Jia Lin’s Weblog

End of February

Not really have anything meaningful to say for the last day of this month. Just felt I could not let the shortest month slip away imperceptibly. We went to Frank��s Mardi Grass Party tonight. Three years in row, we went to the same bar for crawfish of same taste, and three years had gone. When I am sentimental about the loss of a month, off the three years had gone quietly.

Many many years ago, I read a bedtime story about loss of time: a boy stepped into a wonderland and enjoyed three heavenly days, and come back to secular world to find all people he knew are gone, since 100 years passed while he stayed in wonderland. It is scary and sad, the cost of heavenly enjoyment is just too high. Not too long ago, the movie ��Contact�� gives me alternative explanation of time and human sense. Judie Forster�� space shuttle, because of some malfunction, throws her into another celestial dimension of time and space ( wormhole maybe?), where is more beautiful than anything in this earth, and where she met her dear father who died long time ago. She thought her outer-space experience lasted for several hours, but when she (actually only her mind) came back, her crew member on ground told her that she only passed out for 7 seconds. I��m not a big science-fiction fan, but that movie takes my breath away.

The two stories seem completely contradictory to each other. Maybe Einstein can explain better the relation of time, space and happiness. I even don��t know why I��m talking about this. Go back to the beginning, maybe it is just an elegy for February, an elegy for all the time that slipped away. Vita Sackville-West did it better than I do by saying:

��It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.��

And I just realized, indeed, that is the beauty of blogging, even nobody hears you.

It’s not TV, it’s HBO

It seems HBO can achive the mission that PBS failed: a forum for an alternative voice and free speech. And ironically, HBO is run by what we call commercial media conglomereate. That is all opposite to what we learn from those critical theories stuff on public TV and commercial TV, and media concentration.

Despite a little rustiness as the first episode– one-hour life without ADs break, Real time with Bill Maher still brought in fresh air: an open argument in popular media about the war, politics and patriotism. Bill Maher might be too radical for ABC for his comment on “cowards” right after 9/11, but I guess the nation now needs someone to radically question everything. I was little chilled on last night’s discussion on “treason”, it seems that this patriotism idea is so prevailing now that any different view on current administration have been accused of unfaithfulness to their country. Among all the nation’s slump-downs following 9/11, there is nothing more fearful than an invisible cramp imposed on the freedom of speech. The lofty-tone propaganda in mainstream news media in the past year and half keeps reminding me the the tone and message I got from media in China long time ago. If you notice how many more rediculous reality TVs coming out since last year, you can not help but wondering if the network TVs are trying to getting around any serious issue around the country.

And here is where we need Bill Maher, who is able to convey alternative voice about serious issues in a very enterntaining way that can reach average public. I am not totally into Bill Maher. This guy has too many profane comments on religion and sex, and more than often, he is trying too hard to make cynical stunts. But this is the guy who used to say he would rather lose his job than losing his soul, and only because of it, he deserves a salute. And who knows how long “raw, uncensored, outspoken” HBO can hang on, and what will happen when the radical “politically incorrect” outweighs its entertaining element, like what happened with ABC.

Tired, Empty

I was sitting up again Monday night. I had to finish the IQ-quiz-like assignment from statistics class. When I went to bed at 6 o’clock in the morning, I could not sleep. I felt something wrong about my life. How could a 30-year-old woman not able to go to sleep at night because she did not finish her schoolwork? If she had to sit up to take care of her crying baby, or if she is such a successful careerwoman that she has a hell lot of workload need to do at night, or if she has fabulous night life in NYC or Miami, Ok, I think all the sleepless nights are making sense, for a 30 years old woman. But what about me? I don’t have a baby, I don’t have career, I barely have financial independence, I don’t have exciting night life, at the age when my mom had worked for 10 years and had a daughter of 6 years old.

My husband Bin is also a Ph.D student, and thanks God he is looking for job now. He is a very devoted and productive reseacher and is willing to dedicated to academic research, but it is still difficult to get a decent job under such grim economy: he has to compete with veteran professionals retreating from industry to schools as result of the IT slump.Bin is 100 times hardworking than I am, but he is still keeping his spirit high although he is 5 years older than me. When Bin’s father was at this age, he got four kids and the eldest one was 16 years old. Though he did not have successful career, he enjoys big family surrounded with lots of grandsons in his sixties. In opposite, Bin’s enjoyment will reside on being offered a decent, well-paid and respectful job, which should at least match all these efforts he had made at higher education for past 15 years.

