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Beijing Airport Terminal 3 (T3) Opens I got some interesting comments on London Heathrow terminal 5's launch by Lisa Minot, The Sun, 28 March. Heathrow's terminal 5 -- which took 20 years to plan and cost 4.3m pounds -- opened in chaos yesterday (27th March) 1. Passengers faced waiting hours for baggage. 2. Little information with display screens going on the blink and a lack of basics facilities such as catering and baby-changing. 3. Toilets were unfinished. 4. Escalators broke down. There were reports of families missing flights after two lifts jammed. 5. Some 35 outgoing flights were cancelled with 28 incoming ones. 6. Airport staff delayed to go to work for about 2 hours, coz not enough parking space. 7. Many airport staff cried for abused complains from upset passengers. 8. Staff complained that have not gotten enough training of the new baggage handle systems. Bosses said servive today should ba back to normail. But that did not appear furious passengers. |
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Burma and my Ignorance what is happening in myamar or burma... its a classic military repression done by generals who keep starving and killiknghis own people for their own economic interest... in YouTube u can find the movie of the wedding of the main general daughter carrying over 20 milion USD value diamonds necklace.... China, Russia, India, (the sneaky and greedy) singapore , as well Thailand, as seating in business... chair to chairs with the bloody generals.. making money with them... oil, wood, mines from rubins to copper and tin... therefore oppose any sanction or refuse to do any pressure to their business partners (the bloody genarals), to stop the killing of innocent monks and starving civilians.... as money count more then human lifes... ur knowledge concern the issue show.. how democracy... and free information is manipolated.. anyway... anyone who want to bypass GFW of china.. easily download the browser Operator.exe.. sear the interned downoad it... then u can read any webpage.. as well post with a proxy IP... :-) Jie |
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Big Circle Roads South of PVG? Hi Jianshuo, I would argue that the speculation about an accelerator is not totally ungrounded, here is a report about the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (Chinese only, sorry) http://www.sinap.ac.cn/content/ShowDetail.aspx?id=e3bae5bc-707b-47c5-88da-b12a6fefa679 I'm no theoretical physicist, so I'm not really sure if the whole thing is being built underground or it is rather visible from the bird's view. At any rate, here may be more info http://ssrf.sinap.ac.cn/english/ It might be interesting to figure this out... |
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Diversity, Consistency, and Efficiency - Part II Well, I agree with the most part that Doc Chang has said (pls let me call you DC), but I still have to clarify several points. As we know, the dramatic progress which the states made in the 50's or the existence of English as a de facto international language is due to many reasons, among other things, the immigrants from the continental Europe during the world war, the strong financial support, a nice philosophy of doing science, etc. Saying the whole thing is only the consequence of the fact that, a bunch of scientists suddenly decided not to write their papers in German, but English instead, just made me laugh. How could this happen? I mean if each of us thinks just twice. Writing something skillfully doesn't necessarily make you a good scientist, in this sense, it doesn't matter too much, if at all, in which language your publications are written. The other way around, a great scientist, according to my criterion, should be bilingual or multilingual. This is simply the must for communication during collaborations and also represents the fundamentals of science, namely open mind. There is a prominent journal in chemistry called Angewandte Chemie, which you may guess was originally published in German. And yes, their first issue even goes back to the 19th century, however, in the year of 1962, they finally decided to do the publishing in German and English at the same time, which lasts until today. I told you this example just to show how the attitude of Europeans on scientific language has changed in the history. And as far as I know, these days people in continental Europe, which is not English speaking basically, do not feel anything wrong to speak English. On the contary, I think those guys in the states who insisted to use English exclusively were extremely arrogant. Yes, true. The quality of science in China IS increasing, no doubt. But this doesn't mean that it'll last forever or move much even faster if we write everything in Chinese, this doesn't make sense. p.s.: “A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” happens to be an old Chinese saying, you should be proud (or confident, as you put it) of that... Cheers |
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Diversity, Consistency, and Efficiency - Part II Hello guys, interesting topic here. I don't wanna talk much about business stuffs, but just found some discussion by Roger not quite realistic at all. He argued that scientific papers should all be published in Chinese journals using the Chinese language. I mean, hey man, what's the point here? First off, whether you accept it or not, like it or dislike it, it's already a fact that English is by all means the international language, especially in academia. Science is also to some extent an art of communication, you don't expect to make great distributions to the scientific world while working alone, I mean this is extremely true in today's world. Maybe it worked out doing all things by oneself 50 years ago, but no way right now. So the question comes down to how do we communicate with colleague elsewhere around the world. Because we simply cannot afford to recruit an interpreter each time we speak with others, we just need to speak one language, and precisely English. It might not be your mother tongue, but it makes things easier and the collaborations more efficient. And I'm sorry, Roger, but your idea to write Chinese using the Romanic letters, the so-called pinyin, is just ridiculous. There is no such in-between in Chinese. Character is the soul of Mandarin, the basic component and at the same time of course irreplaceable. Writing pinyin is just something to help you know the exact pronunciation, not the way to communicate. I would bet neither native Chinese nor westerners would understand an article written in pinyin without problems, even so they do, it takes simply much more time. And after all, why doesn't Jianshuo publish his blog purely in Mandarin? So if you happen to be a hard-core advocate of Chinese language, you could say something like, aha, how complex this beautiful language is! It's simply not possible for all those foreigners to grasp it. So let's speak English, it's easier...(of course I don't mean that at all) Good luck to all! Cheers, Jie |
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Typical Rush Hours in Shanghai hi! I have been visiting your site very often, i really like it! I am enjoying to be followed by your weekend trips. Like those photos, I presumed some of them taken by yourself. It makes me smile! By the way, I am shanghainess live in London. Thanking you for updating all the home news, really appreciated! Jie |