Catshanghai

Jaron Lanier’s 2010 manifesto ‘You Are Not A Gadget’ was my favourite book of 2010. I keep coming back to the unabridged audiobook version, which combines computer science, virtual reality, culture, humanist ethics and philosophy in a way that makes me feel as if I’m learning something as I cycle around Shanghai on fresh, cold mornings on the way to the bus stop. The book is dense with eloquent and strangely refreshing ideas that require hours of afterthought to will reward its audience with opportunities to revise paradigms. Lanier claims being a true digital optimist leads him to criticise Web 2.0, open culture and cybernetic totallism as nihilistic, Maoist and against creative, individual expressions of humanity. Lanier is concerned online collaboration tools lead to people to behave as bullying trolls under the cloak of drive by anonymity when they find enemies to attack on forums and social networks. He believes attempts to create artificial intelligence that pass as people (The Turing Test) only convince us when we behave as morons. We rely on Netflix algorithms to choose our films that we are capable of figuring out ourselves. His ideas are vast and cannot be contained to a single blog post.

One of Lanier’s concerns is that the Internet has destroyed the social contract where people were willing to pay for music, movies and books. Given that a pirated digital copy is just as good as a paid for alternative the libertarian free culture impetus of the Internet is telling us that it is OK to steal content without paying for it or creative people should just give away their songs, movies or pieces of art for free.

Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine wrote a book called ‘Free’ arguing in favour of not charging for digital products. According to Anderson, in a situation where costs are falling towards zero the expense of having another customer  is nothing. Therefore, you should not charge your customers for using your art, product or service as you find another way to generate revenue.  Lanier is Chris Anderson’s next door neighbor in San Francisco. They are friends, but Lanier strongly disagrees with the idea of free as in stealing or giving things away for nothing. He has tried to find examples of professional musicians who make a liveable wage by giving their music away as a means to promote ticket and t-shirt sales. He says that he can only find a handful of examples of self sustaining Internet stars, most famously the singer Jonathan Coulton.

Lanier believes in the need for a new social contract built on a market of micropayments where content is traded using a type of peer to peer exchange. If other people download or access your content they will pay you and you will in turn pay to access others’ creative works such as music, films, digital art and books. The effect would be cumulative. The more people access your content, the more you would get paid. In this new world of exchange your audience wouldn’t mind paying for content as other people would be paying them for their creativity. Similar social contracts exist today. Our front door locks are symbolic reminders. A thief could easily break into our homes if they really wanted, but this is relatively rare as we have legal and moral agreements with our neighbours not to steal from each other. Lanier would like to extend this notion to content or he fears there will be very few opportunities for artists, musicians and writers to make a liveable wage in the not too distant future. He  credits the idea of the creative exchange to the founder of hypertext, Ted Nelson.

Let us consider how Nelson and Lanier’s creative exchanges could be implemented in schools to distribute high quality learning materials such as digital books, movies and multimedia. It is a good time to think about this possibility as we are on the cusp of replacing laptops and textbooks with low cost tablets and ereaders. Imagine a school where every student had an ipad or a tablet device of some description. How would the school distribute digital textbooks to these devices?

A thirty dollar paper science book may last a school for four years, but it is not an easy process to buy a digital textbook and reassign it to another student every September. There have been baby steps to temporarily transfer ownership of titles using book lending of upto two weeks on some titles. Will Amazon adapt this practice of digital lending to electronic textbooks in schools?

Another idea is to put textbook content behind a webpage or an app that is paid for with annual subscriptions. Instead of charging schools $30 for a book with a four year lifespan you could charge $7.50 a year for each student accessing the material. In return the author and publisher would revise each edition of the textbook on an annual basis to give schools a good reason to keep coming back ti buy new versions. I have seen book publisher’s offering such schemes, but it is very difficult to convince schools and individuals to pay for such digital content when there are many free alternatives such as study websites and Wikipedia that are not hidden behind paywalls.

