CCTV Spring Festival Show

The CCTV show on the eve of traditional Chinese Spring Festival has been the most watched show ever in any given year since its first debuet in 1979. Consequently, it has been one of the most sought after advertising events in which NEC paid more than $100 for 10 seconds commercial in 2005. Nonetheless, like anything else in China, it has also been a stage for political expressions in support of the CCP. Although the producers have never exhausted ideas in appealing the CCP, they reached a new height in this year's show, when they glorified the family names of president Hu Jiantao and the still influential former president Jiang Zemin in this scene. At the moment, the performers were supposed to go through the 'One hundred Names' of Chinese people. All Chinese characters representing family names flew by, while the two 'Jiang' and 'Hu' received extra time. Bravo!

Leaders First

Remember the fire of 2005.

On December 8th, 1995, 288 school kids died in a theater fire. Many of those could have survived, if they were not ordered to remain on their seats waiting for the CCP leaders to walk out the theater first after the fire started. Thirty six teachers died too, trying to protect the kids, but none of the 26 leaders died or injured. The leaders either walked out while letting those kids sitting on their seats, or found safe harbor for themselves. In one such instance, Ms. Kuang Li 况丽, the associate Party education secretary got in a fire-proof room by herself. The room has a capacity of 30, she locked the door behind herself, left more than 100 kids crying for get in the hallway. Later, she had the courage to brag her 'survival skill' to local newspapers. These are memories that will haunt the soles of CCP members forever, if they even had soles.

Other who should have died, and the Seagull command for their miserable death:
Mr. Tang Jian 唐舰, associate director of regional education department, who issued the ordere that students remain their seats until all CCP officials left;
Mr. Fang Tianlu 方天录, the highest rank official at the scene. Not only he walked out, but left hundreds of kids behind, he didn't even notify the fire station on his trip home;
Ms. Zhao Lanxiu 赵兰秀, vice mayor;
Mr. Zhu Minglong 朱明龙, city education department;
Mr. Zhao Zheng 赵征, city education department.

Tough Guy in Toronto

Via boingboing, this tough guy opened his driver side door while he was still driving, and threw whatever left of a two person meal to the groud in Toronto, Canada. A cyclist Leah who was walking up Agasta saw the scene. She picked up the meal, and handed it back to him. The tough guy then dumpped two cups of coffee on the woman's face, then beated her up. When he was tossing her around the car, her bracelet scratched a 1.2 cm mark on the clearcoat.

Hearing police serans closing in, the guy drove off the scene, but only returned to beat up the woman again as well as stomped her bike. That's when the photographer Hool noticed and started shooting. The tough guy charged the photographer with a baseball bat from his trunk.

Hool testified to the police as one of two witnesses, and then posted his pictures at the forum City Noise. The Canadian policemen talked her not to press charges. If you see this face someday, tell him that he sucked big time.

None Censorship Statement Pulled

"Does Google censor search results?" Not long ago, there was an answer to the question on Google's Support Center, but not any more. Google answered the call from the China Communism Party government for data censorship by creating a new domain and isolating its Chinese services from everything else. Google's Sergey Brin justified Google's China policy as it 'ultimately' made more information available to its Chinese users, 'though not quite all of it'. January 25th, 2006, Google announced that it is officially launching its services in China.

Does Google censor search results?

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results. To learn more about Google's search technology, please visit http://www.google.com/technology/index.html.

Academic Misconduct in its Deadliest Form, Update

A U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon in New Orlean released an EMail from the executive editor of New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Dr. Gregory D. Curfman to the leading author of a critical journal paper Dr. Claire Bombardier, in which Dr. Curfman wrote, 'Your explanation lacked scientific objectivity'. He also laid out five points which the journal expected the authors to make corrections:
1) The deletion of the critical data;
2) The deleted data 'would have invalidated your claim' that only people already at risk of a heart attack were at a greater risk from Vioxx;
3) The article doesn't mention a cut-off data for information gathering; however even if it does, a scientific journal expects updates;
4) When comparing the safety between two drugs, the authors use misleading writings by saying naproxen protects heart, but failed to point out that Vioxx may actually do harm to heart.

In the past two days, editors and former editors of the NEJM were grilled by attorney representing the Merck & Co. on their November 2004 editorial accusing Merck of concealing critical data from a published study on its now withdrawn painkiller Vioxx.

Merck received made progress on the other front last week when FDA announced a new policy that could prevent any FDA-approved drug being sued in a state court.

Academic Misconduct

Google Cache Legal

Via boingboing, from EFF, A district court in Nevada has ruled that the Google cache is a legal, because:

1. Caching itself does not directly infringe the copyrighted works at issue, because i) the chching is done automatically; ii) that there are meta-tags available to prevent this automatica process; iii) Cached contents can be removed by owner's requests;
   
2. Google is granted an implied license to reproduce and distribute copies of the copyrighted works at issue;
   
3. It's a fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107;

Author and attorney Blake Field of the state of Nevada also contributed to this significant process by losing a lawsuit manufactured and brought up by himself. Furthermore, the court finds Field estopped himself by deliberately setting up a trap. Another blunder Mr. Field made was he failed to bring up a case against Google's robot in making copies of his works, which may be seen as closer to a 'direct infringement' of his copyrighted works. Instead, he brought up the case against the caching, which qualifies for the DMCA's 512(b) caching 'safe harbor' for online service providers.

Evicting Souter

People in David Souter's hometown Weare, NH will decide in March whether they could have a better use of his 8 acre farmhouse with an inn to be known as the Lost Liberty Hotel.

Joining a 5-4 vote in June 2005, Justice David Souter decides that private land can be taken away not only for public use, which is the traditional understanding of a legal cause 'eminent domain', but also for any commercial development, as long as at the moment it looks profitable.

If the measure passes, I for one will travel to the town of Weare, lunch and dine there, and stay in the Hotel of Lost Liberty for at least one night.