For some Ikea is the symbol for pragmatic and effective design; for some it's the alias of modern cost control. But, we are not talking Swedish furniture.
Not long after Ikea was forced to pull its iconic meat balls from menu because of horse meat scandal, it was discovered to serve chocolate cakes which contains, take a big pause, fecal matter. The chocolate cakes in question was provided by a domestic supplier in its homeland Sweden.
While anyone who produce someone will run into a quality issue sometime, Ikea's cake problem is beyond apprehension.
China's Shanghai Custom discovered the fecal cakes last November, and destroyed them. The same Custom discovered more in December with exact same issue, and destroyed them. All together, two tons of chocolate cakes imported from Sweden were destroyed last year.
Ikea 'learned of' the incident in March. It was so bad, that they pulled the chocolate cakes from 23 countries.
On the surface, it seems that 1) although food quality in China is bad, that in Sweden is worse; 2) the perception of food problems in China is in part because they actually keep an eye on it.
Ikea should reflect on the reason why it looks like bad food product in the whole wild world are stalking them step by step.
Changchun, March 4, 2013, a silver Toyota RAV-4 was stolen around 7 o'clock while the driver left the car idling to a roadside convenience store. There was a two month old baby named Haobo Xu in that car.
One day later, the carjacker turned himself in after learning police had been looking for the car. According to the guy, his target was the car. He headed off to Shuangliao Highway after taking the car. When he saw there was a baby in the back seat on his way, he took a detour to a remote route where he killed little Haobo with his bare hands. He then hid the small body in the snow before resumed his trip to Gongzhuling. Police recovered the baby's body at the location told by the carjacker.
While we mourn for the baby's death, we are deeply troubled by the former senior army officer's thought that killing a two month old baby was a less crime than stealing a $30,000 car. How was this person made?
Zhou Xijun, born 1964, is in police custody. Zhou was a Major in the PLA army. Zhou was originally from Gongzhuling, but holds Changchun residence (hukou).
If mass killing of infants and babies by family planning officials went unpunished (on the contrary, they have been rewarded with salary, promotion and national honors), how should anyone be surprised?
This is a time, when every Chinese in mainland and abroad must reflect on the political hierarchy, national policies, judicial practice, and, our own culture. At the moment, The Seagull is ashamed of being a Chinese for the incomprehensible crime committed by another Chinese and also for living under such an inhumane system without putting up a fight.
Update: The Communist Party's Central Propaganda Department just issued a directive to all media outlets, which limited further reporting on this criminal case. The ordinance read:
......
media should not question police's inaction;
should not demand using the system monitoring political dissidents on missing children;
should not display sorrow or sadness;
should not interview the victim's family and authorities regarding this case;
......
We could only speculate the Party did not want distraction from the annual Congressional session in Beijing which would last two weeks from yesterday.
The Party did not kill little Haobo, but the message conveyed has been consistent. Was anyone surprised?
It is the system. It is 'the firm'. With the gag order on media coverage, the Communist Party pointed out who had manufactured beasts like Zhou Xijun. Do we choose to live under their ruling, or put up a fight? Do we still present asleep and not seeing a thing?
William Steven Albaugh, a deacon of St. Joseph's Church in Fullerton, MD was arrested for processing of child pronography.
Verizon detected the offensive files when Albaugh uploaded them to 'the cloud' (Verizon Online Backup and Sharing Account), and notified authorities. Albaugh admitted to collecting child pronography since the 1970s.
The Congress passed PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008, which mandate ISP reporting its customer on browsing or storage of child pronography. The Act contains an exit clause, that the ISP would not be held liable if they did not scan customer activities. A modern ISP has many motivations to scan customer data. In this case, Verizon used technology provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to find matches between customer data and digital patterns of known child pronography material.
In the last six months of 2012, the NCMEC had received 113,009 reports of child pronography from ISPs.
via arstechnica, the software provided to ISPs compare user data with a database maintained by the NCMEC with about 16,000 images of 'worst of worst' case. This database contains only known victims confirmed by LEA. Both MD5 (file properties) and Microsoft PhotoDNA (biometric information) hashing comparisons are performed in a scan. The NCMEC maintains another database which contains millions of offending images. The division is designed to dispute 4th Amendment claims.
However, many courts see files uploaded to the cloud invokes a Third Party Doctrine, which nullifies expectations of privacy under Fourth Amendment.