Here is a prototype of Lanier’s exchange working in a school system. Let us imagine a network such as IBO affiliated schools where the teachers were authoring digital textbooks to support their courses. If there was a body keeping tally of how many students were accessing the content then it would be possible for schools to charge each other for sharing content. School A has a computer science course on beginner’s Java, which is accessed by School B with 20 students for $5 a year. School B has a literature textbook that is accessed by 10 students in School A for $7 each year per student. Under this proposal, School B would end up paying $30 to School A to offset the balance of trade between the schools.

Under the current method of textbook procurement, it is likely that both schools would have paid publishers hundreds of dollars for paper or digital textbooks. Those funds would have been siphoned out of the school system whereas this scheme would keep scarce resources inside the school s’ wider ecosystem.

I was once a bookseller, but I am not an expert on the publishing industry or economics. I am just an IT teacher with a thirst for audiobooks about the social impacts of digital technologies and this possibility of an exchange is exciting, but it leaves me with more questions than answers.

What is the role of publisher’s in such an exchange? Perhaps they could act as agents to manage the transactions between for a reasonable fee? Maybe they could curate the best examples to publish to a wider reading audience in other markets such as the Amazon kindle store? What is a reasonable royalty to pay the authors under such a scheme? Would it stimulate the creation of high quality learning materials by highly skilled and motivated teaching seeking to make an impact on learning in an age of always on, always connected portable computers and reading devices?

I believe I am often short of time. I suspect many friends and coworkers have similar issues. In my view we often rush around in a way that is not always as useful as it should be, because we create big overheads when we interrupt others or are interrupted ourselves. It could be the torrent of emails we send and receive in a never ending stream or it could be walking into colleagues with a new request or announcement violating any possibility of achieving high quality thought or work.

After two weeks holiday and being inspired by the writing of Leo Babauta, Nicholas Carr, Douglas Rushkoff and Jaron Lanier I believe it’s time to draw up a new social contract where people have the right to focus without excessive interruption from others. Goodness knows it’s difficult enough given our modern predeliction to distract ourselves with technological multi tasking through twitter, facebook, IM and umpteen browser tabs. Here is a mini manifesto to make it easy for folks to avoid chaotic and unscheduled interruptions.

1. Don’t expect folks to answer the phone straight away when you call unless that is part of their job description. The same principle applies to email or any other form of communication, which should all be treated as if they are asynchronous requests to reply later.  The person at the other end may be busy doing something important or thoughtful. Treat synchronous real time communication as a formal meeting that should be arranged at a mutually convenient time.

2. The same principle applies to turning up unannounced when it is very obvious that the other person is occupied. It’s reasonable for people to schedule time during the week when intruders can drop by without invitation. Of course it’s fair enough to ask questions or exchange information in informal settings such as over lunch. Emergencies will also occur from time to time, but we are all creative,  intelligent souls who are capable of extraordinary work given the right conditions such as being able to focus on the task at hand.

To help this happen we need to be clear, polite but firm. This means only reading and responding to emails at set times in the day. This means publicising the times we are available and it means turning people away when they arrive unexpected without good reason. It also means we need to reciprocate by avoiding inflicting unnecessary interruptions on others.

Unscheduled interruptions need to be treated as a violation. Do you agree?

Further reading:
Jaron Lanier ‘You Are Not a Gadget’
Douglas Rushkoff ‘Program Or Be Programmed’
Leo Babauta ‘Focus’
Nicholas Carr ‘The Shallows’

All these titles are available to download as Kindle books from Amazon.com. I listened to Lanier and Carr from downloads at Audible.com while a free version of ‘Focus’ is available from zenhabits.com.

Today is new year’s eve, but tonight I will be home baby sitting Jake waiting for Jenny to come back from a work party.

