Political, Religious, and Academic Neutrality as defined…

For quite a long time, my neutralities were pretty vague. Most folks had no idea what I was on about. So here’s my explanation — just about finalised…

Political, religious, and academic neutrality explained by David Feng:—
• Don’t join or start a political party.
• Don’t join or start a religious organisation.
• Don’t hold stock in any commercial enterprise.

BUT:—
• It’s still OK to vote (beginning next year).
• It’s still OK to visit temples / churches / __________.
• It’s still OK to go to commercial enterprises and to buy stuff and / or to get served there.

A little “extra” regarding the commercial bit:
• Don’t hold top ranking roles of key importance where you holding such roles might cause you to hold conflicting identities in the commercial and academic worlds for as long as you are also employed by an academic institution.

NOTE: These rules are only my personal rules — they’re binding on no other individual. Probably “neutrality” here is an ill-defined term — look at them more as in “non-participatory rules”.

Zucky’s Got A Billion Users on Facebook

And to me this sets off alarm bells.

Imagine what you can do to one billion people — just by flicking a switch. This problem already “plagues” India and China. It has now hit Facebook as well.

When you “lead” a billion, there’s a huge amount of responsibility. I don’t see that in Facebook, which has a privacy issue, as well as the bigger issue of balancing money with community. For governments, they’re doing something a little more different: to them, money is less of an issue (although it still is an issue). But it’s probably too easy to make money off a billion — and Zuckerberg’s charting new territory right now. The temptation to mix and match money with the masses is too great right now. Even in China, which is in less economic ruins than the US, has a problem with this — about balancing that fine line between social good and economic gains.

I’m cautious and tend to be a little pessimistic about this, and for good cause. If I myself had a site with a billion users, I could easy get out of control. It’s human nature. Zucky’s got to be a little careful here. I’m not saying he’ll get greedy; he might contain the greed and not do morally unjust stuff here.

I’d much rather that Zuckerberg and Co take the initiative now with their billionth user online to keep improving Facebook. And by that I mean serving the user base with less pretentious stuff — for example, by “abusing” friends less for a few cheap ads. It’s not cool using your friends and users to “make money”. I’d say do something like probably use that bit of cash for good. Give it to charity (if you do already, give more). Most of us equate Facebook as a huge platform where friends “make” money. We don’t really like that. None of us wants to see our friends “sell” us stuff “just like that”.

Use the power of a billion wisely.

PS: This is outright horrible.

Academic Neutrality: The End of the All-Mac Era

I will be taking one of the most “monumental” moves in announcing the end of an all-Mac strategy. From 01 December 2012, I will no longer restrict myself from the use or purchase of computing or telecommunications devices that do not run on the Mac OS or Apple’s iOS.

The reason for this is manyfold. As you may be aware, I’m an academic, and as an academic, I have to uphold academic neutrality. An academic must be neutral from influences of political, religious or commercial factors where such influence might compromise efforts in seeking the truth as-is. The absolute use of the Mac OS to extents that other operating systems are not used means that Apple might very well be “in charge of my (computer’s) head”, which would be problematic if academic neutrality is to be upheld. There is, of course, no obligation for me to buy a PC, but the move I’ll be taking 01 December 2012 no longer means I must buy a Mac. Of course, I am still permitted to buy Macs!

An academic coming into the classroom every day with, for example, a MacBook Air and a Starbucks tumbler, is problematic if the use of these items is done for purposes which may compromise academic neutrality — especially if he “brainwashes” fellow students about these commercial organisations. For this reason I am ending “exclusive” agreements or contracts so that my academic work is as neutral and as close to the truth as-is as possible.

Neutrality here does not mean abstention, but it does mean objectivity and plurality over subjectivity and exclusivity / restrictions.

