So, I presume everyone’s heard of the row between Google and China, over the (obviously state-sponsored) hacking of Google accounts in the hopes of nabbing those pesky Chinese democracy activists? If not, this article might catch you up. It contains at least one howler: The California-based company, which launched in China in 2006, said it would quit the country unless the government relaxed censorship. On Tuesday, the Chinese government said Google and other foreign companies had to obey the country’s laws and traditions. The howler being that if you know even just a little about China’s traditions and history, you …
Month: January 2010
Attention Bloomsbury: The World Is (Mostly) Not White
UPDATE (25 Jan 2010): Well, they’re changing the cover. But since the point of this post wasn’t just Magic Under Glass, but also about the problem of how it happened, I’m leaving the post as-is. The problem is not really isolated, just as the solution is already known — this World SF Blog post has a bigger discussion on covers and poor cover choices (as well as some good ones). ****** Dear Bloomsbury, You know what I’m emailing about, right? Yup. The cover of Jaclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass. I’m white. I’m a reader. I love books. I buy books. …
Teacher Competence & Textbook Design
The interesting thing about textbook publishers in Korea is that they need to consider the competence of the people who will be using their books. As anyone who lives in Korea can guess, thisis most crucial for the TEFL industry; despite the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of native English speakers teaching English in Korea, there are also hundreds of thousands of non-native speakers teaching English. And since the method for selecting people for teaching jobs doesn’t seem to prioritize skill or ability in the subject they’ll be teaching — at least not when it’s English — and …
Readings 2009
UPDATE: Ooops! I forgot the Rilke I read. Not sure how that happened, but I’ve added it to the end of my list of works.UPDATE 2: Ooops, and Lisa Randall. How could I forget that? ORIGINAL POST: Among my frustrations with 2009 was the fact I got to read way fiction less than usual. WAY less. I was very busy with many things, including health concerns that prompted spome very intensive exercise, new academic writing responsibilities, travel, and also a lot of time spent intensively working on dealing with some personal issues, as well as doing the basic research on …
Random Observations
While I really would prefer to be blogging something a touch more substantial, I’m overloaded with The Freelance Project That Refused to F*cking Die. So, while I’m a little tied up with that — and unable to dive into the fiction-writing project I thought I’d be well into by now — all I have time to post for today are a couple of random observations about stuff in Indonesia, in the vein of my earlier mention of rock star styles here.