As I look back over another year in Shanghai I realise I have spent more time in this city than in any other place as an adult. Working for over six years in one school, getting married to a local, buying an appartment in a working class Chinese neighbourhood and raising a ‘joint foreign enterprise’ child are approximate to laying down roots. However, I am still a foreigner and will always be somewhat alien even if I become really really good at giving taxi directions and wielding chopsticks.

School time operates much like a carousel. You get relaxed spells during winter and summer holidays interspersed with unrelenting weeks of busy pressure as if one is running a sprint and a marathon at the same time. However busy it gets during term time, I always know that teaching in an international school is a lot more engaging than teaching disinterested Bristol yoof and eventually the carousel will turn to reveal the next holiday. I’ve survived before and I can do it again.

But, I also take heart from the awareness that I need to thrive in order to survive. I enjoy my job and sometimes I am even quite good at it. It’s easy to get stale and complacent after several years working at the same post, but I am fortunate to get fresh impetus from the energy and passion of colleagues. I was fortunate to be play a small supportive role in the Learning 2.010 Shanghai education technology conference at Concordia in September (http://www.learning2.asia). One major outcome of this conference was to ignite discussions within our department about the way to allow ICT to break out across the curriculum by working more closely with other subjects. The impetus came from my colleague Adriaan and it looks like we have some momentum to move forward.

I am more of a tinkerer than an advocate. Our department has been using Moodle as a tool to share resources and activities for more than three years. I started using Moodle when I was still in the UK and it struck during my first years in China that the crippled state of the Internet required us to build our own walled garden where we could curate, host and share learning resources.  Moodle would have remained a pet project of the ICT department, but two years ago Nick and Adriaan helped to push it forward.

First, we persuaded the school bosses to give us  a server to play with so we could make Moodle available to the wider school community. Then the prospect of a swine flu outbreak made it necessary to provide a digital backup plan for learning to continue in the event of school closure, which fortunately did not materialise. Still, the foundation of the facility took root thanks to Nick’s tireless enthusiasm until it became firmly established in the school’s culture by the beginning of this academic year.

Jake was still a baby this time last year. It has been amazing to see him grow and develop week by week throughout 2010. My online behaviour has been rather reticent during the last year, except for occasional video posts showing off Jake on Facebook. He is a fearless little boy who takes great delight in showing off his physical prowess whenever he can. By the time he was ten months old, he was already walking very well.  We cam back to the UK for a month in July. Our highlights included witnessing him mount John’s stairs without any help whatsoever and laughing with glee while filling his nappy in front of an assembly of geriatric scrabble players. Since our return to China, Jake’s hair has become increasingly wild and curly while his daring exploits at the local KFC slide has followed suit. In short, Jake is a little action man who loves the ELC music DVD and a fickle succession of reading books about animals and monsters ranging from Maurice Sendak to Julia Donaldson. We spent a few days before Christmas in Hainan Island. Jake was ecstatic when encountering the beach, the swimming pool and any escalator. It’s been a delight to watch him grow up this year from a baby into a proper little boy.

Shanghai Expo opened its doors at the beginning of May. Where we lazy or ungracious for choosing not to go. I enjoyed the spactacle of the architecture from the bridge on my way to school every morning. Shanghai was certainly a better place to live during the six months of the exposition, but I did not fancy the idea of queuing up for hours in the sweltering heat to spend fifteen minutes in a pavillion just to say I’d been there.  I am thankful for the six months moratorium on heavy construction that the made the noise and dust less polluting than it was before. It’s business as usual again since the Expo finished at the end of October. The building crews are working 18 hours a day on the site across the road. The outcome will be another tower block to obscure our view of the Nanpu Bridge after months of dirt and noise.

In some ways that pails into insignificance when compared with the individual acts of pollution I have to encounter on a daily basis when wheeling Jake around the back streets of Puxi. Acts of selfish pollution include smoking, even more smoking, spitting, reckless driving and inconsiderate parking in front of entrances for wheelchairs and pushchairs. Two weeks of holiday allow me to be more  philosophical about my prospects of changing an adolescent culture to be more compliant with my wishes about airs, graces and basic safety.