David Feng’s New Social Media Strategy

I have to say that it has been five years since I got into this whole “social media” thing. In that time, thanks to a few quick intros by @davidavdavid (niu-bi), I’ve gotten myself truly immersed in the whole “SocMed” ecosystem. I’ve taken trains the world over, tweeted about tech stuff, and taken followers where my travels take me. It’s been a fun five years.

I’m now rethinking my social media strategy in light of my commitments of the future — education, academia, media, “A to B”, languages, culture, and tech. In particular, the first three, education, academia, and mediaculture (especially cross-culture communications), will be key topics for me. Some of you have seen me post different things on different accounts. There will now be dedicated channels for each of them.

The following apply as of 12:00 noon Beijing time on 29 September 2012.

First, I’m defining my major SNS accounts as Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo, and LinkedIn. I’m not dumping any of my other accounts, but if you want to stay in touch with my very latest happenings, you’ll need to catch me on one of these accounts.

Second, for a fuller David Feng experience, you’ll need to subscribe to multiple accounts. That’s because I’ll be “dividing” my posts to the following accounts:—

  • Twitter (@DavidFeng): “Live feed”, China, some news, trains, travel, education, academia, Chinglish, Apple technology — mostly in English but partially in standard (traditional) Chinese and some other languages as well. These were the topics that kept my Twitter stream alive for the past few years. Trains and travel have especially been “big” on my Twitter feed. I’m not dumping them anytime soon. At the same time, I’ll add in much more news commentary — especially China-related news and views. I’ll also do education and academia tweets because my PhD dissertation was “inspired” by what had taken place on Twitter.
  • Facebook (DavidFeng): “Live feed”, world news, some travel, some Chinglish, technology in general — in English only with few exceptions. Facebook lets you post more — there’s no 140 character limit there — so stuff posted there will be a little more “in detail”. I also love its geotagging options. Finally, I’ll post more about “general” tech or social media there — the Twitter account is the so-called “Apple fanboy” account.
  • Sina Weibo (@DavidFeng冯琰 / 22092058): “Live feed”, education, academia, trains, language, some news — in simplified Chinese. I have a verified account on Sina Weibo so I’ll be doing what my title has me — as an academic. But there will also be a strong “trains” element since I used to be known as a major advocate for express HSR. (I have 17 rail bureaus in China following me on Weibo!)
  • LinkedIn (David Feng): Professional updates only — mostly educational and academic — in English. There will be some tech as well but most of the updates will be related with my main career.

Me using OS X Mountain Lion has meant that I can now update from my desktop, which makes the whole thing a lot easier. Once I get my iPhones in order (just two!) we’ll be able to message one other on social media a lot easier.

I will also be keeping my @DavidFengLight account active on Twitter — but my other personal “alter egos” will die because they’ve served their time. The Light account will be updated no more than 5 times a day — at times there will be no update guarantee (well, it’s “Light”!).

PS: Chinese users — I’m sorry I won’t be using WeChat (Wei Xin) — I’ve heard a fair load of distressing news about it. But there’s always Weibo Private Messages!

An Open Letter to Apple on the Copyright Issues of the Clock in iOS 6 (iPad)

As I drove home today with my wife, I left a crossing close to my home a little more irate now that I found out on Facebook that Apple has decided to “help itself” (without permission) to our Swiss railways clock in iOS 6 (iPads). As a Swiss, therefore, I’ve decided to “harmoniously” let my emotions and views about this be known.

To whom it may concern at Apple, Inc:—

I, David Feng, citizen of the Swiss Confederation, find it disturbing that Apple has decided to use our iconic train station watch in its latest iOS 6 firmware (for iPads). While I as a Swiss am proud that we have more exposure of our classic timepiece, I don’t think this should have happened in a way that Apple decided to “steal” this on its own without obtaining permission.

I don’t work for, and have never worked for, Swiss Federal Railways (or any branch of the Swiss government), so I write to you as a private individual who is Swiss. Nevertheless I have been told at school, from 1st grade through to the recent completion of my PhD in media studies (communication), that if you use someone’s work, you must at least credit the person. As an Assistant Professor / Lecturer now working in Beijing, I think I have a duty to tell this to my fellow students as well.