All these are frustrating, and it boils down to waver my belief about higher education, even just for now, a transission time. There is no doubt that it alters my natural biological call, and I’m gambling with my normal family life, the pleasure as humanbeing and as a woman, even the promising carrer that I assumed I could have. I’m worried about our life when we are in our 60s: while still uptight, we are lonely and pathetic, and sighing about the too many years we spent at school.

Movie for Valentine

The pianist is not a movie for Valentine: there is no romantic love, there’s no romantic story, there is even no romantism. But when I finally can kidnap my workholic husband to cinema with the excuse of celebrating the lovers’ day, I have to choose the one on top of my all-time list instead of a real valentine movie, like “How to lose a guy in 10 days” or “Daredevil”. And it turns out that is a choice I will not regret, neither would Bin regret for a night not facing his computer.

Let’s get back to the movie. It is riscky to abandon any romantism in a movie about a war; there is no patriotics or heroics, actually everytime the pianist survives comes with tragic spare of other lives; there is no fancy photography, innocent people died even not in slow motion; a movie about a musician has no background music at all at most of the time. I guess the idea here is that there is no romantism at war, when human life is a worthless piece of nothing, human dignity is even cheaper than a rotten potato, all artistic ideal is just delusion. Yeah, the gorgeous, aristocratic German officer saved the pianist under the spirit of humanity and love of art, but it did not change his fate as the prisoner in Russian camp. Look how sleazy and humble he became when he tries to ask for help. A war is a tragedy of the whole human being, and the chance is equal for everyone. The move pounds your heart with its depiction of realistics of the cruelty of war and the deprevation of humanity and dignity. And we have the right actor for the leading role, his innocent, sad and blue eyes took our breath away.

The movie should be played in more theaters during current anti-war campaign. There are not many things around more educational than this one. The message: Don’t hold any fantasy on any war; a war is a war; it means killing and being killed, both of which deprives the meaning of being human being. My anti-war slogan? Respect other’s dignity and respect yourself.

����
����blog����ʾ��?

Alex will have PBS interview on bloggy issues. They also need to shoot some scenes relevant, like someone is coding blogs. Alex joked that I might be shot coding in Chinese. That reminds me indeed I never try typing in Chinese in Blogspot, partly because I used this blog to practice English writing. And believe me, that’s my only blog (how can I handle three or four blogs with different topics?) But obviously, Chinese can also be displayed on the same page. That’s cool, I can switch between the two languages now depending on who and what I’m complaining about.

A Long-lost friend

Willim Lindsay loves the Great Wall more than any Chinese I know. We used to be officemates when I had my internship in China features in 1996. He edited and polished my poor English writing. He told me so much about his adventures to the old and remote part of Great Wall and his journey to follow the path of Red Army’s “Long March” ; He married Qi, a beatiful Chinese woman, and have two angelic kids. We celebrated the Christmas in his apartment in “Freindship Hotel” in Beijing. I’m not sure what makes him think I am good at PR (I even had not much idea about what PR was at that time), and under his encouragement recommendation, I got an internship in Edelman in Beijing, and was offered an position when I graduated (but my nostalgia pulled me back hometown later). My story in Beijing is the most challenging and exciting experience of my whole life. And William is the one opened the window for me. When I decided to study abroad, he kindly wrote me recommendcations. I guess I was not very good in maintaining friendship, I did not write him once since I left China and we just lost contact till now. Thanks to Google, I found his new website on conserving the Great Wall where I found link to his email.

A long-lost friend awaken so much memories in Beijing. Living quitely in Buffalo and following routine life for 3 years, I could not believe I used to have life in Beijing: fast-paced, meeting different people everyday, bicycles and people everywhere, expensive fasion in those stores of five-star hotels in Wangfujing, loneliness and passion, heart bouncing moments, concerts and dramas every night…

Life I chose now is the opposite to the one I left in Beijing, and there is just no way I could go back. Do I regret? That’s the question that I do not have the courage to ask myself.