The weeks, months and years have started to blur together rather like the imagery from Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.

And he sailed off through night and day
And in and out of weeks
And almost over a year
To where the wild things are

The carousel turns and I’m still in Shanghai. My lack of online activity reveals a busy, engaging year (offline) in terms of my professional and personal life. Happy new year. What will 2011 offer?

I have been using a Huawei E5830 mobile broadband router in Shanghai.

It allows me to create a personal 3G wireless hotspot. In other words my 3G China Unicom data signal can be shared between upto five devices such as my Nexus One phone and netbook.

The mifi device is smaller than a cellphone and fits neatly into a pocket or bag. It has a rechargeable lithium ion battery that gives about 5 hours of use. It was manufactured by Huawei, but the model I bought was rebadged as ‘Mifi’ by the UK mobile network operator Three. They have locked down the firmware so you can only use it with their simcard and tariff. I got round this problem by buying it from a UK Ebay seller who had unlocked the mifi by flashing it with new firmware. I paid 68.50 GBP for my mifi whereas Expansys HK are selling unlocked devices for over double the price.

My unlocked mifi allows my wifi devices to go online using any wcdma 3G sim and I can configure it using a browser in the same way as any other wireless router by entering 192.168.1.1 in the address bar. This means you can configure the device using any device with a browser. I have got the mifi to work using Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Jolicloud, although I had some difficulty getting Ubuntu to connect in the first instance.

You can make the mifi secure by setting WEP or WPA passwords and choosing whether or not to broadcast the SSID (the wifi access point name). The device still has a built in client, which works better with XP than Windows 7.

My wifi seems to work fine at getting online especially downtown, but it feels more temperamental in the Pudong hinterland. I have been able to use it to stream and download podcasts even video. The problems start when I try to connect to my VPN using PPTP. My first hurdle was changing the DNS address to Opendns or Google’s servers. The Netvigator firmware on the device forces you to use the mobile ISP’s DNS address. You can only get online with a VPN if you change the DNS server address. Otherwise, the GFW engages in the nasty practice of DNS poisoning, which is a bit like tearing up your address book so there is no way of knowing which numbers to dial.

There is a work around. You need to setup a dmz to a static ip address, which uses a different DNS server to the mifi device. Then my Nexus One connects fine, but my phone has a bug so it cannot sustain a PPTP VPN connection. In layman’s terms this means I can use my Nexus One’s wifi connection to talk to my mifi to momentarily pretend to be in the UK or US. I have a few minutes grace to bypass the bamboo firewall through to Facebook and Twitter before my Nexus One craps out and comes back to China. Maybe it is wrong to blame the mifi for this problem, but it will not let me connect to my VPN from my netbook.

I had more success sustaining a VPN connection from my Nexus One once I rooted it and installed the Cyanogenmod Rom, which lets me connect to a VPN using the openvpn protocol. Since I have stopped trying to use PPTP my mifi’s Internet connection has felt more reliable. PPTP is known for being fairly easy to detect and block. Am I being paranoid or does China Unicom timeout your 3G connection when they figure out you are using a VPN to get round the GFW?

After a few weeks I would give my mifi a qualified recommendation providing you buy a hacked device from Ebay and travel to locations that get good 3G data reception.

Video care of Engadget.com via Tudou

I bought a Nexus One phone last month, but it took me a few weeks to get it shipped from the UK. It cost just under 4000 RMB, but I would buy it from Expansys.com.hk in the future or PDA Dream at Cyber on Huai Hai Road. You can buy a Nexus One in shanghai for 4600 RMB without waiting several weeks.