As a Swiss citizen who loves his country (whilst also appreciating international diversity to its fullest), I think that while it is nice to see more “Swissness” in iOS 6, that Apple would do itself and everyone a much bigger favour if it could avail itself to rightfully use our iconic timepiece. Hereto, I personally think, as an individual, that steps, to be taken, that would eventually give Apple the rightful use to Switzerland’s well-known train station watch, would be appropriate at this moment.

I have been a user of Apple products for 21 years. When I started using Macs in 1991, they were still one-piece Mac Classics running the black-and-white System 6.0.7 operating system. There was no “iPad” of any kind until a mini variant appeared with the Newton. (I still remember these times!) Now I am a happy user — now on my 16th Mac, but unfortunately this happiness has been dampened a little by the recent “stealing” (as Swiss media reports it) of the Swiss railway timepiece classic.

I personally am confident Apple wants to “stay clean”. Neither Apple nor our country, Switzerland, are known as “copycats”. (Unfortunately this cannot be said for the city I am in right now, Beijing!) I find it ironic and also offensive that an “innovative” Apple has decided to copy something from Switzerland, a country also known for innovation, without obtaining permission beforehand.

As an individual, a Swiss citizen, and also a long-time user of Apple products, I personally hope you will do what is needed to solve this issue correctly.

Thank you very much for your kind attention to this issue.

Yours very sincerely
David Feng

馮琰將於今天北京時間 18 時參加北京電臺直播節目,「深聊」鐵路旅行

各位旅客,列車就要開車了!我將於今天(2012 年 9 月 13 日北京時間晚上 18 時)參加北京人民廣播電台文藝廣播的《環球旅行家》節目,聊天話題亦然就是世界鐵路旅行。如果你在北京的話,可以透過「傳統電臺」收聽:FM 87.6。

這次節目來的還真是時候:我在八月份曾於我妻子 Tracy 在歐洲七個國家坐車旅行,南起瑞士南部 Locarno,北到荷蘭阿姆斯特丹,途徑經過瑞士、法國、比利時、盧森堡、荷蘭、列支敦士登等國,並去過的德國鐵路弗賴堡車站。

現在也是該公布本人鐵路旅行的里程了:迄今 1990 年以來的里程 151,028.33 公里以上,個人目標就是到 2015 年前爭取達到二十五萬公里(暑假寒假瘋狂「運轉」,其餘時間專注教育學術,該工作「往死裡工作」,該休息「往死裡坐車」,哈哈!…)。此外,我今年年度鐵路里程已經到達 23,019 公里,跨越接近十個國家,其中時速 300 以上的高鐵佔比 64.03%。這麼說,年內到達三萬公里也不是什麼不可能的了。(Note:十一長假馬上駕到!)

雖然新的工作崗位也意味著我最新鐵路旅行會有些「暫缺資料」,但是我以後也會繼續「掐表」,間接地鼓勵鐵路公司準點運行列車,讓更多人離開堵車的煩惱,綠色旅行。剩下的資料我也有了,只不過得抽空統計。先把學生教好吧,有時候再補個人愛好資料吧!

你可以透過網路微博電臺聆聽(請至《環球旅行家》< 新浪微博頁面點按「收聽微電臺」即可)。

David Feng on Radio Today: Trains, 18:00— Beijing Time

Again, it’s time for a train journey — microphones included, please. I’ll be onboard Radio Beijing Joy FM live at 18:00 Beijing time today (Thursday, 13 September 2012) for a live programme about travel on trains, both in China and overseas. (Tune in the “traditional way” via radio: it’s FM 87.6 in and around Beijing!)

This comes at the culmination of a seven-nation train trip to Europe, where my wife Tracy and I travelled by train in Switzerland, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Liechtenstein, as well as visited the Freiburg im Breisgau Railway Station.

