Jia Lin’s Weblog

Rainy day and Monday

It’s Monday and it’s a rainy day, and the song from my younger days sounds in my head all day long. The teenager-appealing lyrics starts to make sense to me again and actually it fits my current situation quite well. Blues. nothing seems to fit. lonely clown.

It’s the first rain and overcast day I have in Seattle, and it happens in a Monday (actually starting from late Sunday evening). It feels like the party is over… (though I’m not a party person at all)

I used to live in Buffalo before my Californian days, I don’t expect the weather change could do so much on my mood this time around. But it does. Those warnings about 90-day straight raining season in Seattle start to make me worry.

I need to be strong.

old bottle, new wine

An interesting research done by University of Michigan gives an empirical foothold for the old theory of high context / Low context culture. What’s newly revealed in this study is that such differences may be natural born, which could be a quite a blow on the notion of “culture is learned”.

“Nisbett …. asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw. The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish. The Japanese gave 60 percent more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans.”

“the researchers tracked the eye movement of the Chinese and Americans as they looked at pictures. The Americans looked at the object in the foreground sooner �? a leopard in the jungle for example �? and they looked at it longer. The Chinese had more eye movement, especially on the background and back and forth between the main object and the background, he said.”

I met a biologist from UCLA not long ago and he predicted in our lunch that social science will eventually have to find answer in genetics. That’s quite a bold statement. But if you read the recent bestseller Freakonomics, you might discover a newfound territory of eugenics in social science researchtolerantnt abortion policies correlates with the declination of crime rate (because potential criminals do not get chances to be born); who the parents are, rather than what parents do to the kids are highly correlated with the children’s school performanceNumbersrs don’t lie, that’s what the Levitt, thauthorer believe. That reminds me that the whole regression theory starts with Galten’s (he’s Darwin’s cousin) passion on eugenics. He was the one who stood at London street to measure the beauty of women passerby, and who set out to collect heights of hundreds father and sons. I guess social science does start with, or at least with intent to understand, genetics, and there might be a trend today that revives this dangerous tradition, which can be easily labeled as racism.

Sweet home Maple Leaf

This will be hard to beat, we found a house in three days. We will have our first home in Seattle. Hidden in the woods, however, it’s only one block from the bus stop. No famous attractions or cultural center, but everything interesting is within 10 minutes of driving, and a coffee house with free wi-fi is a few blocks away. The house is a little older than we’ve expected, but we can’t complain too much-Seattle is such a hot market today. The view of cascade mountain is just irresistible.

Leadership

I had my first telephone job interview today. I think it went well and my background kinds of impressed the recruiter. But I stumbled over one question about leadership. I don’t even remember how the question was asked, but I remember I was very surprised to hear the term. It’s not that I never heard of that, I did, actually, too many times everywhere, and came across it every time when reading interview tip. I don’t know why I just skipped it every time and think no one will really ask such abstract question. Maybe I’ve been in academia too long and the word sounds so strangely corporate to me. Or, I just realized, maybe I am never comfortable with the question because of culture background? Maybe deep inside, I was more conformed to the value of teamwork and collectivism and never wanted to be the one that look above all others? In Chinese, we said the bird that stands out will be shot first and there are lots of other proberbs on keeping low profile. Even I’ve heard this term ‘leadership’ thousands of times, the value associated with it makes me turne back on . When I got off the phone and eased down, I realized the question is just about a set of management skills, not about principles. I should have mentioned the teaching experience (I think I was given a cue by the recruiter, then I forgot), how to manage a class, how to keep litseners’ attention and how convey message effectively. I will remember it next time. And I should not skip any popular question on interview tips anymore.

new data on Blogosphere by comScore
key findings:

“� 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population
� Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period,and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each
� Of 400 of the biggest blogs observed, segmented by seven (nonexclusive) categories,political blogs were the most popular, followed by “hipster” lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women
� Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections
� Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and theyare much more likely to shop online”

For the last finding, it will be convincing if T-test is available. And I would also like to see how top 400 blogs are categorized

The research has quite impressive sample size: 2 Million internet users.-”The comScore panel includes representative samples of home,work and university users and closely reflects the demographic composition of the general U.S.Internet user population.”

Remembering Peter Jennings

I was quite shocked to hear the news about Jennings�s death today. It felt like yesterday that he announced in ABC about his lung cancer. He came to my attention during 9/11 in 2001, when most of news anchors went way too emotional and he remained his composed and caring gesture. He gave an impression of news insider, who does homework and actually knows what he talks about; and his presence gave a star power of TV personality. I saw him the other time on PBS hosting one of the opening night of Carnegie hall. He transformed himself into a classical music expert without trace of trying, and kept it cool and charming. He reminds me those old-time movie stars like Carry Grant, warm and assuring, but with much more brains and knowledge. And he has the best voice, before he got cancer, in all those veteran anchors of his generation.