Research idea

Until last week, I still planed to focus my dissertation research on Internet metrics, which I just started a little bit with Alex last semester (and has paused since then because of so much other work). But I had been thinking about changing the topic, since yesterday, when I started to analyze textural data of my survey on American’s exposure and knowledge of foreign countries. Schopenghua said “the world is my idea”. That was the first words coming into my mind when I read about what my respondents know about the other countries of the world, although what Schopenghua really meant is a little different. I was amazed by what kind of information retained in respondents�� mind and what perception they hold for each individual foreign country. How do they come up with these ideas (from textbook, TV, internet, movie, friends, entertainment show, or the president��s speech?)? I found the knowledge respondents presented about different countries comes with attitude and tone (admiration, hatred or condescension), So based on the information and knowledge, will the attitudes differ in sense of friends to strangers, or friends to enemies? I��m even thinking about using Galileo to achieve a network graph with friends in the center and strangers or enemies in the periphery.

My project so far has found the knowledge on different countries highly correlate with positions in the World System only when core countries are included. The difference within periphery and semi-periphery is not very significant, where I got a lot of residuals that I could not explained empirically. I guess the attitude (friends to strangers, or friends to enemies) will better fit the regression on world system. The other hypothesis comes out naturally: Is the attitude on foreign countries consistent with mainstream political agenda setting? Or public opinion (or attitudes towards foreign countries) acturally is more shaped by inflow of cultural products (entertainment)? To be more constructive, which might boost my opportunity getting fund, how can we help people especially young people established objective perception of foreign countries?

Now I came up with an ambitious idea to develop this project into a dissertation, and of course, that is where I need money for: to design a survey online (definitely this time), a much more questions of covering broader range and more details (source of information, more knowledge, emotion and attitudes, more countries (at least 50 to 60 I guess). I need a more respondents with higher diversity (different city, different groups, different races maybe). I need to train people who can supervise the survey for me (be sure respondents finish the long surveys, they don��t look for information on line and encourage them to write as much as possible, and they are from different cities). And of course, I need to reimburse respondents who spend one hour or so to fill out my survey. And I need to travel maybe, to visit other researchers to promote my research so they can collaborate with me on survey?

Since most of grants are only given to institutions instead of individuals, I might need to get support from the department. That is not too bad: School of Informatics got research fund to study the effect of international information flow.

In worst scenario, where I did not get any funding from grant givers, I can realize the research by using only UB students. Maybe Mark Diamond Research Fund from GSA will help me a little bit?

Scanty grant resources I might be able to apply

Sharon, the instructor of my Grant Writing course, required us to keep a diary on our working process. I could not think of a better carrier than my blog to record it, and which in reverse, will makes my blog (for a Ph.D student) look a little more meaningful.

The earliest attempt on searching grant for communication research is quite frustrating, since all philanthropic money seems pouring to special education and community service. Than I realized that is why this course is available on school of Education–It will be really a loss if you don’t take the money at your foot. I confine my search on research funding, then I found some sporadic money for academic research on social science, buried under tons of money going to medical, chemistry and engineering research. The worse part is most of funding for academic research can only applied by institutions instead of by individuals, that means that I really need to relate my interest to that of the department or the school.

OK, here are two I find I might try to apply:

Future of Humanity Research Programs

William T. Grant (if I use only college students as my respondents)

Bad Bad day

Next time when my students told me that they could not hand in assignment on time because their computer is down, I��d better believe them, at least some of them. Because it happens to me, while I was working on my deadline for tomorrow. My notebook crashed down mysteriously, error” Registry file failure” I just could not restart it any more. All my paper, data, table is locked in that machine. Lesson: back up is really important.

This is not the worst part of the day. We were supposed to be in Toronto right now to celebrate the Chinese New Year with friends, but we could not get the visa this morning, since the consulate just changed their office hour. For New-year-eve dinner, which is big thing for Chinese, we got a lousy one at ��Scotch & loin��: the steak was terribly scotched, full of charcoal on surface, but the manager did not admit it. When things could not get any worse, Bin and I had a fight, which almost ends up with my fleeing home.

Still it is not the worst part. While we were struggling to get my files back from my notebook, I got my edited paper from Alex, my adviser. Pointing out two paragraphs taking from literatures without quoting, he is very unhappy about this “plagiarism��. That is quite harsh and almost struck me down. I could hardly have any excuse although it seems to have one. I did the literature review two years ago. It must be that I copied something without putting down the resource; and two years later, I took them as my own words. It is a terrible thing to do, and sounds stupid. But it did happen, and unfortunately, to me. I��m glad he finds this out before I submitting to peer review, what a tragedy would it had been. Well, I guess I have to postpone my journal submission and make sure it is all my words.

There are really some days in your life like nightmare, from which you could never wake up. But I believe everything will pass through, and if we could hang on long enough, we survive and wake up in a sunny morning.