Present mileage here is around 23,019 km or so (not including two RER trips in Paris operated by SNCF), and I’m good to break 30,000 km within the year if all turns out fine. With 143 trips by train I am probably one of the most enthusiastic rail folks out there. I’m also a fast rider: 64.03% of these trips were at speeds of 300 km/h or faster.

This brings my global mileage from the 1990s to approximately 151,028.33 km. I have a little personal goal to reach 250,000 km by the end of 2014, in time for the second half of this still-new decade.

Sadly, I’m no longer as precisionist as I used to be: missing are specifics for train trip details as of mid-August 2012. The good thing, though, is I’m still keeping count on the timing of the trains. On one of these super-rainy Sunday afternoons when I tire of life off the rails, I’ll probably pull the rest of the figures into the database and see how things went.

Catch me live via Internet Radio (new on Sina Weibo) — click the radio icon on the official radio page on Sina Weibo, and chime in!

Tianjin and Beijing…

…looks like a very crazy combination indeed:—

  • Geopolitically speaking, since they’re all municipalities under the control of China’s central government, they’re strong, politically and particularly economically. Guangzhou and Shanghai, on the other hand, are just dealing with “mere provinces” around them (although Guangzhou also has the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region interested). So that’d make the pair look a bit like Germany and France — both powerhouses in Europe, or probably the US and Canada.
  • Quality-wise speaking, if we deliberately choose to ignore high speed rail and what it did to Tianjin, we are looking at something a little poorer — a little like Switzerland and France, and at times, even Switzerland and Italy.
  • If we look at “how they are willing to zhuang bi, or to pretentiously “make up” to the stronger brother” (that’s Beijing), that’s just outright hilarious. It’s Apple and Samsung or even Apple and eMachines (remember these guys?).
  • If we look at the attitudes to life, though, it’s a little bit like German-speaking northern Switzerland versus the Italian-speaking Ticino in the south. One’s more serious; the other is way more relaxed.

But it’s the quality bit that hit me (rather, the lack of it). Whilst getting my hair done lately, I’ve been a little _____ enough to have watched Tianjin TV’s late-night news at 23:00. These guys ran something like ten ads that were the same in something like a 30-minute period. (They were ads that looked royalesque and featured supposedly an Italian (must’ve been the generic “cheap expat we can use for about a few thousand yuan for a fake ad” — I’ve heard of horror stories like that from the expat Twitterati in China) doing an ad for — out of all things — a light switch. Out of all things!) In Switzerland if you had a 30-second “main ad” by Advertiser A, followed by a 30-seconder by Advertiser B, then followed by another 10-seconder by Advertiser A, you’d feel ratty at Advertiser A already. In China, you’d wish they gave you America’s Second Amendment, as the pure repetitiveness of the ads are probably too scary. It’s a little bit extreme to, well, shoot yourself because of these ads, but you’d at least fair well feel like banging your head into the wall.

Just before the 23:00 news show, I ran into one of these “design-my-house-right” reality shows which I hated. Never mind that a bank I knew from the show was, well, “familiar to me” (although I know no real staff inside the thing). No, it was more a case that they decided to use “canned applause”, with even a little bit of the whistling effect. You can hear that they’re the same canned sound clip from around the second time they run it. I caught the “rhythm” the second time they used that canned clip. Again, a little wishful thinking of what might happen next to me if they gave us the Second Amendment. OK, I’ll let go of that. But seriously, don’t you feel like shoving your head into the fridge when all you hear on TV are like a thousand repeats of the same canned audio clip — featuring fake applause?

Whilst I’m sure I’d be banned from Tianjin for life (well, not actually) if I called it a little bit like a Shanzhai Beijing in the making, we do have to be real, folks, and face up to reality. HSR is probably one of the biggest blessings to hit the Jin — seriously. Train-wise, I’m also happy about their old Metro Line 1, but the signage on new lines look too much like Beijing. Different, though, is their accent (that spoken accent really stands out!), and their crazy road layout, and probably the road signs… and in fact I wish they’d keep that different.