Above is a very interesting survey conducted by a Chinese dating website. On the left are male's minimum expected income for female; on the right female's minimum expected income for male. Each gender is further divided into three age groups: those were born after 1990, 1980, and 1970. The left most column lists provinces in mainland China.
For example, a 30 year old Shanghai man looks for a woman with minimum income of RMB 3,146 Yuan ($525) per month, while a similar age woman looks for a man with minimum income of RMB 8,562 Yuan ($1,430) per month. In other words, an ideal match between a man and a woman requires a 1:3 salary ratio.
And it should be put into the context of the movement that men should do all the housework alone.
Last night, 2 billion Chinese around the globe cheered Ang Lee's Oscar 'best directing' award for Life of Pi (2012). This is the second best director Academy Award after his 2005 Brokeback Mountain.
Little had been said on Lee's life upon arrival in Hollywood. Lee remained unemployed for six years, during which time his wife Jane Lin, a molecular biologist was the sole breadwinner for the family of four.
When Chinese intellectuals are reflecting how the communist rules are suffocating innovations in China, perhaps they can also mull on how the modern marriage settings are affecting the economy.
Major General Luo Yuan created an account on Sina's Weibo service last week. Within hours, he was found bleeding profusely after being attacked by a mob of posters.
General Luo was found to have a billionaire brother living in the US. That he was elevated to senior post not because of experience and skills but because of his father, a senior Communist official. That he was suddenly extracted from a troop and sent back to PLA's headquarters in Beijing the night before it was sent to battlefield for the Sino-Vietnam border conflict. In his first hour on the popular social network service, the proud kitty hawk found himself defeathered to a chickenhawk.
Frustrated General Luo then mobilized his cyberarmy to make comments at the popular microblog site, with the same phrase praising his knowledge and insight. Unfortunately, one soldier forgot to change his alias and used General Luo's official ID to write about Luo's qualification in a third person tone. It was immediately caught by the net mob, and it's obvious the entire Chinese Internet community was laughing at the general.
As all good stories go, it would not peak at Act One. General Zhu's cyberarmy then used the official ID of an unrelated military agency to declare General Zhu's account had been compromised. Well, guess what, the declaration was traced back to now devastated General Luo.
PLA Army Major General Luo Yuan, PLA Air Force Colonel Dai Xu and PLA Army Major General Zhu Chenghu are known as the Three Hawks in the Chinese military force. General Luo suggested bombing Tokyo over the dispute over Diaoyu Islands. Col. Dai is an advocate of unlimited warfare. General Zhu vowed a nuclear duel with the US, with a calculated tolerable cost of cities east of Xi'an (which include Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, or 80% of Chinese population).
In the context when the US media and government are publicly campaigning the mighty cyber warfare capacity of the PLA, it's a black humor to see the real Internet proficiency of PLA hawks.
The presumed PLA cyber warfare headquarter, Unit 61398, was uncovered by a western computer security firm because soldiers purportedly logged in Facebook and Twitter accounts from their own server without any mask. If any soldiers were set for court martial or careless endeavor, they should argue loudly that their top generals had been doing the same.
Radios with tuning knobs soldered to a fix position may sound last century North Korean. However, it has been confirmed that Nokia's brand new flagship Lumia 920/920T Windows Phones offered to mainland China market are 'hard-coded' to an app store run by the Chinese government.
When owners of these Windows phones attempted to connect to the Microsoft app store, it would be re-directed to the state run app store hosted inside mainland China. Even if the owner set 'region' to other places, or travel outside mainland China, the phone would still refuse to connect to the official Microsoft store but rather redirect to the Chinese government store.
The government-run store in China is heavily customized. For example, you will not find Skype or Facebook apps.
This could prove to be a big blunder to Nokia's Chinese market. As Apple has dominated the 'fashion' population, and Android commands the 'feature' buyers, only a small number of 'geeky' users are left for Nokia's renewed high-end marketing approach. Unfortunately, this group is most sensitive to hint of information control.
A few months ago, Microsoft announced that it would retire the aged MSN Messenger worldwide except in mainland China. The aged instant messaging service was replace by Skype.
ETS released a snapshot on GRE testing scores by country. The GRE test is required by US universities for application to doctoral programs in science and engineering, or roughly the STEM.
