewhere. Though financial considerations are important, they would not be the sole justification. The education degree itself would be good to have. Also, while staying in New York City, I could start collaborating with certain of my friends to create an organization (ideally with a dedicated space) dedicated to migrants' civil rights, incorporating public arts, education, legal advice, and political activism in an environment reminiscent of 1960s and 1970s organizations such as the Asian-American Basement Workshop. Such activism would both be a worthy cause in itself and, incidentally, make me a more interesting candidate for reading an advanced degree. Right now, the only thing I can really put on my application to the University of Sussex is my bachelor's degree in individualized studies (with a concentration in migration studies and transnational studies). If the admissions' office in Brighton believes that is sufficient to grant me the Overseas Research Scholarship, which would bring my fees down from that of an international student to that of a British student, I would be most grateful and would probably advance directly across the Atlantic. If not, I think I may have found a quite desirable fallback. Or is it a fallback?
In any case, the National Archives research room is only open from 8 am to 4pm, so if I'm to begin my planned research for my Chinatown class, I had better get to sleep.
current mood: thoughtful
current music: Serpents. Nitin Sawhney. Beyond Skin
|
|
(271 comments | comment on this)
|
| Saturday, October 11th, 2003
| |
2:41 pm - An entertaining quote from a class
|
|
"What you have to remember is that the Tibetans are Vajrayana Buddhists, who have a strong belief in karma and simple reincarnation. So, what you have to ask yourself is, 'what did those evil Tibetans do to deserve this?'"
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| Thursday, October 9th, 2003
| |
2:36 am - The Chinese Settlement of Baja California and the History of Exclusion in the U.S. and Mexico
|
Joe Cummings writes about the history of the Chinese community of Mexicali, the capital of Baja California. During much of the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese settlers, the first of whom arrived to build the irrigation system of the valley, were the majority population in Mexicali. In 1920, the Chinese population of Mexicali was 10,000 (over 90% of the total population). Though the Chinese proportion of Mexicali's population has fallen dramatically (almost entirely due to settlement of Mexicans from the south), la Chinseca remains a vibrant community with a unique mix of Chinese and Mexican cultural forms.
Like many other settlements of huaren in western North America, the history of Mexicali has a tragic side. Though Mexico, unlike the United States, never passed a law declaring immigration from China illegal and forbidding Chinese from becoming citizens, it was not immune to the anti-immigrant movements that swept across the world in the period leading up to (and especially following) the First World War. Across northern Mexico, thousands of Chinese settlers were tortured and murdered as part of el movimento antichino. Yet the community, unlike many such in the U.S.'s intermountain West, survived, in part because Mexicali, as the largest Chinese settlement in the region, home of la Asociación China de Mexicali and of the Tongs, played the role San Francisco did in the 1880s as a relatively safe haven for Chinese settlers driven out of their communities in Idaho, eastern Oregon, and Nevada. and that Vancouver and Richmond did in western Canada. Though their numbers are unknown, some Chinese living in the US also migrated to Mexicali during this period.
This is part one in a pair of short articles on Chinese settlement in northern Mexico. Part two will concern an earlier period. The laborers in the Imperial Valley were by no means the first in the region.
current music: Jaurès. Zebda. Aux suivant(s) (compil Jacques Brel)
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, October 7th, 2003
| |
3:23 am
|
|
Wow, I actually got a response from someone on that Flemish genealogy site, rather, on a larger one I posted the same query to. Someone is asking their "nicht" (which may mean niece, or cousin, I'm not sure), who knows about the names I mentioned.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Sunday, October 5th, 2003
| |
7:01 pm - Futiliteit
|
There is a very small chance I will get a reply to the message I just composed in Dutch with the help of an online translator, a grammar, and a dictionary (something about the translation just looked silly before i moved things around) and posted on the forum of a Flemish genealogy site (specifically one having to do only with the town of Deinze) that hasn't had another poster since March. I did it anyway though. Now, back to something that matters.
current music: Pieces of Conversation. The Ladykillers. Making the Least of the Moment.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
|
|
|
|