Tianjin has something better to do than to mimic neighbouring Beijing — ultimately to the extent that they might want to incorporate themselves into Beijing altogether… I’d be sad when that would happen. I’d no longer have the “real life” (as in “unbureaucratic”) port city to rush to every week or so, when the Jing throws too much on me…

Email Gremlins…

“What’s a gremlin?…”

If some of you are receiving something like 853,748,237,589,896,704 similar messages from me from a myriad of davidfeng.___ domains, that was me — sorry. Late tonight Beijing time, I’ve begun to have problems with email services for my main domain, davidfeng.me, and its backup alter egos — davidfeng.com and davidfeng.name. Basically, it’s about emails not being sent, or being sent but not being archived, or some other kind of outright craziness — and most likely, about you receiving a trillion similar messages from different davidfeng.___ domains…

If you have Twitter and/or Facebook, let’s do DMs or private messages instead. If you’ve gotten an excess of similar messages from me, sorry.

If this gets out of hand, I’ll call my service providers. Hopefully, this should be solved early tomorrow morning…

—David late on Sunday, 02 September 2012.

Everyone Should Be Like Mr Greaves

I’ve a little educational dynamite for our fellow readers: One of the most influential teachers I have ever had — and I say this as a teacher-to-be starting in about week’s time — has been honoured by the European Council of International Schools for services to international education, and that someone is none other than Mr Greaves from the Inter-Community School Zürich in Switzerland.

I bumped into him for the first time in 5th grade as a pretty strict teacher. He wasn’t happy that I was making a racket all the time on the school bus. But when he met my parents, he introduced himself in a very civilised, gracious manner. Rather than in essence rip me to shreds over my misbehaviour, he guided me — sometimes with strict standards, but always for the better — on how to become a better boy at school.

It was not all too easy getting praise from Mr Greaves. (Back then I used my Chinese Pinyin romanisation name, “Yan”.) But if I caught Mr Greaves on my way back from the toilet clapping his hands and going Yan the Man, Yan the Man halfway down the alley, that was a dead giveaway I had done something good. That, too, wasn’t dead easy: I once handed in homework that made it look like the average Fido had had fun with it. Mr Greaves was unforgiving, and quite rightly: “…but why is this paper so creased!” was his remark, in red ink (I think) — and that set my standards pretty high from that day onwards. Mr Greaves never marked a David Feng / Yan Feng homework which some random dog had decided to set its paws on again.

I was quite surprised Mr Greaves wasn’t recognised with this award earlier. It’s been about twenty years since I knew him. Him deserving the reward is naturally something that simply had to happen, and I’m extremely happy that he’s finally got the recognition he’s rightfully entitled to. Mr Greaves’s standards are of the top calibre quality that I’d like all my fellow students-to-be to learn from Mr Greaves. Learn from a man who sets high moral and educational standards. Learn from a man that’s strict, but doesn’t rip you to shreds, and guides you on your way out from a bad boy / girl into a star student; and learn from someone who knows when to set strict standards but also when to let go and turn a dead silent classroom into a comedy hall. (Some of Mr Greaves’s jokes were just flat-out immortal. I loved these!) Learn from a gent, a most noble gentleman, who has solid principles, serves the educational world selflessly, and continues to teach even to this day. Learn from an educational expert who trusts his students and lets them excel.

Mr Greaves, along with Mr D’Arcy, remain some of the most influential teachers for me. That’s a good, inspiring thing for me as I start getting my feet wet in the edu world. For the past 22 years I’ve sat facing the teacher. (Oh and I’ve had some outright boring ones as well, by the way.) I’d now like to sit facing my fellow students. I’d like to teach my fellow students fully knowing that no matter how high my standards are, that they were always inspired by a man I’m sure everyone should learn from: Mr Greaves.

In short: Everyone should be like Mr Greaves.