I could have bought an I phone, but I like linux and wanted to be able to run multi tasking. I have been using my new phone for two weels. This is what I like about it:

• The phone feels great in my hand and is beautifully designed.
• The amoled screen is crisp and at 800 by 480 is good for reading text and watching movies.
• GPS is amazing. I have had fun tracking my location on Google Earth and Google Maps.
• I like the choice of apps from the market place. I have been using Seesmic for Twitter Guardian Anywhere, Gmote to remote control my computer and Listen for podcasts.
• Mobile web browsing looks great.
• The camera is really good for pictures and videos in natural light.
• The syncing of Google contacts, calendar and Gmail is seamless.
• Android is easy to use and easy to customise compared with Windows Mobile.
• Multi touch lets you pinch and zoom when browsing and viewing photographs.
• The noise cancelling microphone makes call quality very high.
• Battery life is very good (all day) if you manage the phone properly by turning off animated (live) wallpapers, dimming the screen brightness, regularly using a task manager to kill background services and turning off gps, wifi, bluetooth and 3g when not needed.

There are a few kinks and issues that need to be figured out for Android to be perfect rather than merely very good.

• Android needs Audible audiobook support. I have to use Macosome Audiobook converter to listen to my Audible collection on my Nexus One.
• You need third party software to sync Itunes with Android. Doubletwist works fine on my Mac, but it cannot handle smart playlists.
• Android does not yet support many video codecs. It supports h264, m4v and mp4, but I had trouble playing the mp4 files I downloaded from BBC Iplayer Downloader only rectified using Handbrake.
• Copy and paste is awkward. It is buried in menus for browsing and is not available in the native gmail app.
• The virtual screen keyboard takes a lot of getting used to after a physical keyboard on the HTC Tytn. I have recently installed Swype, which is much better than the native keyboard.
• Paid apps are only available from the Android marketplace in a few countries (not China). I had to pop in a UK sim card and use a vpn to download paid apps such as Pixelpipe Pro and The Egg talking timer.
• There is vpn support, but you need to root your phone to use openvpn. Chinese isps keep cutting my pptp connection after a few minutes.

These are a few minor gripes amplified by living behind the GFW. I am sure they will be fixed or worked around as Android develops and matures. This is still the best phone I have ever used, although I have never owned an Iphone.

It’s been more than a week since Google announced that they were no longer going to censor search results on Google.cn in response to accusations that Chinese hackers were trying to spy on activists’ Email accounts and steal source code. I was almost expecting  the Sino Google apocalypse, but it has not yet happened.

When the story first broke, I was in a state of excitement and anxiety. Call it dysphoria. On one hand, it was amazing to see my favourite web company stand up for free speech against an arrogant emerging superpower. I was also worried that this Google fanboy would lose access to all the tools that make him feel connected to the world inside and outside China. I feared and still fear losing access to Google search, Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa and Google Reader. I’ve been telling students to get ready by setting up alternative Email addresses and getting used to the idea of using Bing.com as a second choice search engine.

Since then nothing much has happened except for rash speculation about Google’s real agenda throughout blogs, Twitter, podcasts and news sites about the real reason and impact of Google’s announcement on January 12. Here are a number of theories being tossed about:

• Many employees at Google are unhappy about their decision in 2006 to censor search results when they made and agreement with the Chinese government and setup Google.cn. The free speech Google faction was looking for an excuse to get out of China in order to reconcile their ethical free speech motto of ‘Do No Evil’.
• Sergey Brin was particularly unhappy that the Chinese government or patriotic hackers were trying to use Google’s technology to spy on human rights activists and dissidents given that his family originate from the former Soviet Union.
• Google can not trust the Chinese government as a business partner if they spy on them and try to steal Google’s intellectual property.
• Google were using the hacking attack and free speech issues to leave for business reasons given they only had 30 percent of the search market in China compared with Baidu’s 60 percent.
• The Chinese market accounts for only 2 percent of China’s online revenues, but it is also a source of problems in terms of hackers, click fraud and phishing scams. Leaving the market would help to mitigate these issues.
• Leaving China would give Google a huge PR boost as advocates of Internet freedom.
• Google insiders in their Chinese operation helped Chinese hackers with the attack so they need to close Google.cn to maintain security of their systems and customers’ data.
• The incident revealed an embarrassing security flaw, which could reduce confidence in Google as a secure place for Internet users to keep their online data. Blaming the Chinese would point the blame at others rather than put the spotlight on Google’s security failures.
• China wishes to become a large intranet that excludes access to all international sites that have not been issued with a license to be viewed within the Bamboo firewall. Such a move would fracture the Internet. What is good for the Internet is good for Google. What is bad for the Internet is bad for Google. Leaving China is a hardball negotiating tactic to try and keep the Internet whole and complete.
• Google is using their announcement to initiate a foreign policy response from the US government to protect open standards, free speech and American commercial interests overseas.
• Google is showing that modern corporations can operate as quasi states with more clout than sovereign countries, rather like the Dutch East India Company during the colonial era. Notice how the Chinese government gave a muted response to Google’s announcement. Contrast this with the indignation meted out to the UK government’s criticism of Akmal Shaikh’s recent execution for drug smuggling.

So many theories raise more questions than they answer, but it is useful to bring together a list of sources on this issue even if history finally reveals that some of them have speculated falsely.

Google Defends Against Large Scale Chinese Cyber Attack: May Cease Chinese Operations

Google Official Announcement on January 12

Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil by Sarah Lacy of Techcrunch (January 12)

What Google Should Do by Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do) (January 12)

Google Puts Its Foot Down by Rebecca Mackinnon (January 12)

My Response to Jeff Jarvis’ Comments on the Google-China Showdown by Siva Vaidhyanathan (January 12)

The Google News: China Enters The Bush-Cheney Era by James Fallows (January 12)

China Seeks Clarity on China’s Intentions by Miao Xiaojuan, Cheng Zhuo and Wang Cong of Xinhua (January 13)

Google sends a shockwave through Chinese internet by Charles Arthur of The Guardian

How Google censors its results in China by Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian (January 13)

China’s cyberwar goes beyond Google by Tim Stevens of The Guardian (January 13)

Everything (almost) that’s happened with Google + China so far – Elaine Chow of Shanghaiist (January 13)

Google strikes a blow to China’s Great Firewall by Jeremy Goldkorn in The Guardian (January 13)

Google v. Baidu: It’s Not Just about China by Sarah Lacy of Techcrunch (January 13)

Google’s challenge to China: the reaction by Tania Branigan and Dan Chung of the Guardian (January 13)

Google attacks ‘trace back to China’ by Tania Branigan and Kevin Anderson of The Guardian (January 13)

Google counts cost of censorship and draws red line under China by Boobie Johnson of the Guardian (January 13)

Timeline: Chinese internet censorship over the last year by Tania Branigan of The Guardian (January 14)

Google the latest victim of Chinese ‘state-sponsored’ cyberwar by Charles Arthur of The Guardian (January 14)

Google investigates China staff over cyber attack by Tania Branigan of the Guardian (January 18)

Playing the Wall Game in China by Tania Branigan and Charles Arthur of The Guardian (January 18)

Podcast Links

NPR Onpoint Radio Google Versus China – 18th January 2010 with Tom Ashbrook, James Fallows, Kara Swisher, David Barboza and Yong Xue

This Week In Google Podcast Episode 25 ‘The People’s Republic of Google’ with Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Gina Trapani and Siva Vaidhyanathan (January 19)

BBC Digital Planet – 19th January 2010 with Gareth Mitchell, Bill Murray and Fons Tuinstra

I'm back at work today after nearly three weeks in Guangzhou, southern China.

Posted via email from catshanghai’s posterous

We enjoy films at home on a 90 inch pull down projector screen. One of the benefits of living in China is that the latest releases are available on DVD for less than $1. Even James Fallowes of the Atlantic admits to buying pirated DVDs while he was living in China so I don't feel too guilty as there is really no other choice and it's a big hole in the censorship net if you live in this country. Here is my list in no particular order:

Posted via email from catshanghai’s posterous